A faint sinking came to her breast. What if her father couldn’t catch up with Jock after he left Rushfield? She knew that Jock did not care whether he caught up or not, that Henry was but a meek hanger-on of the cavalcade, unbelonging. Her father’s voice came back, floating under the spell of the farmer, ‘Monday is a court day in Rushfield and I can’t very well see my way clear to work that day. I got a right smart to do in town a Monday. I got to meet my partner…’ Henry’s voice, wavering. Then the farmer, ‘Now see here. I’m afeared the season can’t last over to Tuesday. I can’t work my hands on a Sunday. Some men can but by golly I’m placed so’s I can’t. I’ll give you four dollars to stay and set for me Monday and the gal thirty cents a hour…’

The grains of dust floated before her weary eyes, under the lids, and flecks of mud caked into heavy lumps, impeding and clodding. Ants walked over the warm mud and worms lay dead in the sun or turned crawling back into the soil.

It was not until Sunday that Henry Chesser brought the grub box in from the wagon. Nellie, his wife, set out the things on the mantel over the fireplace, and she and Ellen built a fire and cooked over it, frying bacon and making a corn pone. Henry turned his two horses into the pasture at the farmer’s suggestion. After he had eaten of the bacon and the pone, Henry lay on the ground in the shade of the house and Nellie sat in the doorway watching the yellow lane down which a few people passed during the morning. She began to smoke a cob pipe, wheedling the tobacco from her husband. When they were quiet, Ellen went off through the underbrush along the creek and waded across the stream behind a screen of willows. She saw her work of yesterday, ragged and new, the plants set where she had dropped them. Today it would rain again and tomorrow there would be the rest of the field to plant. She could hear the loud cackling of the hens over toward the barn and the farmer’s house, a high fluted sound spreading over the farm. She saw Mr Hep Bodine – the farmer – stroll down the fencerow beside the tobacco, looking at his field, stopping to look, walking jerkily on. He wore a pale shirt that stuck out of his vest stiffly – his Sunday clothes. She hid in a thick clump of brush until he went back up the hill, for she was afraid he might ask her what she was doing, or he might order her back to the cabin. Sometimes men cursed her when she walked on their land – ‘You damned little road rat, get out of here.’ Mr Hep might not; he was going to pay her thirty cents an hour tomorrow to drop plants for his men, but she felt safer in the brush.