‘I know a man would give me two settens for a dollar.’

She saw the woman hurrying in and out across the yard with a pan of corn mush in her hand to feed the little ducks, hurrying in and out of hen houses, her apron full of eggs and her pocket full of coins, in and out of coops, in and out of barn sheds, hurrying, all easy and light and free-going on oily wheels. Or, to make the picture more real, let there be a sick chick, sick with gaps or the roup. Then she would – say it had gaps – twist a bit of bluegrass top down into its throat and swab out the worms, drawing them up clinging to the grass brush; or if it were sick with the roup perhaps, drooping about and getting no better, its head swelled up and its tongue hard, eyes all bunged up, then knock its head against the henhouse door, one sharp blow, and bury it out behind the barn. All the chicks were well again, laying eggs and hatching young, eating, crowing, growing up to frying-sizes, fattening in the coops and sold to the peddler, the money jingling in her pocket and the bright new disc plough, red and gilt, would go clicking all the while across the bottom field. One day Sebe slipped his arm around her as she rode beside him and then she drew herself up into a stiff spear and said, ‘Mr Sebe Townley, do you want me to jump outen this-here buggy and walk home? I’d as lief walk as not and a little rather.’

The pictures Sebe made stayed in her mind and grew brightly definite, neat farms lying beside running creeks where ducks spread out in thrifty processions, brightly whitewashed hen-yards where fowls snapped up nourishing corn and turned it into profits even when it sold for eighty cents a bushel, neat tenant houses with bright dooryards full of hollyhocks whose culture took nothing from the care bestowed upon the chicks. She seldom went inside the house, her life moving outside among the poultry and the shifting coins, viewing the clockwork of the barnyards and the plenty of the cribs. If she went inside the house it was Jonas who came there. Sebe kept remote in the picture as the mere organiser and mover of the pageant, for she could not endure the sight of his ears, and if they came within the scope of her vision she looked away quickly or dropped her eyes in half-amused disgust; or if they persisted in holding a place, then she smote the pageant with light words, tore away hencoops and barns with gusts of laughter, desecrated the bright disc plough with derision, and sent the geese and ducks scurrying with her hard scorn. But most often Sebe’s offending members kept out of the picture or retreated humbly, having been caught overstepping, and then she helped build back the barnyard she had demolished by asking the price of ducks or the annual yield of feathers.