Part 6 (2/2)

”Couldn't you manage to pick us a mess of dandelion for supper, Ollie?”

asked Isom. ”I notice it's comin' up thick in the yard.”

”I might, if I could find the time,” said Ollie.

”Oh, I guess you'll have time enough,” said Isom, severely.

Her face grew pale; she lowered her head as if to hide her fear from Joe.

”Cook it with a jowl,” ordered Isom; ”they go fine together, and it's good for the blood.”

Joe was beginning to yearn forward to Sunday, when he could go home to his mother for a satisfying meal, of which he was sharply feeling the need. It was a mystery to him how Isom kept up on that fare, so scant and unsatisfying, but he reasoned that it must be on account of there being so little of him but gristle and bone.

Joe looked ahead now to the term of his bondage under Isom; the prospect gave him an uneasy concern. He was afraid that the hard fare and harder work would result in stunting his growth, like a young tree that has come to a period of drought green and promising, and stands checked and blighted, never again to regain the hardy qualities which it needs to raise it up into the beauty of maturity.

The work gave him little concern; he knew that he could live and put on strength through that if he had the proper food. So there would have to be a change in the fare, concluded Joe, as he sat there while Isom discussed the merits of dandelion and jowl. It would have to come very early in his term of servitude, too. The law protected the bondman in that, no matter how far it disregarded his rights and human necessities in other ways. So thinking, he pushed away from the table and left the room.

Isom drank a gla.s.s of water, smacked his dry lips over its excellencies, the greatest of them in his mind being its cheapness, and followed it by another.

”Thank the Lord for water, anyhow!” said he.

”Yes, there's plenty of that,” said Ollie meaningly.

Isom was as thick-skinned as he was sapless. Believing that his penurious code was just, and his frugality the first virtue of his life, he was not ashamed of his table, and the outcast sc.r.a.ps upon it. But he looked at his young wife with a sharp drawing down of his spiked brows as he lingered there a moment, his cracked brown hands on the edge of the table, which he had clutched as he pushed his chair back. He seemed about to speak a rebuke for her extravagance of desire. The frown on his face foreshadowed it, but presently it lifted, and he nodded shrewdly after Joe.

”Give him a couple of eggs mornings after this,” said he, ”they've fell off to next to nothing in price, anyhow. And eat one yourself once in a while, Ollie. I ain't one of these men that believe a woman don't need the same fare as a man, once on a while, anyhow.”

His generous outburst did not appear to move his wife's grat.i.tude. She did not thank him by word or sign. Isom drank another gla.s.s of water, rubbed his mustache and beard back from his lips in quick, grinding twists of his doubled hand.

”The pie-plant's comin' out fast,” said he, ”and I suppose we might as well eat it--nothing else but humans will eat it--for there's no sale for it over in town. Seems like everybody's got a patch of it nowadays.

”Well, it's fillin', as the old woman said when she swallowed her thimble, and that boy Joe he's going to be a drain on me to feed, I can see that now. I'll have to fill him up on something or other, and I guess pie-plant's about as good as anything. It's cheap.”

”Yes, but it takes sugar,” ventured Ollie, rolling some crumbs between her fingers.

”You can use them mola.s.ses in the blue barrel,” instructed Isom.

”It's about gone,” said she.

”Well, put some water in the barrel and slosh it around--it'll come out sweet enough for a mess or two.”

Isom got up from the table as he gave these economic directions, and stood a moment looking down at his wife.

”Don't you worry over feedin' that feller, Ollie,” he advised. ”I'll manage that. I aim to keep him stout--I never saw a stouter feller for his age than Joe--for I'm goin' to git a pile of work out of him the next two years. I saw you lookin' him over this morning,” said he, approvingly, as he might have sanctioned her criticism of a new horse, ”and I could see you was lightin' on his points. Don't you think he's all I said he was?”

”Yes,” she answered, a look of abstraction in her eyes, her fingers busy with the crumbs on the cloth, ”all you said of him--_and more_!”

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