Main-Travelled Roads | Page 8

the feminine device of smiling and chatting with the others. She asked Ed if he wouldn't have another piece of pie.
"I will-with a fork, please."
"This is 'bout the only place you can use a fork," said Bill Young, anticipating a laugh by his own broad grin.
"Oh, that's too old," said Shep Watson. "Don't drag that out agin. A man that'll eat seven taters-"
"Shows who docs the work."
"Yes, with his jaws," put in Jim Wheelock, the driver. "If you'd put in a little more work with soap 'n' water before comin' in to dinner, it 'ud be a religious idee," said David.
"It ain't healthy to wash."
"Well, you'll live forever, then."
"He ain't washed his face sence I knew 'im."
"Oh, that's a little too tought! He washes once a week," said Ed Kinney.
"Back of his ears?" inquired David, who was munching a doughnut, his black eyes twinkling with fun.
"What's the cause of it?"
"Dade says she won't kiss 'im if he don't." Everybody roared.
"Good fer Dade! I wouldn't if I was in her place."
Wheelock gripped a chicken leg imperturbably, and left it bare as a toothpick with one or two bites at it. His face shone in two clean sections around his nose and mouth. Behind his ears the dirt lay undisturbed. The grease on his hands could not be washed off.
Will began to suffer now because Agnes treated the other fellows too well. With a lover's exacting jealousy, he wanted her in some way to hide their tenderness from the rest, but to show her indifference to men like Young and Kinney. He didn't stop to inquire of himself the justice of such a demand, nor just how it was to be done. He only insisted she ought to do it.
He rose and left the table at the end of his dinner, without having spoken to her, without even a tender, significant glance, and he knew, too, that she was troubled and hurt. But he was suffering. It seemed as if he had lost something sweet, lost it irrecoverably.
He noticed Ed Kinney and Bill Young were the last to come out, just before the machine started up again after dinner, and he saw them pause outside the threshold and laugh back at Agnes standing in the doorway. Why couldn't she keep those fellows at a distance, not go out of her way to bandy jokes with them?
Some way the elation of the morning was gone. He worked on doggedly now, without looking up, without listening to the leaves, without seeing the sunlighted clouds. Of course he didn't think that she meant anything by it, but it irritated him and made him unhappy. She gave herself too freely.
Toward the middle of the afternoon the machine stopped for a time for some repairing; and while Will lay on his stack in the bright yellow sunshine, shelling wheat in his hands and listening to the wind in the oaks, he heard his name and her name mentioned on the other side of the machine, where the measuring box stood. He listened.
"She's pretty sweet on him, ain't she? Did yeh notus how she stood around over him?"
"Yes; an' did yeh see him when she passed the cup o' tea down over his shoulder?"
Will got up, white with wrath as they laughed.
"Some way he didn't seem to enjoy it as I would. I wish she'd reach her arm over my neck that way."
Will walked around the machine, and came on the group lying on the chaff near the straw pile.
"Say, I want you fellers to understand that I won't have any more of this talk. I won't have it."
There was a dead silence. Then Bill Young rose up.
"What yeh goen' to do about Ut?" be sneered.
"I'm going to stop it."
The wolf rose in Young. He moved forward, his ferocious soul flaming from his eyes.
"W'y, you damned seminary dude, I can break you in two!"
An answering glare came into Will's eyes. He grasped and slightly shook his fork, which he had brought with him unconsciously.
"If you make one motion at me, I'll smash your head like an eggshell!" His voice was low but terrific. There was a tone m it that made his own blood stop in his veins. "If you think I'm going to roll around on this ground with a hyena like you, you've mistaken your man. I'll kill you, but I won't fight with such men as you are."
Bill quailed and slunk away, muttering some epithet like "coward."
"I don't care what you call me, but just remember what I say: you keep your tongue off that girl's affairs."
"That's the talk!" said David. "Stand up for your girl always, but don't use a fork. You can handle him without that:'
"I don't propose to try," said Will, as he turned away. As be did so, he caught a