“Hello, Jake!” said she.  “I heared you was dead.”

“Hello, Rowena,” I answered.  “I’m just breathin’ my last!”

All the hands began yelling at us.

“No sparkin’ here!”

“None o’ them love pinches, Rowena!”

“I swan to man if that Dutchman ain’t cuttin’ us all out!”

“Quit courtin’ an’ pass them molasses, sweetness!”

“Mo’ po’k an’ less honey, thar!”—­this from a Missourian.

“Magnus, your pardner’s cuttin’ you out!”

I do not need to say that all this hectoring from a lot of men who were most of them strangers, almost put me under the table; but Rowena, tossing her head, sent them back their change, with smiles for everybody.  She was as pretty a twenty-year-old lass as you would see in a day’s travel.  No longer was she the ragged waif to whom I had given the dress pattern back toward Dubuque.  She was rosy, she was plump, her new calico dress was as pretty as it could be, and her brown skin and browner hair made with her dark eyes a study in brown and pink, as the artists say.

It was two or three days before I had a chance to talk with her.  She had changed a good deal, I sensed, as she told me all about her folks.  Old Man Fewkes was working in the vegetable garden.  Celebrate was running a team.  Surajah was working on the machinery.  Ma Fewkes was keeping house for the family in a little cottage in the corner of the garden.  I went over and had a talk with them.  Ma Fewkes, with her shoulder-blades almost touching, assured me that they were in clover.

“I feel sure,” said she, “that Celebrate Fourth will soon git something better to do than make a hand in the field.  He has idees of makin’ all kinds of money, if he could git Mr. Gowdy to lis’en to him.  But Surrager Dowler is right where he orto be.  He has got a patent corn-planter all worked out, and I guess Mr. Gowdy’ll help him make and sell it.  Mr. Gowdy is awful good to us—­ain’t he, Rowena.”

Rowena busied herself with her work; and when Mrs. Fewkes repeated her appeal, the girl looked out of the window and paused a long time before she answered,

“Good enough,” she finally said.  “But I guess he ain’t strainin’ himself any to make something of us.”

There was something strange and covered up in what she said, and in the way she said it.  She shot a quick glance at me, and then looked down at her work again.

“Well, Rowena Fewkes!” exclaimed her mother, with her hands thrown up as if in astonishment or protest.  “In all my born days, I never expected to hear a child of mine—­”

Old Man Fewkes came in just then, and cut into the talk by his surprised exclamation at seeing me there.  He had supposed that I had gone out of his ken forever.  He had thought that one winter in this climate would be all that a young man like me, free as I was to go and come as I pleased, would stand.  As he spoke about my being free, he looked at his wife and sighed, combing his whiskers with his skinny bird’s claws, and showing the biggest freckles on the backs of his hands that I think I ever saw.  He was still more stooped and frail-looking than when I saw him last; and when I told him I had settled down for life on my farm, I could see that I had lost caste with him.  He was pining for the open road.