“Not see me?” I questioned.

“I never wanted to see you again until I came for you, Woman.  I didn’t think I could stand it—­to put you out of my arms again.  I can’t take you with me to-night.  I came miles out of my way to bring her to you, and I’ve hurried them both cruelly.  The calf is only two days old, but you do need her badly to feed the chickens.  Milk-fed chickens show a gain of thirty per cent. over others.  You can churn and get all the butter you need and feed them the buttermilk.”

“Do you suppose I can learn to milk and churn her?” I asked as I shrank a bit closer in his arms from this new responsibility.

“Milk her and churn the milk,” laughed Pan as he bent my head forward on his arm, set his teeth in the back of my neck, and shook me like Peckerwood Pup shakes the gray kitten when I’m not looking.

“Will you show me in the morning?”

“Woman, I have to run ten miles through the forest before daybreak, and I don’t know when I can come back to you.  I know I ought to tell you things, but I—­I just can’t.  I demand of life that I be allowed to come for you and take you into the woods with only your Romney bundle.  Will you be here ready for me when I come, and keep the bundle tied up?”

“Yes,” I answered as I drew his head down and pressed it to my breast, hoping that he might hear the chant on my heartstrings.  I think he did hear.

    “I am thy child. 
    I am thy mate. 
      Come!”

he made response, as he slipped from my arms and away into the darkness, leaving me alone with only the mother now for company.  She licked my arm with a warm, rough tongue, and I came back into my own body and led her to the barn and supper.

There are two kinds of love, the cultivated kind that bores into a woman’s heart through silk and laces in a hot-house atmosphere and brings about all kinds of enervating reactions until operated upon by marriage; the other kind a field woman breathes into her lungs and it gets into her circulation and starts up the most awful and productive activity.  I’ve had both kinds.  I moped for months over Gale Beacon, and made him and Matthew and father completely unhappy, lost ten pounds, and was sent to a rest-cure for temper.  The next morning after Adam gave me the cow and calf and passionate embraces out in the orchard I began to work like six women, and what I did to Elmnest not ten women could have accomplished in as many days.

I weeded the whole garden and I picked three bushels of our first peas, tied up sixty bunches of very young beets with long, tough orchard grass, treated fifty bunches of slender onions the same way, half a dozen of each to the bunch, and helped Bud Corn-tassel load a two-horse wagon with them and everything eatable he could get out of Aunt Mary’s garden.  Then I got up at two o’clock in the night and fed the mules so Bud could start at half-past two in order to be in the market at Hayesville long before