“Of course I have.  If Mrs. Dawson can manage it, I should think mother could.”

“Mrs. Dawson is a younger woman.  Anyhow, there’s no point in trying to make machinists of Mahailey and mother.”

Ralph lifted his eyebrows to excuse Claude’s bluntness.  “See here,” he said persuasively, “don’t you go encouraging her into thinking she can’t change her ways.  Mother’s entitled to all the labour-saving devices we can get her.”

Claude rattled the thirty-odd graduated metal funnels which he was trying to fit together in their proper sequence.  “Well, if this is labour-saving”

The younger boy giggled and ran upstairs for his panama hat.  He never quarrelled.  Mrs. Wheeler sometimes said it was wonderful, how much Ralph would take from Claude.

After Ralph and his mother had gone off in the car, Mr. Wheeler drove to see his German neighbour, Gus Yoeder, who had just bought a blooded bull.  Dan and Jerry were pitching horseshoes down behind the barn.  Claude told Mahailey he was going to the cellar to put up the swinging shelf she had been wanting, so that the rats couldn’t get at her vegetables.

“Thank you, Mr. Claude.  I don’t know what does make the rats so bad.  The cats catches one most every day, too.”

“I guess they come up from the barn.  I’ve got a nice wide board down at the garage for your shelf.”  The cellar was cemented, cool and dry, with deep closets for canned fruit and flour and groceries, bins for coal and cobs, and a dark-room full of photographer’s apparatus.  Claude took his place at the carpenter’s bench under one of the square windows.  Mysterious objects stood about him in the grey twilight; electric batteries, old bicycles and typewriters, a machine for making cement fence-posts, a vulcanizer, a stereopticon with a broken lens.  The mechanical toys Ralph could not operate successfully, as well as those he had got tired of, were stored away here.  If they were left in the barn, Mr. Wheeler saw them too often, and sometimes, when they happened to be in his way, he made sarcastic comments.  Claude had begged his mother to let him pile this lumber into a wagon and dump it into some washout hole along the creek; but Mrs. Wheeler said he must not think of such a thing; it would hurt Ralph’s feelings.  Nearly every time Claude went into the cellar, he made a desperate resolve to clear the place out some day, reflecting bitterly that the money this wreckage cost would have put a boy through college decently.

While Claude was planing off the board he meant to suspend from the joists, Mahailey left her work and came down to watch him.  She made some pretence of hunting for pickled onions, then seated herself upon a cracker box; close at hand there was a plush “spring-rocker” with one arm gone, but it wouldn’t have been her idea of good manners to sit there.  Her eyes had a kind of sleepy contentment in them as she followed Claude’s motions.  She watched him as if he were a baby playing.  Her hands lay comfortably in her lap.