Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/269

 Yet that very evening they had what approached a scene. He came in, went into the living room and stayed there. She could hear him moving about, but he did not come back to the kitchen.

"I need some water, Tom."

"I'm busy. Pretty soon."

She was suddenly angry. She took the pail and went out to the well. When she started back she saw him at the kitchen door, but he made no move to help her. He stood aside and let her pass him, and she slammed it down on the table.

"Must have been in a hurry," he drawled, watching her.

"When you're too busy to carry water for me, I'll do it myself."

And then her nerves gave way. She did not cry. She stood, white and defiant, and reviewed her grievances, the isolation, the heat, that she was a prisoner. And she ended by showing him her hands, roughened, the nails broken.

"You used to like my hands! Look at them!"

"I'm sorry, girl. I tried to tell you what it would be like."

They sat down to the meal in silence. It was when he began to eat that she saw what he had been doing when she called him. The blisters on his own hands had broken, and he had been covering them with adhesive plaster.

She got up and put her arms around him.

"I must have been crazy, Tom."

He drew his first full breath since the outburst.

"You sure had me ready to whoop and holler!" he said. "Thought you were getting ready to hit the trail for somewhere else."

That night, by the lamp, he began his eternal figuring again, and he told her that with luck after the shipping next fall he could pay his interest and have six hundred dollars left over. It stunned her. All this labor, the long hours, the worry, and—six hundred dollars! She had paid more than that for an evening wrap.

When he saw her face he tried to explain to her the cattleman's grievances; the demand for young beef in East-