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Show 121 faster by threshing back and forth behind them. I felt as if I couldn't bear it if we didn't get home soon. "You can't make the dumb things go any faster, " he told me. "You will only wear yourself out. " I calmed down and endured to the end. I was worn out when we reached home and put the cattle in the seven acres. Somehow I got the horse unsaddled, hung the bridle up and got to the house. I made it inside the kitchen door and shut it behind me, leaned against it and slowly slid to a heap on the floor. Mama got something warm into my stomach and helped me get to bed. "Your pa, when he was eleven, drove a double-bedded wagon single-handed from Kanosh to Salt Lake, " she said. "It took him a week. He stopped in Payson to see his grandmother Mott. She looked him over and said: 'Whose child be ye?' 'I'm Lucina's boy,' your pa told her. He thought she would say something else to him, but she didn't. " I guessed that Papa hadn't expected too much of me. After that nothing seemed too hard for me. I chopped wood like a man, swinging the axe in a wide arc with a true bite. I could milk cows and get as wide a ribbon of milk as Papa could, feed and water the cows and horses if old Dobbin didn't beat me to it. Dobbin was'breachy! He could unlock the granary, turn on the water tap, untie his own rope. Strangely, he never did these tasks in reverse, so that, eventually he left the granary open and Old Nance got in and foundered so badly on grain that she died. |
