Presently he came round the house, and she hardly dared to look at him; she could not ask. But there was no need. He flung his hat on the ground before her with a gesture of frantic violence. When he spoke the words came in a ferment of fury:
"That skunk of a Harrison says he won't bring the thresher up here this year; claims the road's too rough and bridges are too weak for the engine."
"Do! I'm not going to do anything! I'm not going to haul my wheat down to him--I'll see him in hell and back again before I will."
"The wheat can rot in the fields! I won't be bossed and blackguarded by any dirty little runt that thinks because he owns the only threshing outfit in the neighbourhood that he can run my affairs."
He raged up and down, adding invective, vituperation.
"But you can't, Wes--you can't let the wheat go to waste." For Annie had absorbed the sound creed of the country, that to waste foodstuff is a crime as heinous as murder.
She recognized from his tone that she had been wrong to protest; she had confirmed him in his purpose. She picked up her sewing and tried with unsteady fingers to go on with it, but she could not see the stitches for her tears. He couldn't mean it--and yet, what if he should? She looked up and out toward those still fields of precious ore, dimming under the purple shadows of twilight, and saw them a black tangle of wanton desolation. The story Aunt Dolcey had told her about the potatoes of last year was ominous in her mind.
He was sitting opposite her now, his head in his hands, brooding, sullen, the implacable vein in his forehead swollen with triumph, something brutish and hard dimming his clean and gallant youth.
"That's the way he's going to look as he gets older," thought Annie with a touch of prescience. "He's going to change into somebody else--little by little. This is the worst spell he's ever had. And all this mean blood's going to live again in my child. It goes on and on and on."
She leaned against the porch seat and struggled against the sickness of it.
"I might stand it for myself," she thought. "I might stand it for myself; but I'm not going to stand it for my baby. I'll do something--I'll take him away."
Her thoughts ran on hysterically, round and round in a coil that had no end and no beginning.