“I ’ll make a little speech before preachin’ in the mornin’,” confided Odell to Calihan after congratulations were over. “You needn’t be thar unless you want to. I ’ll fix you up all right.” Calihan smiled faintly and looked shamefacedly toward the meadow, and reached outside and took hold of the handle of his pitchfork. “I want to try to git through that haystack ‘fore dark,” he said, awkwardly. “Ef you-uns will be so kind as to excuse me now I ’ll run down and finish up. I’d sorter set myself a task to do, an’ I don’t like to fall short o’ my mark.” Down in the meadow Calihan worked like a tireless machine, not pausing for a moment to rest his tense muscles. He was trying to make up for the time he had lost with his guests. Higher and smaller grew the great haystack as it slowly tapered toward its apex. The red sun sank behind the mountain and began to draw in its long streamers of light. The gray of dusk, as if fleeing from its darker self, the monster night, crept up from the east, and with a thousand arms extended moved on after the receding light. Calihan worked on till the crickets began to shrill and the frogs in the marshes to croak, and the hay beneath his feet felt damp with dew. The stack was finished. He leaned on his fork and inspected his work mechanically. It was a perfect cone. Every outside straw and blade of grass lay smoothly downward, like the hair on a well-groomed horse. Then with his fork on his shoulder he trudged slowly up the narrow field-road toward the house. He was vaguely grateful for the darkness; a strange, new, childish embarrassment was on him. For the first time in life he was averse to meeting his wife and child. “I’ve been spanked an’ told to behave ur it ’ud go wuss with me,” he muttered. “I never wuz talked to that away before by nobody, but I jest had to take it. Sally an’ her mother never would ‘a’ heerd the last of it ef I had let out jest once. No man, I reckon, has a moral right to act so as to make his family miserable. I crawfished, I know, an’ on short notice; but law me! I wouldn’t have Bill Odell’s heart in me fer ever’ acre o’ bottom-lan’ in this valley. I wouldn’t ‘a’ talked to a houn’ dog as he did to me right before Sally an’ her mother.” He was very weary when he leaned his fork against the house and turned to wash his face and hands in the tin basin on the bench at the side of the steps. Mrs. Calihan came to the door, her face beaming. “I wuz afeerd you never would come,” she said, in a sweet, winning tone. “I got yore beans warmed over an’ some o’ yore brag yam taters cooked. Come on in ‘fore the coffee an’ biscuits git cold.” “I ’ll be thar in a minute,” he said; and he rolled up his sleeves and plunged his hot hands and face into the cold spring-water.