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Updated: May 4, 2025
You, Sybylla, thought this! You, a chit in your teens, an ugly, poor, useless, unimportant, little handful of human flesh, and, above, or rather below, all, a woman only a woman! It would indeed be a depraved and forsaken man who would need your services as a stay and support! Ha ha! The conceit of you!" Because? The Beechams were vacating Five-Bob almost immediately before Christmas.
In a blank quietness, the Beechams went on to hunt a camp. And here they were fortunate, for they came upon a neat tent city with a sign declaring it a Government Camp. Tents set on firm platforms faced inward toward central buildings, and everything was clean and orderly. They drove in. Yes, they could pitch their tent there, the man in the office said; there was one vacant floor.
Daddy said that was one way to get around the Child Labor Law. So the Beechams were to thin the beets and hoe them and top them, beginning the last of May and finishing in October, and the pay would be twenty-six dollars an acre. The government made the farmers pay that price, no matter how poor the crop was. "Five hundred and twenty dollars sounds like real money!" Daddy rejoiced.
"It's a chicken-coop!" squealed Rose-Ellen as they walked over to it. "Gramma wants to live in a chicken-coop!" "It's empty. And it'd be a sight easier to clean than some places where humans have lived," Grandma replied stoutly. So the Beechams got permission to live in the farmer's old chicken-coop. It had two rooms, and the men pitched the tent beside it for a bedroom.
Then Sally's wail sounded, and Grandma's call: "Rose-Ellen! Jimmie! Dick! You all right?" Until dawn the Beechams could only huddle together in the small refuge Daddy contrived against the dripping, pricking blackness. When day came, the rain still fell and the wind still blew; but fitfully, as if they, too, were tired out.
The rooms were good-sized and lofty, and sometimes have been known to suffice for very fine people indeed, a fact which the Beechams were well aware of; and they were not above the amiable weakness of making it known that their house was in a line with that of Lady Cecilia Burleigh. This single fact of itself might suffice to mark the incalculable distance between the Reverend Mr.
At first cotton-picking was interesting, the fluffy bolls looking like artificial roses and the stray blossoms strangely shaped and delicately pink. Sometimes a group of Negro pickers would chant in rich voices as they picked. "Da cotton want a-pickin' so ba-ad!" But it was astonishing to the Beechams to find how many aches they had and how few pounds of cotton when the day's picking was weighed.
"Got here just in time, just in time!" chanted Dick and Rose-Ellen, as a sudden storm pounded the roof with rain and split the air with thunder and lightning. "My land!" cried Grandma. "S'pose this roof will leak on the baby and Seth Thomas?" For an hour the Beechams dashed around setting up campkeeping. For supper they finished the enormous lunch Grandma had brought. After that came bedtime.
The Beechams were in no want of money to buy what pleased them, and the mother made many additions to Phoebe's wardrobe which that young lady herself thought quite unnecessary, not reflecting that other sentiments besides that of simple love for herself were involved. "They shall see that my daughter is not just like one of their common-looking girls," Mrs.
They looked, smelled and tasted delicious. In turn, Grandma sent biscuits, baked in the Dutch oven Grandpa had bought her. Grandma had always been proud of her biscuits. In July the Mexican children took Dick and Rose-Ellen to the vacation school held every summer in one of the town churches. The Beechams were not surprised at Nico's dressed-up daintiness when she called for them.
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