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"An' then his bad luck comes. We're just mixin' into a clinch that ain't arrived yet, when he shoots a short hook to my head his left, an' a real hay-maker if it reaches my jaw. I make a forward duck, not quick enough, an' he lands bingo on the side of my head. Honest to God, Saxon, it's that heavy I see some stars. But it don't hurt an' ain't serious, that high up where the bone's thick.
The fair little listener for fair she was, and young; though something of what is called the dumpling shape; but I don't myself object to that lighted a candle, glanced at the Hay-maker on the top of the clock, who was getting in a pretty average crop of minutes; and looked out of the window, where she saw nothing, owing to the darkness, but her own face imaged in the glass.
And then the gong goes, and I says to myself how I has one friend, my poor old mother way out in Wyoming, and I goes in and mixes it, and then I seen Benson losing his goat, so I ups with an awful half-scissor hook to the plexus, and in the next round I seen Benson has a chunk of yellow, and I gets in with a hay-maker and I picks up another sleep-producer from the floor and hands it him, and he takes the count all right. . . Crisp, lucid, and to the point.
"Up he jumped and scampered away to cut some more and spread it out on the rocks. Then he discovered that the pea vine which he spread in the sun dried as he wanted it to, while any that happened to be left in the shadow of a rock didn't dry so well. He had learned how to make hay. He was the first hay-maker in the Great World.
Old Man Coyote grinned back good-naturedly. "I should think, Peter," said he, "that when there is so much sweet grass and clover in the summer, you would make some of it into hay and store it away for winter, as Little Chief Hare does. There's the thrifty little hay-maker for you!"
The Gadfly, still carrying his bundle, shuffled towards the horseman. "Do you happen to be wanting a hay-maker, sir?" he said, touching his ragged cap and running one finger along the bridle. It was the signal agreed upon, and the rider, who from his appearance might have been a country squire's bailiff, dismounted and threw the reins on the horse's neck. "What sort of work can you do, my man?"
It was hot and dry enough to suit the most exacting hay-maker. My field is only a small one and so rough and uneven that I had concluded with Dick's help to cut it by hand. I thought that on a pinch it could all be done in one day. "Harriet," I said, "we'll cut the clover to-morrow." "That's fortunate," said Harriet, "I'd already arranged to have Ann Spencer in to help me."
If their mother had known of this marauding, she would have punished the delinquents severely. Jean Valjean gruffly and grumblingly paid Marie-Claude for the pint of milk behind their mother's back, and the children were not punished. In pruning season he earned eighteen sous a day; then he hired out as a hay-maker, as laborer, as neat-herd on a farm, as a drudge. He did whatever he could.
"It isn't the lord of the manor," cried Miriam; "it is the head hay-maker, and when you dress yourself for supper, she will never think of you as the man who brought in the wood." Dora, from the kitchen window, saw Ralph go out to the woodhouse, and she saw him returning with an arm-load of small sticks.
Meantime, the jolly blaze uprose and fell, flashing and gleaming on the little Hay-maker at the top of the Dutch clock, until one might have thought he stood stock-still before the Moorish Palace, and nothing was in motion but the flame. He was on the move, however; and had his spasms, two to the second, all right and regular.
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