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"I'll trade even." "No, sir," he said, "I'm expecting threshers to-morrow, and have got to have some money to buy meat and groceries with." "Well, then, I'll give you two dollars and fifty cents, and no more." "All right; it's a trade. The boy will change them for you."
The corn he was bound to supply to the schoolmaster was always measured out to him from the bottom of the sieve; he seized the courtyard of the school for his threshers, so that during school-time not a word of the lessons could be heard for the racket; he never repaired the building set apart for the cultivation of the muses, but looked on while the schoolmaster himself patched up the holes in his wall with balls of clay borrowed from his own garden, and re-thatched the dilapidated rush-roof with his own hand.
The threshers were coming at eight o'clock, and they hoped to get the engine and threshing-machine in order and be well under way at nine. Two neighbor women came over to help Mrs. Loper, and Elvira assisted Maggie in all her tasks.
This, in turn, was broken by a woman's scream. Over a score of men, most of them half drunk, were gathered in front of a large barn. From the ridge of this projected a derrick-beam with a pulley through which a rope was roved. One end of the rope was in the hands of several threshers, the other was in a noose around Gil Steele's neck. Mrs. Steele was being bound and gagged by other men.
One student of agriculture has estimated that it would require the whole agricultural population of the United States one hundred days to shell the average corn crop by hand, but this is an exaggeration. The list of labor-saving machinery in agriculture is by no means exhausted. There are clover hullers, bean and pea threshers, ensilage cutters, manure spreaders, and dozens of others.
There were no threshers there to thresh their poor old backs, or sword-fish to stab their stomachs, or saw-fish to rip them up, or ice-sharks to bite lumps out of their sides, or whalers to harpoon and lance them. They were quite safe and happy there; and all they had to do was to wait quietly in Peacepool, till Mother Carey sent for them to make them out of old beasts into new.
It was necessary that the "driver" should be a man of judgment, for the horses had to be kept at just the right speed, and to do this he must gauge the motion of the cylinder by the pitch of its deep bass song. The three men in command of the machine were set apart as "the threshers."
Rustic Lobourne hinted broadly at a young woman in the case, and, moreover, told a tale of how these fellow- threshers had, in noble rivalry, one day turned upon each other to see which of the two threshed the best; whereof the Bantam still bore marks, and malice, it was said.
My brother was so exasperated; that he turned to me and said, "If I were Joe, I would kill the overseer if I knew I should be shot the next minute." In the winter the horn blew at about four in the morning, and all the threshers were required to be at the threshing floor in fifteen minutes after. They had to go about a quarter of a mile from their quarters.
And how amusing it is to listen when the Platonists on the one hand and the Aristotelians on the other, among the busy threshers of straw in the Museum at Alexandria, fall together by the ears so vehemently that they would both enjoy flinging their metal cups at each others' heads if the loss of the wine, which I pay for, were not too serious to bear.
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