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"Shore must be a sound sleeper," said Racey Dawson to himself, "if he really did just wake up." He buckled on his gunbelt, set his hat a-tilt on one ear, and went down to wash his face and hands in the common basin on the wash-bench outside the kitchen door. But Swing Tunstall was before him, and was disposed to make an issue of the dropped boots.
As she worked her lips moved, and Emily, still peeping through the leaves, wondered what she was saying, for a low murmur rose and fell, emphasized now and then with a thump of the rolling-pin. "I mean to go and find out. If I stand on that wash-bench I can look in and see her work. I'll show them all that I'm NOT 'fussy, and can be 'right pleasant' if I like."
She had reached down and taken from the wash-bench the lump of yellow soap that lay there, and was soaping the garment on the board before her, turning it this way and that. As she did this she began, all to herself and for her own ear, softly, with unconscious richness and tenderness of voice, to sing. And what was her song? "Oh, don't you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?"
She and Peter had several long talks; then Emma called in Cassius, an ex-husband of hers who so long as he didn't live with her could get along with her, and had him widen the shed room, Peter taking in its stead his mother's bedroom. Cassius built a better wash-bench, with a shelter, under the china-berry trees in the yard, and strung some extra clothes-lines, and Emma Campbell moved in.
But now, as I sat on the wash-bench, thinking of all this, I looked down at my baggy trousers and faded waistcoat with disgust. One of the surest signs of the loss of self-respect is a disregard of one's personal appearance.
Into this assembly stepped Irish Fallon, closely followed by Bill, the sight of whose blood-stained face attracted grinning attention. The two men passed the length of the room to the wash-bench, where a few loiterers still splashed noisily at their ablutions. "I heard it plain, I'm tellin' you," some one was saying. "'Way off to the south it sounded."
Clo flew to the door and opened it; Victoria peeped over her shoulder; there was that perfidious Dolf encircling the stranger damsel with his right arm, and making bold efforts to lay hold of the wash-bench with his left. Dolf looked up and saw Clo; he was not so much under the excitement of the cider that he could not understand the risk he ran. "Dare is pretty conducts!" exclaimed Clo.
The four walls of the kitchen were rather too close together to inclose a bed, a wash-bench, two tubs, a cooking stove, a table, seven Windsor chairs, the water pail, the cupboard, and the rocking-chair in which Mrs. Brady sat, and leave anything but a tortuous path for locomotion.
But when I turned that corner there was nobody in sight, although the bu'sted wash-bench, with a cranberry crate propping up its lame end, was shaking a little, as if some one had set on it recent. I knocked on the door, but nobody answered. After knocking three or four times, I tried kicking, and the second kick raised, from somewheres inside, a groan that was as lonesome a sound as ever I heard.
This is home for a good while to come," said he. "I'm not so very bashful," Joe disclaimed, placing the little roll which contained his one extra shirt on the wash-bench near the door, taking off his hat, then, and standing serious and solemn before his new master. "Well, I don't want to stand here waitin' on you and dribble away the day, for I've got work to do!" said Isom sourly.
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