e doing in the fields.
She seemed to think that my elders withheld helpful information, and
that from me she might get valuable secrets. On this occasion she asked
me very craftily when grandfather expected to begin planting corn. I
told her, adding that he thought we should have a dry spring and that
the corn would not be held back by too much rain, as it had been last
year.

She gave me a shrewd glance. 'He not Jesus,' she blustered; 'he not know
about the wet and the dry.

I did not answer her; what was the use? As I sat waiting for the hour
when Ambrosch and Antonia would return from the fields, I watched Mrs.
Shimerda at her work. She took from the oven a coffee-cake which she
wanted to keep warm for supper, and wrapped it in a quilt stuffed with
feathers. I have seen her put even a roast goose in this quilt to keep
it hot. When the neighbours were there building the new house, they saw
her do this, and the story got abroad that the Shimerdas kept their food
in their featherbeds.

When the sun was dropping low, Antonia came up the big south draw with
her team. How much older she had grown in eight months! She had come
to us a child, and now she was a tall, strong young girl, although her
fifteenth birthday had just slipped by. I ran out and met her as she
brought her horses up to the windmill to water them. She wore the boots
her father had so thoughtfully taken off before he shot himself, and his
old fur cap. Her outgrown cotton dress switched about her calves, over
the boot-tops. She kept her sleeves rolled up all day, and her arms and
throat were burned as brown as a sailor's. Her neck came up strongly out
of her shoulders, like the bole of a tree out of the turf. One sees that
draught-horse neck among the peasant women in all old countries.

She greeted me gaily, and began at once to tell me how much ploughing
she had done that day. Ambrosch, she said, was on the north quarter,
breaking sod with the oxen.

'Jim, you ask Jake how much he ploughed to-day. I don't want that Jake
get more done in one day than me. I want we have very much corn this
fall.'

While the horses drew in the water, and nosed each other, and then drank
again, Antonia sat down on the windmill step and rested her head on her
hand.

'You see the big prairie fire from your place last night? I hope your
grandpa ain't lose no stacks?'

'No, we didn't. I came to ask you something, Tony. Grandmother wants to
know if you can't go to the