eascended the
load, and we finished the job in silence together....

We laboured on after sunset till the full moon swung over the tree-tops.

* * * * *

Usually they did not use the cook-shack much ... it was used while on
the road from one wheat farm to another. Usually the farmers' wives and
daughters in the valleys and on the hillsides vied with each other as to
heaping food before the threshers ... every morning saw mountains of
pancakes ... bacon ... eggs ... ham ... beefsteak ... we laboured like
giants, ate like hogs, slept like senseless stocks.

I climbed to my bed in the haymow that first night. It was chill enough
for the use of my blanket.

I drowsed off, to wake with a jump of all my body from a dream that a
giant was pressing down on me, that he had my legs doubled up over me
and was breaking them into my breast....

The cramps....

I stood up and rubbed my legs till the taut tendons softened and
stretched ... but when I dared bend them the littlest, the tautening and
drawing twisted them again. And so I suffered half the night through,
till, in wrathful agony, I stumbled to the watering trough and stood
naked-white in the flood of the full moon, rubbing the icy water over my
body....

The dutiful house dogs ... barking furiously, the two of them rushed at
my apparition as I stood up in the trough and splashed. They embayed me
as a quarry. I jumped out of the trough and threw stones at them. They
backed from my attack and bit at the stones. I stepped back in the water
and rubbed myself more. The dogs squatted on their haunches at a safe
distance and bayed lugubriously at me and the moon in common.

The rest of the night I lay preternaturally awake, hearing the snoring
and murmuring of my fellows in the mow ... hearing the horses as they
crunched and whickered ... all the noises of the outside night came in
at the open door of the mow. Even the hay began to annoy me as it
continually rustled in my ear.

I took my blanket and went to lie on the hard ground, under the water
waggon. There I heard the multitudinous insects of the night, and the
whippoorwill.

Ordinarily I do not have an appetite for breakfast. That morning I
thought I would eat little, but I ended by devouring six eggs, two dozen
pancakes, drinking three cups of coffee ... all of which immediately lay
like a lump of rock in me....

No, I could not keep it up! It was too much of an effort, such frig