Dockett he'd sent up to
Perry Shaw for me--no, he comes puffin' up to me himself--because a big
corner-piece o' the bank had slipped into the brook where she makes that
elber at the bottom o' the Seventeen Acre, an' all the rubbishy alders
an' sallies which he ought to have cut out when he took the farm,
they'd slipped with the slip, an' the brook was comin' rooshin' down
atop of 'em, an' they'd just about back an' spill the waters over his
winter wheat. The water was lyin' in the flats already. "Gor a-mighty,
Jesse!" he bellers out at me, "get that rubbish away all manners you
can. Don't stop for no fagottin', but give the brook play or my wheat's
past salvation. I can't lend you no help," he says, "but work an'
I'll pay ye."'

'You had him there,' Jabez chuckled.

'Yes. I reckon I had ought to have drove my bargain, but the brook was
backin' up on good bread-corn. So 'cardenly, I laid into the mess of it,
workin' off the bank where the trees was drownin' themselves head-down
in the roosh--just such weather as this--an' the brook creepin' up on me
all the time. 'Long toward noon, Jim comes mowchin' along with his
toppin' axe over his shoulder.

'"Be you minded for an extra hand at your job?" he says.

'"Be you minded to turn to?" I ses, an'--no more talk to it--Jim laid in
alongside o' me. He's no hunger with a toppin' axe.'

'Maybe, but I've seed him at a job o' throwin' in the woods, an' he
didn't seem to make out no shape,' said Jabez. 'He haven't got the
shoulders, nor yet the judgment--_my_ opinion--when he's dealin' with
full-girt timber. He don't rightly make up his mind where he's goin' to
throw her.'

'We wasn't throwin' nothin'. We was cuttin' out they soft alders, an'
haulin' 'em up the bank 'fore they could back the waters on the wheat.
Jim didn't say much, 'less it was that he'd had a postcard from Mary's
Lunnon father, night before, sayin' he was comin' down that mornin'.
Jim, he'd sweated all night, an' he didn't reckon hisself equal to the
talkin' an' the swearin' an' the cryin', an' his mother blamin' him
afterwards on the slate. "It spiled my day to think of it," he ses, when
we was eatin' our pieces. "So I've fair cried dunghill an' run.
Mother'll have to tackle him by herself. I lay _she_ won't give him no
hush-money," he ses. "I lay he'll be surprised by the time he's done
with _her_," he ses. An' that was e'en a'most all the talk we had
concernin' it. But he's no hunger with the toppin' ax