"To pay for having been born last? Not a bit more than if I had
been born first. Any girl in the family owes you as much for life
as I do; it is up to the others to pay back in service, after they
are of age, if it is to me. I have done my share. If Father were
not the richest farmer in the county, and one of the richest men,
it would be different. He can afford to hire help for you, quite
as well as he can for himself."
"Hire help! Who would I get to do the work here?"
"You'd have to double your assistants. You could not hire two
women who would come here and do so much work as I do in a day.
That is why I decline to give up teaching, and stay here to slave
at your option, for gingham dresses and cowhide shoes, of your
selection. If I were a boy, I'd work three years more and then I
would be given two hundred acres of land, have a house and barn
built for me, and a start of stock given me, as every boy in this
family has had at twenty-one."
"A man is a man! He founds a family, he runs the Government! It
is a different matter," said Mrs. Bates.
"It surely is; in this family. But I think, even with us, a man
would have rather a difficult proposition on his hands to found a
family without a woman; or to run the Government either."
"All right! Go on to Adam and see what you get."
"I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that Nancy Ellen gets
dinner, anyway," said Kate as she passed through the door and
followed the long path to the gate, from there walking beside the
road in the direction of her brother's home. There were many
horses in the pasture and single and double buggies in the barn;
but it never occurred to Kate that she might ride: it was
Sunday and the horses were resting. So she followed the path
beside the fences, rounded the corner of the church and went on
her way with the text from which the pastor was preaching,
hammering in her brain. She became so absorbed in thought that
she scarcely saw the footpath she followed, while June flowered,
and perfumed, and sang all around her.
She was so intent upon the words she had heard that her feet
unconsciously followed a well-defined branch from the main path
leading into the woods, from the bridge, where she sat on a log,
and for the unnumbered time, reviewed her problem. She had worked
ever since she could remember. Never in her life had she gotten
to school before noon on Monday, because of the large washings.
After the other work was finished she had spent nights and
mornings ironing, when she longed to study, seldom finishing
before Saturday. Summer brought an endless round of harvesting,
canning, drying; winter brought butchering, heaps of sewing, and
postponed summer work. School began late in the fall and closed
early in spring, with teachers often inefficient; yet because she
was a close student and kept her books where she could take a peep
and memorize and think as she washed dishes and cooked, she had
thoroughly mastered all the country school near her home could
teach her. With six weeks of a summer Normal course she would be
as well prepared to teach as any of her sisters were, with the
exception of Mary, who had been able to convince her parents that
she possessed two college years' worth of "ability."