there during the season to look after the crop, and lived at their own
homes the rest of the time. Was she going to stay long at the major's?
He noticed she had not brought her trunk with her. Had she known the
major's wife long? Perhaps she thought of settling in the neighborhood?

All this naive, good-humored questioning--so often cruelly misunderstood
as mere vulgar curiosity, but as often the courteous instinct of simple
unaffected people to entertain the stranger by inviting him to talk of
what concerns himself rather than their own selves--was nevertheless,
I fear, met only by monosyllables from the young lady or an impatient
question in return. She scarcely raised her eyes to the broad
jean-shirted back that preceded her through the grain until the
man abruptly ceased talking, and his manner, without losing its
half-paternal courtesy, became graver. She was beginning to be conscious
of her incivility, and was trying to think of something to say, when
he exclaimed with a slight air of relief, "Here we are!" and the shanty
suddenly appeared before them.

It certainly was very rough--a mere shell of unpainted boards that
scarcely rose above the level of the surrounding grain, and a few yards
distant was invisible. Its slightly sloping roof, already warped and
shrunken into long fissures that permitted glimpses of the steel-blue
sky above, was evidently intended only as a shelter from the cloudless
sun in those two months of rainless days and dewless nights when it was
inhabited. Through the open doors and windows she could see a row of
"bunks," or rude sleeping berths against the walls, furnished with
coarse mattresses and blankets. As the young girl halted, the man
with an instinct of delicacy hurried forward, entered the shanty, and
dragging a rude bench to the doorway, placed it so that she could sit
beneath the shade of the roof, yet with her back to these domestic