I'm going to marry her
to-day, and to-morrow start working for Mr. Willson, who will pay me
enough to keep a wife. I'm sorry, mother, but--well, I've got to
have her. Some day you'll know her, and you'll love her, I know you
will; and if there's ever any children--"
But Mrs. Norris had clutched him by the arm. "Sammy," she
whispered, "your father will be raging mad at your going, and
harvest hands so scarce. I _know_ he'll never let me go near you,
never. But if there's ever any children, Sammy, you just come for
your mother, and I'll go to you and her _without_ his letting."
Then with one of the all too few kisses that are ever given or
received in a farmhouse life, she let him go. The storm burst at
breakfast time when Sam did not appear, and the poor mother tried
to explain his absence, as only a mother will. Old Billy waxed
suspicious, then jumped at facts. The marriage was bad enough,
but this being left in the lurch at the eleventh hour, his son's
valuable help transferred from the home farm to Mr. Willson's, with
whom he always quarreled in church, road, and political matters, was
too much.
"But, father, you never paid him wages," ventured the mother.
"Wages? Wages to one's own son, that one has raised and fed and
shod from the cradle? Wages, when he knowed he'd come in fer part
of the farm when I'd done with it? Who in consarnation ever gives
their son wages?"
"But, father, you told him if he married her he was never to have
the farm--that you'd leave it to Sid, that he was to get right off
the day he married her.
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