Here and there on the hillsides the columns of pearl-gray smoke, wafted straight skyward, showed both the location of cultivated land where litter and brush were burning, and also that the wind was in abeyance, and the sun once more in power. The sky wore a misty veil over the blue, and the Moosatuk, rushing, foaming, and overleaping itself in its spring-running seaward, drew more from the ground for colours than of the sky reflections. Now and again an uprooted tree would be swept by, turning and stretching its bare arms upward, as if giving signals of distress, and then a log would plunge along, striking against the submerged rocks, rearing, and plunging again like a gigantic water snake.
Yes, in deed and in truth, life had returned to the River Kingdom at the sound of the voice of the waters, and yet throughout all the wide expanse the only human touch was in the field below, where a man, who cast a Titan’s shadow behind him, was driving a plough into the deep, cool soil, slowly shattering the stubbly hillocks of last year’s corn. Calmly he worked, but with finality. The reins that guided the horses hung loose about his neck, for he only made use of them at the turnings, while the motive power seemed to come less from the horses than from the shoulders of the man who kept the ploughshare true in its course.
Brooke Lawton stood spellbound. For the first time she saw and comprehended the most primitive labour of primitive man, and it appealed to every sense of her body,—the mental, spiritual, physical,—appealed to her as had the freshly baked loaves, by its symbolism as well as directness, for beneath the leavening development of generations, side by side with the temperament for music expressed in rhythm and colour defined by pigments, walked another Brooke, the primitive woman.
Ah! if she could but fix and paint the scene as she felt it! Instantly the ploughman stood as the rightful ruler of the River Kingdom, and dominated it. It was not the personality of the man, for she had not yet seen his face, merely his fitness to his surroundings. Enoch Fenton’s voice broke the spell: “A slow worker, as I told your ma (I put in my mare with your horse, it’s too heavy for one), but that don’t signify in share farmin’; you won’t hev to watch out sharp until the harvestin’, and then I’ll help you out. If you was left to yourself, you might fare like that pretty city Widder Harris, down to the Forks; she let old Ed Terry keep her cow fer half the milk. Firstly the cow was dry, and Mis’ didn’t get any of course; time went along, and the cow calved, and after a week Mis’ Harris went across lots with her kettle fer her milk.