He hurried the unloading, released the wagon brake, and drove off.

So Jean, coming from the spring behind the house, really got her first sight of him as he went rattling down to the gate.
Jean stood and looked after him, twitched her shoulders in a mental yielding of the point for the time being, and said "How-da-do" to the old lady.
She was not so old, as years go; fifty-five or thereabouts.

And she could have whispered into Lite's ear without standing on her toes or asking him to bend his head.

Lite was a tall man, at that.

She had gray hair that was frizzy around her brows and at the back of her neck, and she had an Irish disposition without the brogue to go with it.
The first thing she did was to find an axe and chop a lot of fence-posts into firewood, as easily as Lite himself could have done it, and in other ways proceeded to make herself very much at home.