Come out and eat breakfast with me, an' take care o' y'r young ones." She neither moved nor made a sound.

With an oath he turned on his heel and went out to the table.

Eating his breakfast in his usual wolfish fashion, he went out into the hot sun with his team and riding-plow, not a little disturbed by this new phase of his wife's "cantankerousness." He plowed steadily and sullenly all the forenoon, in the terrific heat and dust.

The air was full of tempestuous threats, still and sultry, one of those days when work is a punishment.

When he came in at noon he found things the same--dinner on the table, but his wife out in the garden with the youngest child.
"I c'n stand it as long as _she_ can," he said to himself, in the hearing of the children, as he pushed back from the table and went back to work.
When he had finished the field of corn it was after sundown, and he came up to the house, hot, dusty, his shirt wringing wet with sweat, and his neck aching with the work of looking down all day at the corn-rows.