Read Online The Unplowed Sky by Jeanne Williams - Free Book Online

Commandments , Miss Hallie?” he asked. “It’s on at the theater in Hollister.”
    â€œPlannin’ to get there on the tractor?” drawled Jim Wyatt.
    â€œWhy, no, Jim.” Rory gave the former engineer a careless smile. “I figgered you’d lend me your Model T if I filled it up with gas.”
    Wyatt looked at Hallie, as if his answer was up to her. She had heard of the famous movie, of course, and had planned to attend a matinee. Then Felicity left Jackie with her and everything had changed—and kept changing.
    â€œNo, thank you, Mr. MacLeod,” Hallie said quickly. Blushing again! She had to stop that. “I can’t go off and leave Jackie our first night here. Besides, I think I’m going to be too tired to keep my eyes open.”
    â€œSo would you be, Rory, if you didn’t mainly stand around on the platform all day, lord of all you survey, while we break our backs.” Rusty Wells, the Oklahoma farmer, delivered the barb in a good-natured tone.
    â€œThe engineer’s job is the engine and keeping an eye on the whole picture,” Rory retorted loftily. “If you toss your pitchfork in the feeder along with the spikes, as some have been known to do—”
    Everyone looked at Rich Mondell and chortled. The handsome black-haired professor blushed beneath his sunburn but he laughed, too. “Well, boys, I only did it once.”
    â€œAnd you paid with nary a whine for fixing the cylinder,” put in Garth, returning with his sulky-faced daughter. “It’ll chew up a pitchfork, but can’t digest one real well.”
    â€œShucks, the perfessor’s rich.” Cotton Harris’s nose was almost bloody from constantly peeling sunburn. “He just works for the healthy fresh air and exercise.”
    â€œIf you saw my college paycheck, you wouldn’t say that,” Mondell retorted.
    â€œYou’ve gone and eaten all the crusty sides of the gingerbread,” Meg accused, poking with a none-too-clean finger at the remaining center pieces.
    â€œIf they’d eaten the centers, that’s what you’d have all of a sudden wanted.” Shaft frowned at his boss’s daughter. “Take that piece you’ve got your paws on, and see if it won’t sweeten you up a little.”
    Meg scowled, but did as she was told. Rory eyed her warily. “You fall in the stock tank again?”
    â€œThe dratted board I had laid across the tank so I could dip water scooted out from under me.” Meg shook the clinging legs of her overalls that were drying plastered to her skin.
    â€œA bath might improve you,” Rory teased, “but you’d better not have muddied up the water. You know what they say: “‘If you won’t drink it, don’t put it in your engine.’”
    â€œSure, worry about the engine!” Meg bit savagely into the roast beef. “You and Dad both care a lot more about your old machinery than you do about me!”
    â€œYou’re cheaper to fix.” Rory scrunched his nose at his niece. “And when you blow up, you don’t send engines and cylinders and threshers flying everywhere.”
    â€œNot yet.” Meg made a face at him and almost giggled. She took another chunk of the maligned gingerbread.
    Now Hallie understood why a young girl was with a threshing crew, but she couldn’t understand, any more than she had with Felicity, how a mother could leave a child—just go off and act as if the youngster had never existed.
    Hallie had felt abandoned when her mother died though she knew, in her mind, that Ellen Meredith fought hard to live, that she hadn’t wanted to die at thirty-two with so much life to live, so much love to love, with her daughter so young and her husband so distraught. Hallie felt abandoned by her father, too, though he had never intended that Felicity crowd her out. Hallie bitterly regretted now that she had probably caused him