The cabin was right where Lowil said it would be. Given that it was the off-season, it was in a state of disuse though it was still in fairly decent shape. Braun took off the moment they stopped and made for the nearby bushes while Kre tried his best to ignore the grunting and wailing sounds issuing forth.
Shaking his head, Kre parked the wagon off to one side and unhitched the horses while Lowil took their packs inside to get things set up. By the time Kre had finished, Braun had a kettle going over a small fire he had managed to start and was working on brushing the dust off of the nearest table.
“He sounds like he’s having a rough time out there,” Lowil said in a slightly worried tone. “I hope he’s all right.”
“I kind of think he deserves it,” Kre admitted. “He’s just such a… what’s the word… weasel?”
Lowil sighed and threw the dust rag to Kre. “He really isn’t that bad, he’s just misguided in many of his beliefs and has nearly no personality. Everyone goes through a phase like that, even you. His is just lasting longer than most and treating him like a third-class citizen doesn’t help anything. I taught you better than that.”
Appropriately ashamed of his behavior, Kre started to wipe down the other table in the sitting room of the cabin. Once finished, he looked around and started to realize how nice the cabin actually was.
A single row of large flat stones marked out the perimeter of the cabin with heavy wooden logs raised vertically to mark the corners. Seasoned wooden planks made up both the interior and exterior walls and, Kre suspected, the cavity between the boards was filled with now-dried mud and grass. Buildings like this were relatively easy to set up provided the lumber was handy, which, in an orchard, was a safe bet.
The inside of the cabin consisted of just two rooms: the sitting room where Lowil and Kre were at, which housed a fire pit and two long tables built to seat thirty or so workers; and a long common sleeping room where workers could set up their blankets or cots, if they were lucky enough to own one. It was truly a design of function over form which suited the migrant apple picking population very well.
“Kre, can you get another bucket of water from the pump outside? I’ll see if I can get some kind of stew going with the various food we have.”
The youth nodded and tucked the dust rag into his pocket as he grabbed two buckets. When Lowil raised an eyebrow at the second bucket, Kre shrugged. “Braun might need to do some washing up and a good cool drink might help his stomach too.”
The teacher nodded and smiled as he watched his former pupil head outside to the water pump. ’Maybe I didn’t do such a bad job of teaching this one as I thought,’ he mused to himself. Still smiling, Lowil turned and used some of the now boiling water to rinse out a pair of mugs he had found. He rinsed them this way three times before he was satisfied and then added a bag of tea leaves to each mug before filling them with the rest of the water. ‘Yeah, maybe he’ll be all right after all.’