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THE LOST WAGON

by JIM KJELGAARD

Jacket by Al Orbaan

Endpapers by Gerald McCann

Lithographed in U.S.A.

[Transcriber Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Dodd, Mead & Company · New York

Copyright, 1955 by Jim Kjelgaard

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-7136

Printed in the United States of America

The characters, incidents and situations in this book are imaginary and have no relation to any person or actual happening

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For Alma and Rob Zaun

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE - Pondering
CHAPTER TWO - The Discussion
CHAPTER THREE - The Destroyers
CHAPTER FOUR - Mountain Man
CHAPTER FIVE - The Start
CHAPTER SIX - The Party
CHAPTER SEVEN - Independence
CHAPTER EIGHT - The River
CHAPTER NINE - Storm
CHAPTER TEN - Snedeker's
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Winter
CHAPTER TWELVE - Barbara and Ellis
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Spring
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - The Mule
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - The Meadows
CHAPTER SIXTEEN - The Farm
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - Besieged

About the Author
Books by Jim Kjelgaard

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The Lost Wagon

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CHAPTER ONE

Pondering

When he had guided his plow halfway down the furrow, a bar-winged fly alighted just above Joe Tower's right ear. He felt it crawling, its presence irritating through the sweat that beaded his forehead and dampened his temples, and he knew that he should swat it away. When it was ready to do so the fly would bite him, and bar-winged flies drew blood when they bit.

He did not raise his hand because once again the devils which, at sporadic intervals, tormented him, were having a field day. The fly was a counter-irritant. He wanted it to bite. It was a time to be hurt because, after the fly bit him, there would be that much more satisfaction in smashing it.

At the same time he kept a wary eye on the mules. Though he was sometimes confused by the facts and affairs of his personal world, at the moment he had no doubt whatever about one thing. He hated all mules in general and these two in particular. They were big, sleek roan brutes with an air of innocence that was somehow imparted by their wagging ears and doleful expressions, but was entirely belied by the devil in their eyes. Twice within the past fifteen minutes they had balked, stepped over their traces, snarled their harnesses and kicked at him when he sought to untangle them. He had escaped injury because he knew mules. All his life he had handled animals, and most of the time he knew what they were going to do before they did it.

He felt the fly crawling around, and gloated silently as he awaited its bite. He mustn't harm the mules because a man simply never hurt his animals. But he could swat the fly, and so doing he could relieve all his pent-up anger at the mules and, this afternoon, at the world in general.

Not for a second did he take his eyes from the mules, and they seemed to know that he was watching them. Muscles rippled beneath taut hides as they strained into their collars and pulled as though they had never had any thought except getting the plowing done. Joe Tower's already tense nerves began to scream. The fly didn't bite and the mules didn't balk, and unless something happened very soon, he felt that he would be reduced to babbling idiocy.

Nothing happened except that the already hot sun seemed to become a little hotter on his sweat-drenched shirt and his perspiring head and arms. But he had been scorched by so much sun and had sweated so many gallons that he never thought about it any more. Sun and sweat were a part of things, like snow and ice. Nobody escaped them and nobody could do anything about them, and Joe wasn't sure that anybody should want to. If the sun didn't shine the crops wouldn't grow. Or if the sun did shine, and there was no snow to melt and fill subterranean reservoirs, the crops wouldn't grow anyhow. This basic reasoning should be obvious to anyone at all.

The rich brown earth turned cleanly as the plow wounded it, and the scorching sun burned a healing scab over the wound. Keeping intent eyes on both mules and waiting for the fly to bite, Joe was not one man but two.

One of them felt a soul-filling peace. It was good to plow and to have the nostril-filling scent of the newly turned earth, for these things were symbolic. The earth was a vast treasure house, but the treasure was not yielded freely. It was only for the strong, for him who could sweat and strain and guide a plow. Such a person was blessed beyond any others. But the other man who walked with Joe was angry and resentful. He did not doubt his own strength for he could plow as long a furrow as was necessary. He did dislike the forces, the petty forces that had nothing at all to do with plowing, which kept him from doing it.

Joe's lean, six-foot body adjusted itself perfectly to the rhythm of the plow. Hairy, sun-browned arms gripped the handles with exactly the right pressure, and there was something almost lyrically smooth in the way he could, without using his hands at all, control the reins that were looped over the small of his back. Gray-streaked hair that needed cutting and black beard shadowed a face that might have been thirty years old or fifty, and was thirty-four.

To himself and his work he gave little conscious thought. He had plowed so many furrows that plowing came almost as naturally as breathing, and he had long since ceased even to think about his own physical proportions. What sometimes seemed an age ago and sometimes only yesterday, he had fancied himself as a dashing figure and very handsome. He had been nineteen then and courting Emma, and it was a foregone conclusion that the world was not only to be their oyster, but that it would be filled with the purest of pearls.

That had been yesterday, and yesterday was lost somewhere in the haze that every morning hung like a blue shroud over the low mountains that marched into the distance. This was today, and today meant work. But somehow, yesterday's dreams had not passed with passing time.

Yesterday's dream had become today's dream, and it was made up of things that a man might hope to possess—no unreasonable things, but ordinary things, like a sizable piece of good land, owned free and clear; an extra team of mules; a flower garden for Emma to fool around with, and maybe a small orchard down the side of a hill; some pretty clothes for Emma and for blossoming Barbara, and some toys for the younger ones; and most of all, freedom from the never-ending uncertainty about meeting the next payment. It seemed as though that shouldn't be too much for a man to want, yet most of it was still a dream.

Joe blew his breath upward to see if he could make the fly leave him and, when it did not, he became angrier. He was almost always a creature of the moment, and always the moments were filled with things demanding immediate attention. To the exclusion of all else, this one centered in a team of fractious mules, a fly that must bite soon and a strong sense of restlessness.

He came almost to the end of the furrow and still the fly contented itself with crawling around his temple and stopping now and again to buzz its wings or clean its fragile feet. Joe's tension increased and, had it not been for the anticipated senses of achievement that swatting the fly would give him after it bit, he would have swatted it anyhow.

They reached the furrow's end, he prepared to swing the team around, and that was the second the fly chose to bite him. It was a sharp and sudden pain, somewhat like the prick of a needle, but the pain did not ebb as a needle wound would have. The fly had pierced a blood vessel and would now bloat itself with blood. Joe Tower's hot anger passed the boiling point but, where another man might have cursed, he said nothing.

He let go of the right plow handle so that he could raise his hand and swat the fly. A surge of purest pleasure shimmered through him, for this was the second he had been awaiting. Just at that moment the mules rebelled.

Expertly, choosing precisely the right time, knowing not only exactly what to do but exactly how to do it, they stepped over their traces and swung away from each other. They plunged forward, dragging the plow on top of the ground. Instead of swatting the fly, Joe grabbed the reins with his right hand and pulled back hard.

The steel bits took hold, and the mule's jaws gaped open. But they were hard-mouthed, and Joe brought his left hand to the aid of his right while he fought back as stubbornly as the mules were fighting him. When he finally brought the team under control, the fly was gone and only a dull ache remained to prove that it had ever been.

For a moment Joe felt weak and spiritless, as though he had conceived some master plan which should have worked well but which instead had gone completely astray. Then, still eying the mules warily, he straightened them out and swung the plow around.

The silliness of what he had intended to do and the way he had intended to do it, struck him forcibly. He had actually made serious plans to relieve his own pent-up feelings by swatting a fly. He grinned and for a moment he rested.

His eyes strayed past the boundaries of his own farm to a green-clad hill where a little herd of cattle grazed. Joe looked wistfully at them. The cattle belonged to Pete Domley, and Joe had a sudden overwhelming conviction that Pete was the smartest man in Missouri. Instead of worrying about a farm, Pete had merely acquired a judicious assortment of bulls and cows and let nature work on his side. Beyond the slightest doubt, cattlemen had all the best of everything. It would be nice if all one had to do was cull his herds every season and sell the increase.

Joe could not let himself rest for long because the sun was shining, the ground was ready for working, and he had problems. He had bought his eighty-five acres for $600, of which he still owed Elias Dorrance, the banker, $400. This fall Elias would expect another payment. If Joe did not get the field plowed and planted he would have no crops to sell and therefore no money, and Elias was not noted for his willingness to wait. It was strange how things never worked out the way a man thought they would.

Joe had understood before they were married that Emma had not wanted to leave her father. Old Caleb Winthrop was a widower of uncertain temperament, gentle one hour and abusive the next. Emma had been devoted to him since her mother's death, and she had been able to forgive his harshness and his tyrannies because she deeply pitied his loneliness. She was even able to persuade Joe that old Caleb "didn't mean anything" and that "things would surely work themselves out" once they were all living together.

Joe had had his doubts, but he laid them aside, and after the wedding he gave up his small interest in a near-by farm and came to work for his father-in-law.

Things didn't "work themselves out." Joe stuck to his job for five long years, chafing all the time under the old man's constant criticism. Caleb had let it be understood that some day the farm would belong to Joe and Emma, but meanwhile it seemed as though there was nothing Joe could do right—or if he did anything right then sure as fate he'd done it at the wrong time. Emma, who'd been able to tolerate the old man's venom easily enough when it was directed against herself, suffered agonies when Caleb would start to mutter and then to shout over something Joe had done.

There had come a day when Caleb shouted at Joe a little too loud and a little too long. Emma asked Joe to step outside with her, there was something she wanted to say to him.

They walked away together toward the big tree over by the barn, and when they got there Emma turned to Joe and looked into his tired and angry eyes, and she put her hands on his arms and felt there the rapid tensing of his muscles as he clenched and unclenched his fists that were dug deep into his pockets.

"Joe," she said, "I was wrong. I should never have asked you to come here to work for Pa." The color rose up into her face. "I can't stand it when he yells at you. Something terrible happens inside of me. I—I hate him when he yells at you, Joe."

He took his hands out of his pockets and drew her close to him, and she put her head down on his shoulder and wept bitter tears. He moved his work-roughened hand tenderly over her soft hair, and he held her gently and rocked her a little because he felt she was trying to make a decision, a hard and painful decision, and he didn't want to influence her one way or the other.

When she quieted she talked again, blurting the words as though she had to get them out quickly—while she dared. "We can't stay," she said. "It's not right the way he treats you. And he won't change, Joe. He hates the thought of you getting his land, and he means to make you pay—not in money or work, but in other ways. Mean ways. It's not worth it, Joe."

A smile came over his face, and he held her away from him so she could see him and how good he felt. "I prayed to hear you say this, Emma. I've been wanting to leave for a long, long time, but I waited for you to come to it by yourself." He looked at her with all the love he felt and could never quite put into words. "I couldn't go without you, Emma, and I wouldn't force you to come—more especially because I can't offer you anything away from this farm. I'll have to work as a hired man till we can get together enough to buy us some land of our own."

Emma put her face down against his shoulder, and the words that came up were muffled. "I've got a confession to make, Joe. I knew you wanted to leave. I knew it a long time ago. But I was afraid to speak out against Pa. I guess I've always been afraid of Pa, not knowing it, thinking all the time I just respected him the way a daughter should. But hearing him yell at you, I found out something I never knew. I can get mad at Pa. I can get so mad at him that I'm not frightened at all any more. I could walk right up to Pa this minute and tell him we've had just about enough!"

She lifted her face then, startled by her own audacity, and said, "Want to see me do it?" And then, before he could say yes or no, she ran away from him back to the house, quick as a deer. Joe chased her, and when he came in panting through the door there she was standing in front of Caleb with her eyes blazing, and saying, loud and clear, "Pa, we've had just about enough!"

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For eight years Joe had worked as a hired hand for other farmers. Being a menial did not trouble him at all, but he worried greatly over the fact that he was seldom able to offer his family more than the basic necessities of food, clothing, and shelter. Within his inner soul was a deep conviction that they deserved more. A great oak could not flourish in a flower pot, and human beings could not grow as humans should if they must always be restricted.

Last year Emma had overwhelmed him by producing $600 which, almost penny by penny, she had saved over the years. Two hundred had gone into the land and $400 into things needed for the land: mules, cows, harness, the plow, the harrow and a host of other things which never seemed very expensive when one bought them singly but which ate up money when purchased together. Now this wasn't working out. Though a part of Joe could be perfectly in tune with what he was doing, another part resented it fiercely. Good land was for good crops, and good crops were a joy to the heart and soul. But Joe looked over what he had already plowed and seemed to see there a row of dollar bills for Elias Dorrance. He thought uneasily of the way he lived, and wondered if his sons and daughters would have to live that way too. Then this feeling faded until it was only a vague irritation, and Joe became the complete farmer.

He guided the plow down another furrow and another. It was hard and hot work, but Joe licked his lips in anticipation as he forced himself to plow one more furrow. It pleased him to work as hard as he could, and sweat as much as he could, before he indulged himself because then the indulgence was appreciated all the more. Swinging back on still another furrow, he halted the mules in their tracks and walked to a leafy sycamore that spread its green branches where the plowed field ended. He pulled a handful of wilting grass aside and revealed a brown stone jug.

For two seconds, wanting to cheat himself of no part of this, he looked at the jug. Its earthen sides were beaded with little globules of water, and as it lay in the sycamore's shade it looked inviting. Joe knelt to pick it up, and the jug was cool to his hand. He pulled the corn cob stopper and held the jug to his lips while he took great gulps of cold water. It was part of the ritual, a measure of things as they must be. A man who had never been sweat-stained from hard labor could not know the true goodness of cold water. His thirst satisfied, Joe put the jug back and covered it with grass.

The day had been hard and somewhat frustrating, but it was with a sense of loss and resentment that he noted the long shadows of early evening draping themselves over the fields. The day couldn't possibly be ended, but as soon as he knew that it was ending he felt a rising pleasure. No man had a right to rest while there was daylight in which he might work, but anybody with half a lick of common sense knew that you couldn't work at night. When it was impossible to work, the whole time might be given to dreams, and dreams were a very important part of life, too.

Knowing very well that their day was over too, and that they were going to pasture, the mules stood meekly and made no attempt to kick as he unhitched them. Free from the plow, they stepped along as briskly as though they hadn't just finished pulling it for more than ten hours, and there was something akin to friendliness in their eyes when Joe drove them into the pasture, stripped their harness off, hung it on the upper railing, and shut the pasture gate behind him.

He turned to watch the mules frisk like a couple of colts across the green grass, then lie down and roll luxuriously in it. Not until tomorrow morning would he have to fight them into harness again, and that made him forget, in part, the trouble he had had with them today. He grinned at the mules.

There was a soft footstep beside him and Joe's oldest daughter was there. She was slim and tall, and almost startlingly beautiful. There was little resemblance to either Joe or Emma; Barbara was the re-creation of some ethereal being who had been in the family of one or the other perhaps 100 and perhaps 500 years ago. She had been one of the really awe-inspiring events in Joe's life. He was not naïve and he knew the ways of nature. But when he had courted Emma he had known only that he was desperately in love with her and that he wanted her always at his side. It had simply never occurred to him that they, too, should produce children; he hadn't thought that far. When Emma told him she was pregnant he had walked around in a half daze for weeks. He hadn't really believed it until Barbara's arrival.

Joe said, "Hello, Bobby."

She said, "Hello, Dad," and she added, as though it were an afterthought, "The chores are done."

Joe frowned. At the same time, since he was tired, he knew some relief. Half the families around put their children to work in the fields as soon as they were big enough to pull weeds, but Joe had never liked the idea and he didn't hold with his womenfolk doing field work at all. Men were supposed to work the fields, but almost as soon as she was big enough to do so, Barbara had taken a hand. She liked to do things, and for all her seeming slightness she was very strong. Just the same, even though he was relieved because he would not have to milk the cows, swill the pigs, and do all the other things that forever needed doing, Joe didn't like it. But he spoke with the gentleness that Barbara inspired in him.

"You shouldn't be doing such chores."

She smiled, the corners of her eyes crinkling, and Joe thought of Emma. "I like to do them and it won't hurt me."

Because he did not know what to say, for a moment Joe said nothing. It was unreasonable because a man always had the right to tell his children what to do, but secretly he was still more than a little overawed by Barbara. Then the silence became awkward and he asked,

"Where's Tad?"

"He—He's about."

Joe frowned. It was a foregone conclusion that Tad was about because Tad, his eldest son, was always somewhere. Joe thought of his children.

After Barbara they'd waited seven years for Tad. Then Emma, Joe, Alfred, and Carlyle, had arrived in rapid succession. If Joe understood any of them he understood Tad, for the eight-year-old thought and acted a great deal like the father. A wild and restless youngster, Tad was wholeheartedly for anything he didn't have. As long as there was something he really wanted he was entirely willing to work like a horse for it.

Where the field joined the forest, a white and black dog of mixed ancestry panted into sight and stopped to look expectantly back over his shoulder. Joe stiffened, waiting for what he knew he would see now, and a moment later Tad appeared with Joe's long-barreled rifle over his shoulder and a cluster of squirrels in his hand.

Joe's anger flared. Tad loved to hunt, which was not unusual because all normal boys did. But nobody eight years old had any business running around the woods with a rifle and more than once Joe had forbidden Tad to use his. Joe's face became stormy as the youngster drew near.

"What you been doing?"

Tad stopped, every freckle on his multifreckled face registering total innocence and his eyes big with surprise. Joe fumed. The boy was like him and yet they were not alike. Never in his life had Joe faced anything in any except a direct way. He did not know how to pretend, as Tad was pretending now.

"Huntin', Pa," the youngster said.

"Haven't I told you to leave that rifle alone?"

"You didn't tell me today."

"I don't have to tell you every day!"

"I didn't use but six shots."

Joe roared so loudly that the pastured mules looked curiously at him, "It's no matter if you used only one!"

"I got six squirrels," Tad explained. "Mike, he put 'em up a tree and kept 'em there. I just shot. Smacked every one of 'em plumb through the head."

"Give me that rifle," Joe snatched the weapon, "and get in the house before I tan your hide!"

"Yes, Pa."

The squirrels in his hand, the dog beside him, Tad trotted toward the house. There was nothing meek or subdued in his squared shoulders and upturned head, and for a moment Joe had an uncomfortable feeling that he had been tested by an eight-year-old. He scowled and shrugged the thought away while he felt a rising pride. Six squirrels with six shots was good shooting anywhere, and young ones wouldn't be all they should be if they didn't have a bit of the devil in them. He must keep the rifle where Tad couldn't reach it, though. Maybe this fall, or as soon as he could spare a day from the fields, it would be a good idea if he took Tad hunting with him. He really wouldn't mind Tad's using the rifle if he could be sure that it was safely used.

Barbara went to close the chicken coop. The rifle in his hand, Joe walked to the spring house, leaned the rifle against it, and dipped a pail full of water. He spilled some into a wooden bowl that stood on a wooden bench and sighed deliciously as he washed his face and hands. This, the final act of his working day, was one to which he always looked forward. It was as though, in washing away accumulated sweat and grime, he also washed away the troubles that plagued him. The end of the day was almost like being born again.

There was a new spring in his step and a fresh tilt to his head as he walked toward the house. He remembered Emma, not too clearly, as a lovely young girl. Now her figure was mature. Hard work, childbirth and worry had traced their own lines on her face. But to Joe there was something completely fitting and even refreshing about that. A tree could not forever remain a graceful young sapling. It had to grow, and became strong with growth, in order to withstand winter blasts, summer storms, fire, and other hazards that menaced it. Joe found in the mature Emma a solid strength and assurance that he could not remember knowing in the girl, and with it had come a deepening love. He met his wife and kissed her. Emma stepped back and smiled.

"Did you have a good day?"

"It was a good one."

Her eyes dwelt on the rifle, and her brows arched in question. "Did Tad have it again?"

Joe grinned. "Yup."

He took the rifle into his and Emma's bedroom, and hung it high on two wooden pegs driven close to the ceiling. For a moment he looked at it, frowning, and then he was satisfied. He could reach the rifle but Tad couldn't unless he had something to stand on. If he tried that, Emma would hear and stop him. Still, the boy was devilishly clever when it came to sneaking the gun out.

Tad was outside dressing his squirrels, and Barbara had gone down to the creek to gather a little knob of wild flowers for the table. As soon as Joe had settled himself in the chair, the four youngest children were upon him. Joe reached down to lift baby Carlyle into his lap with the other three, and they cuddled there like soft kittens.

"When I was out in the fields today," Joe began, "I met a big grizzly bear. He had a mouth this wide...."

He spread his hands to show the width of the grizzly bear's mouth and his fingers to demonstrate the length of its teeth. Gently, to their squealing delight, he tickled the four little ones and nibbled their hands and feet to show how the grizzly bear had mauled and bitten him.

Behind him, Emma stood at the window enjoying, as she did each night, the pure pleasure that Joe took in his children. She had loved Joe almost from the day she first set eyes on him, in the store where they had come together at the counter, she to buy calico for an apron, Joe to buy some nails for the repair of a fence. Something about the set of his shoulders and the powerful but easy way he moved caught her attention. Here was a man slow and sure and strong—slow of speech, slow to smile, but with an imp of mischief that could dart out unexpectedly from his eyes. When the storekeeper had held up for his attention a small jug of maple syrup from a shipment newly arrived, and had inquired, "Like one of these?" Joe's eyes had strayed to Emma and he'd replied, unblinking, "Sure would." Joe took the jug of syrup in his hand, hefted it for weight and again, looking into Emma's startled eyes, said "Sweet, no doubt of it." Then, absolutely over-come by his own impudence, he had slapped his money on the counter and run from the store, jug in hand, nearly falling over a box that stood in his path.

She smiled now, thinking of that casual beginning. Their marriage had not been easy, but it had been rich in tenderness and in sharing. The five years that they had lived with her father had been troubled and barren. Barbara's arrival had given them a center of relief away from Caleb. Barbara had been like an oasis in a parched land. Their feelings, that withered and died in Caleb's presence, could grow and flower when they were alone with their baby girl.

Joe had been bewitched by Barbara from the beginning. And each of his children had seemed miraculous to him in birth. He was a good man, a good father. True, there was a restlessness in Joe that sometimes frightened her. He liked to work, but to work for himself, for his own family. He had endured Caleb's domination with an inner rage that had seemed like a bottled-up tornado to Emma. Though he managed to conceal most of it, the fury of it had at times been revealed in his bloodshot eyes and white, set lips, in the way he strode out to the plow or pulled open the barn door—and it had caused a tight little knot of worry to harden inside of her. He wanted then, and he wanted now, to be on his own, his own man. The obligation of his debt to Elias Dorrance sat heavily upon him, more heavily than it did on Emma, because the furious independence that burned within him raged against the naked fact that the land was not his own, would not be his own until he had paid back every last dollar he owed on it.

Emma sighed a little, wishing that Joe did not chafe so under his debt. If Joe were less restless, she would be able to enjoy even more fully the home that in this one year had become so precious to her. Her eyes strayed now from the little mass of squirming and giggling humanity gathered about Joe's knees, and she re-examined lovingly, for the thousandth time, every bit of furniture in the room. Most of it had been made by Joe, and they had talked about it and planned it for where it would stand and how it would serve them. The little cupboard that held their best dishes had been polished with such energy that it gleamed as brightly as a copper pot. The curtains blowing in the soft breeze had been stitched by Barbara and herself after the young ones were tucked away for the night. The lamps were polished, their chimneys spotless. Everywhere in the room there was evidence of labor and tender care. Emma loved the room and everything in it. Her whole life was here in this room, with Joe, with her children. Life was hard, but it was rich and full, and if Joe did not have these flashes of restlessness, it would be well-nigh perfect.

Barbara came in and put her handful of flowers into a cup on the table and then, with quiet efficiency, she and Emma put the meal on the table and the four youngsters slid from Joe's lap to crowd hungrily around. Tad came in, his face and hands clean and his black hair slicked back with water. He carried the dressed squirrels on a piece of bark. Laying them on a wooden bench, he almost leaped into his chair. Emma smiled with her eyes and Joe smiled back, and the words they had whispered a thousand times to each other were heard, unsaid but understood.

Emma asked, "Did you get a lot done?"

"Quite a lot. But those darn mules—."

He told her of the trouble he'd had with the mules, but even while he spoke it seemed to be someone else talking. He could not understand it because it was past his understanding. To plow the earth and grow new crops was always good. By such deeds people lived and had lived since the beginning. But....

His every nerve and instinct, and his heart, told him that good land had magic in it. It had been maddening, as a hired hand, to be able to feel and touch this magic, and not to have it for his own. He had thought that having his own land would change all this, but it hadn't. Previously he had worked for wages while his employer reaped the benefit of his labor. Now he was merely working for Elias Dorrance. As before, all he could offer his family were the basic necessities. Joe looked down at his empty plate.

Emma's understanding eyes were upon him. She said, "Why don't you take a walk, Joe?"

"Now say! I might just do that! I might go down to Tenney's!"

"Why don't you?"

"I think I will."

Joe sought the star-lighted path leading to Tenney's general store, which was the center of half a dozen houses at Tenney's Crossing and the unofficial clubhouse for every man from miles around. Except for the church, which most men would think of visiting only on Sunday if they visited it at all, Tenney's store was the only meeting house. Joe looked at the star-dappled sky, and he was struck by what seemed the odd thought that he had never seen stars crowd each other aside.

Out in the shadows a bird twittered, and Joe stopped in his tracks. He knew all the local birds by their songs, and he could give a fair imitation of nearly all, but this one he could not identify and it mystified him. He decided to his own satisfaction that it was a vagrant mocking bird that had uttered a few off-key notes.

He was so absorbed in thinking about the bird that he reached Tenney's Crossing almost before he realized it. By the thin light of an early-rising moon he saw a man leaning at a slight angle against Frawley Thompson's house. Without too much interest he recognized a local Indian known as Lard Head, a nickname he had acquired from a passion for slicking his black hair down with lard. Lard Head's other consuming ambition in life was to get as drunk as possible as often as possible, and obviously he was drunk again. He was fast asleep standing up, and doubtless he would go looking for something else to drink as soon as he awakened.

Yellow oil lamps glowed behind the store windows, and Joe set his course straight. He saw Elias Dorrance come out of the store and linger in the shadows, waiting for him, and he felt a rising irritation. He disliked nobody simply because they had more than he, but he wouldn't have liked Elias Dorrance under any conditions. Elias, who lived by the sweat and toil of others, was an alien here in this place where most men lived by their own labor. The banker spoke,

"Hi, Joe."

"Hi."

"Got your seeding done?" Dorrance asked casually.

"Why don't you come see for yourself. Elias?"

He brushed past and into the store, not thinking about the fact that he had rebuffed the man to whom he owed money—and not caring. Elias Dorrance was not being neighborly; he was just checking in advance to find whether he'd get a payment this fall or whether he'd have to foreclose on Joe's farm. Either way it made no difference; no amount of sweet talk would keep Elias from getting his due and no other kind would insult him if he saw money in the offing. Elias was a sponge. He absorbed everything but had an amazing facility for disgorging whatever would not benefit him.

Joe put Elias from his mind and went into the store. A kerosene lamp burned in front and another in back, and in between was all the amazing variety of goods that a store such as this must stock. Lester Tenney sold everything from pins to farm wagons, and he always had exactly the right amount of goods. This was no coincidence, and anywhere except here Lester Tenney might have been a great merchant. He had an amazing insight into his customers' exact needs. Nobody had ever had to wait for him to put in a special offer or to bring goods from St. Louis.

A tall man whose gaunt frame made him seem even taller, Tenney was rearranging goods on a shelf when Joe entered. Wispy brown hair fought desperately for a hold on his balding head, but after the first wondering glance few people noticed anything except Lester Tenney's eyes. They were clear and blue, and very deep, and oddly similar to two pieces of clear blue sky. The storekeeper gave Joe a friendly nod and a cheery greeting.

"Good evening, Joe."

"Hi, Les. What's new?"

The storekeeper inclined his head toward a little knot of men gathered under the second lamp at the rear of the store.

"Bibbers Townley came back. For the past hour he has been enchanting we peasants with his adventures in the west."

"So?"

"Go back and listen," Lester Tenney advised. "It's worth it. The way Bibbers tells it, compared to him Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus and Daniel Boone were strict amateurs."

Joe looked with interest toward the men in the rear. Pete Domley, five feet two and taciturn, stood against the pot-bellied stove which, at this season, needed no fire. There were Yancey and Lew Garrow, lean and sun-scorched. Joe saw old Tom Abend, wild Percy Pearl, John Geragty, Fellers Compton, Joab Ferris and Lance Trevelyan. All these men he had known for years, and the years had brought them closer together. Side by side they had fought forest fires, battled to keep rain-swollen creeks within their banks, built a new house or barn for some unfortunate whose building had been destroyed by fire, hunted and fished together. Not one of them was the enemy of any other.

Joe saw them almost as he would have seen his family, and he felt pleased because they were present. His eyes strayed to the young man who sat on the counter, with his right leg cocked nonchalantly over his left knee, and he reflected that Bibbers Townley had changed very little.

Three years ago, then in his late teens, Bibbers had left Tenney's Crossing. But there had been some preliminaries attending his departure.

For days preceding his final farewell he had absented himself. He returned riding a fancy thoroughbred with a new saddle and he had also got hold of two new Colt revolvers and an apparently endless supply of ammunition. For two weeks, the guns prominent on his hips, he had swaggered around announcing to anyone who would listen that no hick town was big enough to hold him. He was, he said, a man of parts and he was going into the west where there was room for men. At the slightest provocation, and sometimes at none, he had drawn either or both of the revolvers and shot at any convenient target.

Joe edged unobtrusively up beside the Garrow brothers and looked with interest at Bibbers Townley. Before Joe was born, settlers had started going west. Four families from Tenney's Crossing had gone, and Joe himself had considered going. But a man didn't pull up stakes and move that easily. At least, he didn't when he had six young ones to think about.

"And how do you think," Bibbers was saying when Joe joined the group, "I got this?"

He held up his right hand so the assembled men could see a white scar running diagonally from the base of his little finger across the palm to the base of his thumb. There was an uncertain silence, and Joe sensed a rising scorn among his friends. He chuckled silently. Tenney had told him that Bibbers had been talking for an hour, and evidently he had also been lying for an hour. But he could still hold his audience partly because he interested them and partly because, never having been west, they could not completely distinguish Bibbers' fact from his fiction. Then,

"You stuck your hand in the church poor box," Percy Pearl said smoothly, "and the parson had left his knife in it. You grabbed the knife instead of the money you thought you'd get."

Hot rage flashed the other's cheeks, and he braced his hands on the counter as though he were about to jump down. Percy Pearl stood cool, unflinching, and Bibbers settled back. Nobody knew how Percy Pearl earned his living. He never worked and he never farmed and he was often gone for long periods. But he always had a good horse and everything else he needed. However, since he never did anything questionable around Tenney's Crossing, it was just as well not to ask questions. Rumors were current that Percy was good with a knife and equally good with a gun, and nobody had any reason to doubt it.

"Do you want," Bibbers blustered, "to make something of it?"

Percy's shrug was cold as ice. "You asked me."

"Shut up, Percy," Lew Garrow urged. "Let him talk."

"Yeah," Fellers Compton seconded. "Let him talk."

"All right," Percy agreed. "Go ahead and talk, Bibbers."

"I got this cut," Bibbers said, sure that he had won an encounter which he had not won at all, "in a fight with Apaches. It was in Arizona territory...."

For a couple of moments Joe listened with great interest to a lurid tale of a battle which Bibbers had had with eight Apaches. He shot six of them, and with the last two it was knife to knife. At that point the story became so absurd that Joe lost himself in his own thoughts.

Bibbers was a liar, had always been one. However, select ten groups of men from ten parts of the country and they would average out about the same. The fact that any part of the country could produce its quota of asinine braggarts was not necessarily a reflection on the country. Joe unleashed himself completely.

Suppose a man owned everything on his land and the land too? He'd still have to work, but he wouldn't have to work until his whole insides tightened into a hard knot, and inner forces built up so tensely that he seemed ready to explode! When things got that bad, if it were not for Elias Dorrance, a man could take an hour and go hunting or fishing or just walking. Would it ever be that bad if land was something between a man and his God, and not between a man and his banker? Would it be bad at all if he knew that his children were going to find opportunities which they could never have here?

Then there was the rest of it; the eternal wondering about the unknown! Wouldn't a man rid himself of that burden if he went to see for himself?

"One time in Sonora," Bibbers Townley was saying, and Joe listened with little interest while Bibbers regaled his audience with another improbable adventure. Joe stared beyond the stove, and saw only the vision that arose in his own mind. He broke into Bibbers' account of what he had done one time in Sonora.

"What about land," he called.

"Land? Land, my friend? Do you want to know how they measure land in the west? I'll tell you."

Immediately he started telling, all about how he had staked out land by riding for three days straight west, then three south, three east, and three north. Finally he came back to the starting point and all the land he'd ridden around was his. Joe spat disgustedly.

"You thinkin' of goin'?" John Geragty asked Joe.

"I've been pondering on it."

"So have I."

Joe slipped away from the group and his feet were light on the starry path. The curtains had parted, at least for the time being, and he had seen the bright promise. He must hurry home at once so he could tell Emma about it too.

---

CHAPTER TWO

The Discussion

For a Moment after Joe had gone, Emma sat silently at the table. She was lonely and a little depressed, as she always was when Joe left her. Even when he went to work his fields in the morning, she looked forward to the noon hour when he would be home for lunch. If he did not care to stop working long enough to come home but wished to eat in the fields instead, Emma carried him a meal whenever she could think of a plausible excuse for so doing. It was not always possible because Barbara insisted on doing it. Emma smiled wistfully. Barbara thought she was saving her mother work when in reality she was robbing her of a privilege.

"What are you smiling about, Mother?" Barbara asked.

"I was thinking of your father."

Barbara looked curiously at her and Emma made no comment. For all her lovely girlhood Barbara was still a child. She must live a few years before she could even hope to understand some things, and it would be futile to try to explain them now. Love was always a fine and beautiful thing, but the quick, fierce passions of youth were only the first flames. The smoldering fires that were fed by years of working and struggling together really welded it so that two, in actuality, did become one. But no young person would ever understand that. Only experience could teach it.

Emma glanced with studied casualness at her lovely daughter. Approaching her fifteenth birthday, for more than a year Barbara had had a large contingent of suitors. All were gawky youths who stumbled over their own feet, never knew what to do with their elbows, and were apt to stutter or stammer when disconcerted. Barbara accepted them with an almost regal poise the while she interested herself seriously in none, and that pleased Emma. She herself had married at sixteen, which was early enough. Emma thought with mingled pity and amusement of Lucy Trevelyan, whose fifteen-year-old Mary had been urged upon every eligible man in the neighborhood and who was now going around a second time. It was more than a question of just getting a man. It had to be the right man and, for Barbara, Emma wanted as much happiness as she had found with Joe.

Emma looked again at her daughter, who was staring dreamily across the table. After a moment, the youngster spoke,

"Why didn't you go to the store with Dad?"

"With all those men!" Emma was half horrified.

Barbara said thoughtfully, "I suppose it would be awkward. But you work very hard, too. If it relaxes Dad to go to the store, it should relax you."

Emma laughed. "I'd be as out of place there as your father would at a sewing bee!"

"When I get married," Barbara said firmly, "I'm going everywhere my husband goes. Everywhere!"

Tad snorted derisively, and left his chair to hone his beloved knife.

"Don't make fun of your sister, Tad."

"I didn't say nothin'," Tad protested.

"'I didn't say anything,'" Emma corrected.

"Yes, Ma."

"Let me hear you say it."

"I didn't say anything," Tad mumbled.

Emma turned from him and the incident had come, passed and was forgotten. She had about her a quality that demanded respect and attention, but which never left a sting.

In passing, Emma sometimes wondered at how much she herself had changed during the years of her marriage. From a gentle girl, much in awe of her father, admiring Joe from a distance and struck quite speechless when he asked her to marry him, she had acquired over the years both firmness and authority in her dealings with the children. Joe loved to play with his children when they were little, and he admired them as they grew older, but when it came to discipline he didn't appear to know how to go about it. With Tad he sometimes exploded, sometimes cuffed his ears and sometimes turned his back in despair. With the others he somehow subtracted himself, so that Emma was left in charge of discipline. Perhaps the trouble was that an ordinary reprimand would have seemed unsuitable to the wonderful creatures he thought them to be. Whatever the reason, over the years Emma had found that while all decisions regarding the children were discussed between Joe and herself, with Joe often playing a larger part than she did in the actual deciding, it was usually Emma alone who had to put the decisions into effect. She smiled ruefully. Nobody, not even Joe—especially not Joe—realized that Emma still had safely hidden away, some of the timidity of her younger years. Within the home, in relation to the children, she was undoubtedly a tower of strength.

Baby Emma slid from her chair to climb upon her mother's lap and lay her head on Emma's shoulder. Emma encircled her with a gentle arm.

She knew that Joe was in awe of Barbara, stood on just about an even footing with Tad, and regarded the other four as lovable, cuddly beings who were still too young to have any real identities of their own. But it was Emma who understood their hearts and, much of the time, their minds.

Proud of Barbara's grace and beauty, she still saw beyond it. Barbara was not, as Joe thought, fragile of body. She did have a generous nature and a delicate, sensitive mind that must either encompass all or reject all. There were times when Emma trembled for her and what the future might do to her. To Emma she was an opening bud, almost ready to bloom, and if blossoms were not tenderly nurtured they faced certain destruction. Emma hoped and prayed that the common sense and almost mature judgment which Barbara was already displaying would come to her aid when she most needed it.

Tad was a reflection of Joe, and yet he was not Joe. Behind Tad's wild impulses and rash acts, Emma saw the man to be. Tad would be a good man, like his father, and Emma knew that she was guilty of no heresy when she hoped that he might be even more capable and talented. Joe himself hoped that. He wanted everything for his children.

Baby Joe was a child of infinite patience. Given a problem, such as a knotted piece of string, he kept doggedly at it until every knot was untied and the string straight. Emma was grateful and happy for him, for she knew that the world never had enough people who were not afraid of problems. One day Joe would be outstanding.

Alfred was the soul of mischief. Quick and alert, he missed no opportunity for fun or pranks. Once, in all innocence, he had offered a present to Barbara and put in her outstretched hand a large black beetle. He had gone into gales of laughter when Barbara, who shrank from all insects, flung the beetle from her. Imaginative, Alfred was forever inventing games that he could play alone or in which all might share.

Carlyle had been born to laughter and an appreciation of the beautiful. From the very first, a bright butterfly, a stray sunbeam, a bit of colored ribbon, a colored leaf, had caught and held his fascinated attention. The first word he'd ever spoken had not been the traditional "mama," but "pretty." Emma treasured him greatly, and there was a tradition in her family that one of her ancestors had painted some of the world's outstanding masterpieces. Though she knew that she would never attempt to dictate the lives of her children, Emma had more than a faint hope that artistic talent would live again in Carlyle.

But it was the raven-haired child in her lap whom Emma cherished just a bit more than the rest. It was not because Emma saw her own image there, but because baby Emma was the sickly one. She was subject to sudden, raging fevers that left her pale and weak. More than once they had despaired of her life. But she had always come through and no night passed that Emma did not offer up a prayer that she would always continue to do so. The child turned to smile sleepily at her mother.

"Time for bed, darling?" Emma coaxed.

"Yes, Mama."

Emma carried her into the living room, put her on a chair and returned to the kitchen to dip a pan of water from a kettle warming on the stove. Tenderly she removed the clothing from baby Emma's fragile little body, washed her daughter, put her night dress on and carried her into bed. She leaned over to kiss the child twice on each cheek and watched her snuggle happily beneath the quilts. This was a ritual that Emma herself must always perform. Barbara could put the other young children to bed, but Emma always had to take care of baby Emma.

Barbara had the giggling Carlyle in her arms when Emma went back into the kitchen. In passing, she patted the child's curly head and started to wash her dishes. Her china was carefully stored in the new cupboard and there it would remain until the children were big enough to respect it. Emma remembered poignantly one of her minor heartbreaks of years ago. The Casper family, departing for the west, had decided that their china was too frail to stand the trip so they'd given it to Emma. It was lovely, delicate ware that had come across an ocean, been used by the Caspers in New York, and brought by them to Missouri.

Emma delighted in its feel, and her heart lifted when she merely looked at it. Often she speculated about its history. It was ancient and expensive, the sort of china wealthy people of good taste would buy. Had it come from some castle in England, or perhaps Spain? Who were the people, now probably long dead, who had made merry over it? Delighted and thrilled, Emma had set the table with it. But Barbara, at the time their only child, was a baby then and she had pushed her cup and plate onto the floor where they shattered.

Emma put the rest away and used her old dishes until they, too, were broken. Joe, always handy with tools, had made her wooden plates, bowls, and cups. He had used hard, seasoned maple, and had worked endlessly with it until it was polished almost to the consistency of china. As each new baby arrived, Joe had made more table ware. They were almost alike, but not exactly so, and Emma had handled and washed them so often that every line in every piece was familiar. She knew by touch which plate, cup, or bowl, belonged to whom, and that gave her a good feeling. Just as it was part of Joe's life to respond intimately to the goodness in new-turned earth, it was part of hers to care for the various things that meant security for her family. Security, to Emma, meant no one big thing but a host of little ones.

She soaked her hands in the warm water, liking the feel of that too, while she washed the dishes with a soapy cloth. Rinsing them in clean water, she stacked them on the table beside her. She did it carefully, meticulously. Wooden dishes could not break, but it was part of her nature to be meticulous and nothing at all was so easy to get that one could afford to be careless with it. Besides, the dishes were precious. Joe had spent long hours, night hours when he could not work in the fields, making and polishing them. Where a less particular man would have called them good enough, Joe had worked on. He did not, he said, want to take the chance of any slivers finding their way into baby mouths.

Barbara brought the pajamaed Carlyle out for his good-night kiss and took him in to bed. She stooped for Alfred. Quick as a deer, he darted behind a chair and made faces at his sister. When Barbara went to the chair, Alfred, howling with glee, ran to his mother and clasped both arms about her. Emma turned to him. She herself was tired, and a bit out of patience, and she spoke more sharply than she ordinarily talked to any of the children.

"Go to bed now, Ally."

"Do' wanna."

"Alfred, go with Barbara!"

Meekly Alfred surrendered himself to Barbara's arms, and was carried into the other room for his bath. Emma shook her head to dislodge a wisp of hair that had fallen over her eye. There were rare occasions when she worried about Alfred too. She imagined that Percy Pearl must have been a great deal like him when he was a baby, and though she liked Percy, she would not want any of her children to imitate his way of life. Like everyone else, she really did not know how Percy lived. But there were rumors, and Emma suspected more. She comforted herself with the thought that there was really nothing to worry about. Thousands of children were mischievous. If all of them turned out badly, the world would be made up largely of bad people.

Emma dried her dishes as carefully as she had washed them and stacked them in the cupboard. She poured her dish water down the drain, an ingenious wooden spout that Joe had also constructed and which led into a cesspool beside the house. Vigorously she began to scrub her table and the wooden sink. In all their years together, except to praise her cooking, Joe had never once commented on the way she kept house. That had been a cause of minor dissension at first. Emma had worked for hours, hand-stitching the new curtains. Proudly she draped the windows, and when Joe came in he didn't even appear to notice. But the years had taught her much.

Joe regarded the house as exclusively her domain and the fields as his, though he always wanted to know what she cared to have in the family vegetable garden and sometimes asked her advice as to what crops he should plant. She warmed to him because he did, for it proved that he respected her. Concerning the house, his very lack of comment was approval. Emma poured clean water into her dish pans and scrubbed them while Barbara brought Alfred in for his kiss and took Joe. Carefully, Emma swept the floor and emptied the trash into the kitchen wastebasket, a hollow stump that Joe had further hollowed and so arranged that it had both a dust-tight bottom and a hinged cover.

Barbara came in with baby Joe, and after Emma kissed him, the girl took him to bed. Barbara re-entered the kitchen.

"Aren't you about finished, Mother?"

"Almost. Tad, take yourself off to bed now."

"Already?" Tad was testing the razor-keen blade of his newly honed knife.

"It's time. Take your bath and go to bed."

"Do I have to take a bath? I swam in the crick today."

"The 'creek,'" Emma corrected firmly. "If you swam you needn't bathe. But go to bed."

"It's too early," he complained.

"Tad!"

"Yes, Ma."

Tad took himself toward the bedroom and emerged, yawning, for his good-night kiss. After he had gone, Emma smiled covertly. Tad, at eight, resented his own childhood fiercely. He was in an almost ferocious rush to grow up so he could avail himself of what, in his own mind, were all the privileges of adulthood. But he still would not go to bed without his mother's kiss.

Emma seated herself at the table for the moment contented to rest. This, for her, was a time of contentment and soul-satisfying joy. She arose to each new day as though it were a complete new challenge that was sure to present its opportunities but might offer hazards, too. But the night always meant peace, and to know that her younger children were safe in bed brought happiness to Emma's heart. Now she knew only a little uneasiness because Joe was still absent. Barbara washed her hands and face, and let her satiny, tawny hair cascade down her shoulders.

"Are we going to the Trevelyans' barn dance Saturday night, Mother?"

"I think so."

"Would you mind very much if I did not go with you?"

Emma glanced curiously at her. "Why not?"

"Well, Johnny Abend asked if he could take me. So did Billy Trevelyan and Allan Geragty. It would be fun if you let me go with one of them."

Emma's eyes sparkled with humor. "And which of the three are you going to honor?"

Barbara wrinkled her nose. "Allan Geragty is a smart aleck. I don't like him."

Emma murmured, "Dear, a choice of only two escorts! Yes, you may go."

"Thank you. I believe I'll set outside for a little while, Mother."

"All right."

Barbara opened the door and closed it quietly behind her. Emma knew that she was going only to look at the stars, and that was good because all young people should have trysts with stars. They might never pull one out of the sky and have it for their own, but they could always try. Emma fell into a mood of sober reflection.

The years had brought her a fair measure of wisdom, and at thirty-two she knew a great deal which she had not known when, at sixteen, she became Joe's wife. Among other things, she knew now that her father had been a martinet. He knew, he thought, the only true way, and all about him must follow or risk his wrath. If Emma regretted any years of her married life, it was the first five when she had insisted that she must not leave her father. But she had honestly known of nothing else that she might do.

Since babyhood she had been under her father's influence, and in his opinion women must always take a secondary place. One by one, as her six older brothers attained their majority, they had quarreled with their father and left home. Then the old man had suffered a series of spasms, and now Emma wondered if they were not simulated spasms designed to keep his last remaining child at his side. But she had loved him and pitied him and remained under his influence. She had brought upon her husband five painful and unproductive years. But those five years had taught Emma the true measure of Joe's worth. In spite of old Caleb's abuse, Joe had given him the fullest help of which a man is capable. He had been in the fields from the first light of morning until the last lingering glow of twilight. And he had waited without a word of complaint until Emma herself was willing to leave. With a fresh surge of love and gratitude she thought about his patient waiting, more difficult for him than for many another. Because he had waited until she was fully ready, she had felt obliged to conceal from him the real anguish she felt when, looking back from the wagon that was carrying them away, she saw Caleb, a strangely shrunken, isolated figure, standing in the doorway of his empty home.

But it was not only pity for Caleb that tore at her. It was that her own roots ran deep, that Caleb's home had been her home for all of her life, that now she and Joe and Barbara had no home at all other than the quarters that would be given to them on the farm where Joe would be working. To be without her own home was a personal agony that she had shared with no one, but it was an agony that had enabled her to save and scrimp and put aside every penny until she could hold out her hands to Joe with enough money in them to buy a place of their own.

Now she held the spare copper lamp base in her hands, and with a soft piece of cloth she rubbed it and rubbed it until she could see mirrored in it the smiling, contented outlines of her own face. For a few precious minutes she dared to hope that, in spite of the troublesome debt, their most difficult years were behind them.

Barbara came in, stifling a yawn with her hand. "I think I'll go to bed too, Mother."

"Are you tired, darling?"

"Lazy, I suppose."

Barbara stooped to pick up a toy wagon—another of Joe's products—that Alfred and Carlyle had left on the floor. She put it in its proper place on a shelf, dipped a pan of water, and bathed herself. Night-dressed, she kissed her mother good night. Emma sat alone.

For eight years she had gone with Joe from farm to farm, where he worked for a house, food, and small wages. But he had always fed and clothed his family, and where other men had given up in despair, taken to drink, or even abandoned their families, Joe had still plodded on. Still, he was more than a plodder. Plodding was his way of making a good from what otherwise would have been a bad situation.

Just as she herself had wanted a home, Joe had wanted his own land, and to be his own master. Together they had worked and saved and sacrificed, until the day came when they were able to realize their ambition. For her it was the end of the journey. She had come home. The foundation of their life was laid. From here on all the work they did would be toward making their home and their land completely their own, forever. Yet she had seen as the year passed that Joe was somehow not content, and thinking about him now, a familiar fear began to tug at her again. She knew the wild fires that flared beneath Joe's placid exterior, and she was at a loss to explain them. The debt against which he fretted so angrily was to her bothersome but surely not intolerable. Bit by bit they would pay it off, and meanwhile they could live comfortably, each year expanding their little home to meet their expanding needs.

She started when she thought she heard his footstep, then sank back in her chair. Five minutes later the door opened quietly and Joe tiptoed in. Emma looked at his flushed cheeks and excited eyes, and for a moment she was startled. Men looked like that when they drank too much, but Joe didn't drink. However, he had surely partaken of some heady draught. Emma asked,

"Are you all right, Joe?"

"Oh sure. I'm all right. I was down at the store. Bibbers Townley's there. He just came back from the west."

He sat beside her, his eyes glowing, and Emma looked wonderingly at him. She had never seen him just this way before.

"Tell me, Joe," she urged.

He blurted, "How would you like to go west?"

A great fist seemed to have closed about her throat, and for a moment she could not breathe. After a time her breath came back, and her voice. But Joe was already going on, leaning forward tensely in his chair, his face eager and alive.

"There's land in the west, Emma! Land for us! For Tad, Joe, Alfred and Carlyle! Land for whoever Barbara and baby Emma might marry! It's for the taking!"

"There's land right here, Joe," she managed to say. "Our own land."

There was quick impatience in his voice as he repeated her words, "Our own land? I'll be able to pay Elias Dorrance $50 this fall, and out of that $40 goes for interest, and $10 off on what we owe."

"Still, it's something," she said hastily. "Ten off is something! Little by little, Joe, we'll make the land our own."

"How many years?" he demanded almost angrily. "How many more years will it take?"

She could not answer him, not only because she did not know the answer but because the question wasn't really a question. It was an accusation. He seemed to be accusing her of unwillingness to see something that was plain enough to Joe, that was right out there in front of them.

He was looking at her now, his whole face full of questioning.

She avoided his eyes. "Let's think about it," she said. "The plowing and seeding's already done for this year. Let's think about it this year, and come next spring we'll talk about it again."

"Come next spring?" he asked vaguely. All of the glow faded from his face. Even his lips grew pale, and in the sudden quiet she could hear his breathing, quick and shallow and weary. He seemed spent, as though all the weariness of many weeks of work had been piled upon him all at once in this moment.

He rose and shuffled to the window. Directly overhead a lone star glittered, cold and unyielding, and he watched it silently.

Emma's heart ached for him, but what could she do? How could he ask her to do this terrible thing, to pull up her roots again and turn her back on all that they had so painfully, so hopefully gathered together into this little house? She couldn't do it, not even for Joe, even though she loved him as dearly as she loved life itself.

She went to him and stood beside him at the window. Soon he put his arm about her. She dropped her head on his shoulder and a shudder went through her, so that she held to him convulsively.

"Forgive me, Joe," she whispered. "I'm not brave and strong the way you think. I'm afraid, Joe. I love this house, and I'm frightened to leave it."

He held her close, and could find no words. A door had been closed between them, somehow, and he could not get through to her, to explain to her about the west. Maybe another year. Maybe....

---

CHAPTER THREE

The Destroyers

Joe was so weary of body and brain that the things he saw shimmered behind a haze that was born of no weather, but in his own mind. He was detached from almost everything, a lone being in a lone world, and the only thread that connected him with anything else was the smooth handle of the ax which he carried in his hand. The ax was real as it could be real only to one who had just spent eleven hours using it. At the same time, and while he reeled with fatigue, Joe counted his blessings.

Now the oats were high and the young corn in tassel. The family vegetable garden was thriving, the hay was not yet ripe enough for the scythe, and there were many more trees to cut on Joe's sixteen acres of timber. Clearing all sixteen acres was a major task and one that Joe didn't even hope to complete for several years because he could work in the timber only when there was nothing else to do. However, he intended to chop and trim many more trees.

He was exhausted, but the restlessness that had possessed him a month earlier was now gone, and for the present he was contented. Preparing the land to grow crops and planting them had been hard work. But now it was finished and when the crops were harvested he would be able to feed his family and livestock through the winter. All the surplus must be sold to satisfy Elias Dorrance. Yet, for the moment Joe harbored no special resentment against him. Bankers were necessary, and Elias had helped Joe when he needed help.

Carefully, as a man who loves good tools will, Joe hung the ax on its wooden pegs in the tool shed, and then took it down again to test both bits with his thumb. An ax had to be razor-sharp, actually capable of shaving, if a man was to do good work with it, and whoever put a tool away in good shape would find it in the same shape when he needed it again. Joe found the ax so sharp that he must have honed it after felling the last tree. He grinned; he was more tired than he'd thought because he couldn't remember sharpening the ax.

He leaned against the tool shed's wall, giving himself to the luxury of doing nothing at all. He watched Barbara, serene and lovely, going toward the pig pen with a pail of swill and he knew a moment's sheer pleasure. He gave no thought to the incongruity of the scene, that anyone should be able to look graceful while feeding pigs, but felt only delight because he saw something lithe and beautiful.

Joe yawned. He had been very wakeful last night. Lying beside Emma, he had watched the moon wane and the first faint streaks of dawn creep like stealthy thieves out of the sky. Only then had he gone to sleep, and soon afterward it had been time to get up and go to work again.

He went to the well, drew a bucket of water, and washed his face and hands. Instead of going to the store tonight he would go to bed after the evening meal. The empty swill pail in hand, Barbara came to stand beside him and her slim figure was bent slightly backward, as though by a mysterious wind created by her own spirit.

She said, "You look tired."

"Now don't you fret your head about me!"

She smiled. "I will if I want to. How did it go today?"

"Good enough. How are the pigs?"

"Eleanor," Barbara said seriously, "keeps shoving Horace out of the trough. She won't let him eat."

Joe said dryly, "Eleanor has the manners of a pig, huh?"

She laughed, and Joe looked at her red-stained fingers. He knew without being told that Barbara, and probably all the rest except the babies, Alfred and Carlyle, had spent at least a part of their day gathering wild berries. Plucking and preserving wild fruit was a job the women folk and youngsters could do, and it was inevitable as summer itself. Joe fell back on a stock question,

"Where's Tad?"

"He went off in the woods by himself."

"Didn't he help you?"

"Oh yes. Mother made him."

Joe grinned inwardly. Emma seldom raised her voice to any of the youngsters and she never struck any of them. But somehow she managed prompt and unquestioning obedience to any order she issued, and that was more than Joe could do. There was about his wife a mysterious force which was always recognizable, but which Joe could not explain. It was strange, he reflected in passing, that this force did not carry over into anything outside the immediate family. It was strange that the thought of leaving the house should be so fearsome when in other respects Emma was so sure of herself. But he brushed the thought aside, as he had brushed it aside each time it came to plague him.

Joe entered the house and kissed Emma, and for the moment his weariness lifted. He wrinkled his nose.

"Something smells good!"

"Raspberry preserves. We'll try some tomorrow, but we can't now because it isn't done. We found good picking; some of those berries were as big as my thumb."

A black kettle in which simmered the fruits gathered that day was pushed toward the back of the stove. Spicy odors filled the room, and Joe knew that, when snow lay deep on the ground, Emma would bring her jams, jellies and preserves from the shelves where she kept them and they would be a little bit of the summer back again. Joe remembered the delights of winter morning feasts when all had spread pancakes a quarter inch thick with jam, and he smacked his lips.

The four younger children, their hands stained like Barbara's, rushed toward him and he braced himself to meet their charge. The youngsters hadn't anyone except one another to play with and they always looked forward to his arrival. He plumbed his brain for a story to tell them or a little play to act out. Then Emma turned from the stove and spoke to the children:

"Your horses are trampling everything in the house and I won't have it. Tie them up again."

The happy youngsters returned to the game, obviously a game of horses that they had been playing, and Joe felt a swelling gratitude. It would be nice to rest, and Emma had known it. At the same time he felt a vast admiration for his wife; she had relieved him of any more responsibility without offending the children. It went to prove all over again what Joe had always suspected; for all their supposed fragility, and despite the fact that they were allegedly the weaker sex, women had strength and power about which men knew nothing. Strength and power, that is, when it came to dealing with their children. Regarding other things, though, such as making a sensible move in a sensible direction—but again he brushed the thought aside. He sank into a chair, and with a real effort managed to keep from going to sleep.

"How was it today?" Emma asked.

"I had a good day."

All things considered, he had had a good day. There was much about ax work that he enjoyed. An ax in the hands of a man who knew how to use it ceased to be a mere tool and became a precision instrument. To an ax man, an ax was much like a good rifle to a hunter.

"Are you going to cut more trees?" Emma asked.

"I'll work in the timber until the hay needs cutting."

That was all they said but that was all they had to say because the rest fell into a precise pattern. When the trees were felled and trimmed some would be split into rails for rail fences and the rest used for firewood. As soon as snow eliminated the danger of forest fire the brush would be burned. That was always a minor festival. The whole family turned out for the brush burning. The children watched, fascinated, while leaping flames climbed skyward through crackling branches. Then, while Joe raked the unburned branches together and fired them, Tad and baby Emma built a snow man or a snow fort for the delectation of the rest. It usually ended with Emma and Barbara serving a lunch beside still-glowing coals and Joe always saved enough branches so everyone could have a dry seat.

Emma went to the door and called "Tad!" and as though the eight-year-old were on some invisible leash that attached himself to his mother, he appeared out of the lowering night. His seal-sleek hair proved that he had already washed at the well, but no mere water could suffice for Tad now. His face and arms were laced with deep gashes from which blood was again beginning to ooze, and there were fang marks on his upper forearms.

Joe said in astonishment, "What the dickens happened to you?"

"I caught a wildcat!" Tad said gleefully. "Caught him right in a snare I set myself!"

"Don't you know better than to fool around with wildcats?"

"It's only a little one," Tad said, as though that explained everything. "Not hardly big enough to chew anything yet. Got him in the barn, I have. I'm goin' to tame him."

"Get rid of him," Joe ordered.

"Aw, Pa!"

Joe was inflexible, "Get rid of him now! One thing we don't need around here, it's a wildcat!"

He caught up a lantern, lighted it, and with Tad trotting protesting at his heels, stamped out to the barn. The wildcat had already seen to its own liberation. Tad had put him in one of the mules' feed boxes, covered it with a board, and weighted the board with a rock. The imprisoned cat had worked the board free and slipped away.

"Blast his ornery hide!" Tad ejaculated.

Joe said sternly, "What's that you said?"

"You say it."

"So you can too, huh? Get this, don't let me ever again hear you say anything that even sounds like a cuss word. And no more wildcats."

"It was only a little one."

"You heard me!"

Tad's face was stubborn, a little sullen. For a moment he said nothing and Joe repeated,

"You heard me!"

"Yes, Pa."

Joe lighted their way back to the house, blew the lantern out before he entered and hung it on a wooden peg. The gesture was automatic, and brought about by a lifetime of necessarily frugal living. One never stinted his family, himself, or his animals, in that order, on food. But one never wasted anything at all that cost money. Though the circuit-riding Reverend Haines often thundered to those of his flock who lived in Tenney's Crossing that money was the root of all evil, Joe had never believed that. Money was simply the hardest of all things to come by.

For once hardly savoring the food—and Emma had an almost magic touch with the plainest of viands—Joe ate because it was necessary to eat. Only vaguely was he aware of Barbara's keeping a watchful eye on the chattering younger children; of Tad, sullenly disappointed and still rebellious but not letting that interfere with his always prodigious appetite. He seemed closest to Emma, in whom everything else always seemed to center, and he knew that she was watching him while she worried about him. Before very long he would be asleep.

The youngsters slid from their chairs and went back to the bits of string they had been playing with. Obviously, for the time being, Emma's sadirons were horses because they were all tied at different places around the room. They wouldn't need him tonight, and Joe excused himself.

"Reckon I'll go see if the sky's still in place."

He rose from the table and stepped outside into the pleasant summer night. There was only blackness, unrelieved by any hint of moon or star light. Tad's dog came to wag a welcoming tail and sniff, and even while Joe petted the dog he thought that Mike wouldn't herd stock and he wouldn't hunt except with Tad. Therefore, in a land where everything had to earn its keep, he was useless. But young ones had to have something and Tad liked his pet largely, Joe suspected, because Mike could whip any other dog, or any other two dogs, in the whole country.

Joe breathed his fill of the night air, went back into the house, and for a few moments idly watched his four younger children at their play. Emma and Barbara were doing the dishes and, with a trace of sullenness still lingering about him, Tad sat at the table cutting a new sheath for his knife. Joe leaned against the door jamb and drowsed for a second. He seemed to be back in Tenney's store, listening to tales of unlimited land and unlimited opportunity in the west, and he saw his children with those opportunities before them. Joe shook himself awake.

He felt numb with fatigue as he took off his clothes and methodically hung them up. Though there were nights when he liked to stay late with the men at Tenney's store, tonight sleep was more inviting. But for a few minutes he lay wide awake and he knitted his brows because he was troubled about something. However, it was nothing he could clearly define and after a while Joe forced it from his mind. As soon as he did, he fell into a sound slumber. When he awakened, gray dawn again lingered behind the curtains with which Emma had draped the windows. Not for another three quarters of an hour would the rising sun change the gray to gold, and for a few moments Joe knew sheer contentment. Restful slumber had driven away the exhaustion and physical aches of the night before. Beside him, Emma still slept soundly.

Then, out in the lightening morning, Tad's dog barked. Emma came slowly awake, and turned to smile at him.

"Good morning."

"Good morning, darling."

He moved a little nearer, feeling the warmth of her body against his. Joe remembered his youth and bachelor days as a somewhat fruitless period, and he had not reached fulfillment until his marriage. Their life had never been easy. But it had always been good and this was one of the best parts of every day. For a little while they could be together in complete idleness, each happy because the other was near. They were rested and refreshed, ready to cope with the problems, big and small, that the day might bring. But in the morning, just before they arose, the big problems seemed small, and the small ones trifling.

"What's the dog barking at?" Emma asked drowsily.

"He's probably found a varmint out in the field. I'll go see. You rest a while yet."

Joe slipped out of bed, stretched luxuriously, stripped off his night shirt and put on his clothes. He went to the door, swung it open and stared stupidly at what he saw.

A rangy black steer stood in the center of the trampled corn patch, chewing placidly on a stalk of corn that projected like a green stick from its mouth. A herd of varicolored cows and steers were foraging listlessly or switching tails in what remained of the oat field. The vegetable garden lay in ruins. Though most of the cattle had filled their stomachs and were now contented to digest the rich fare they had eaten, a few calves and yearlings were still cropping eagerly at anything green that remained.

Joe's immediate reaction was a vast weakness, as though his body were no longer a solid thing but a liquid mass. He wilted like a melting candle, everything that had gone to make him suddenly dissolved, and only the feeble flame of a sputtering wick remained to prove that there ever had been anything else. Then he braced himself and fought back.

His whole life had been a struggle, with the odds tremendously against him. He'd been close to the breaking point only a month ago, when the desire to go west had swept around him like a flame, and he'd been forced to blot it out and forget it. Forgetting it had left him curiously empty and deflated. But he'd pulled himself together and knuckled down to the job of making this crop a good one. Now the crop lay before him, destroyed. A seething anger began slowly to gather in Joe's chest, and he held on to the doorframe to steady himself.

Emma appeared at his shoulder, and when he looked at her Joe saw that her face was pale. She said nothing but her comforting arm slipped about him. Joe said inanely,

"They're Pete Domley's cattle."

"I know."

Joe exploded, "I'll—!"

He wheeled, went back into the bedroom, and took the rifle from the pegs where he had hung it. His brain was on fire, so that priming and loading the weapon were mechanical functions which he knew nothing about but which he did well because he had done them so often. Not seeing anything else, aware only that destroyers had come to take that which rightly belonged to Joe's family, he leaned against the door jamb and took careful aim at the black steer. His finger tightened on the trigger when Emma's voice cut through the red mists that seethed in his brain.

"No, Joe!"

She looked almost ill, but there was desperation in her words that was far more effective than any physical barrier. She spoke again.

"It is not the way."

The red rage that flamed in his brain burned less hotly. He lowered the gun so that its stock rested on the floor, and looked from her to the destroying cattle. Then sanity reasserted itself. He put the rifle back on its pegs and said dully,

"I'll drive them away."

Joe strode toward the cattle with Tad's dog at his heels. He was well aware that it was futile to drive the raiders away for there was no more damage to be done. Yet he knew that the cattle did not belong where they were, and since there was no one else to chase them, he must.

The rangy black steer in the corn patch looked at him with mildly surprised eyes as Joe approached. He caught up a fallen corn stalk, slashed viciously at the animal's rump, and the steer galloped off to join those in the oat field. A blocky white and black cow with a calf at her heels bolted toward the end of the field and the rest followed. They crowded clumsily through the hedge that marked the boundary of Joe's land and went back into their pasture. There they all stopped to look, as though telling him that they knew they'd done wrong but informing him that they had a right to be where they were. When Joe did not pursue them any farther, the cattle wandered toward their water hole and Joe noted mechanically that there were many more than there had been. Pete had several herds which he kept in different pastures. Probably, guided by the mysterious senses which animals possess and which no man can explain, one or more of the other herds had come to join the cattle Pete kept here and together they had organized the raid.

Joe tossed his head furiously, and the veins in his head and neck were so taut that they stood out and throbbed visibly. The old restlessness returned with a force so overwhelming that it was almost impossible to resist it. He felt himself grow huge, and it seemed that if he took a step in one direction he would be right among the marauding cattle. A step in the other direction would be sure to bring him face to face with Elias Dorrance. There was no place to take his family where they would not be hemmed in and preyed upon by something. Unaccountably he thought of that night when he had walked to Tenney's store and looked at the stars that never shouldered each other aside. Joe voiced his explosive thoughts to the startled dog:

"This place is just too blasted small!"

The dog at his heels, Joe walked back to the house. Crushing disappointment was a luxury, and he had never been able to afford luxuries. And the past was forever lost, and now this belonged to the past. The fields could be plowed and planted again, and with luck the crops would mature before frost killed them.

Joe looked at Emma, still standing mutely in the doorway, and a hot knife turned in his heart. She seemed, with her eyes, to be asking him for forgiveness. If they'd gone west when he wanted to go, they wouldn't be faced now with the destruction of the whole summer's work. He could see in Emma's eyes the fear that things would get even worse than they were, that the new crop that Joe would start to plant now might be lost just as the present crop was already lost, and that they would go into the winter with no money, no feed for the animals, no provisions for the family.

He groped for words to comfort her, and could think of only,

"I chased them. Everything's all right now."

"I—I'm terribly sorry, Joe." Her voice trembled.

"Now don't you go fretting your head! I'll get new crops in!"

She said uncertainly, "It's very late for new crops."

He forced what he hoped was a careless laugh, and wished he hadn't done so because she knew it was forced. Joe berated himself silently. Above all he wanted to soothe, to spare her, and there was no way. Their crops, their livelihood, was gone. It was more than a serious situation. It was a desperate one and she knew it as well as he did, but he tried.

"Now just don't you fret. Everything's all right."

She said, "Don't tell me that, Joe."

Though it was morning, with the day scarcely started, she turned tiredly to the stove. Joe sat down to await the meal she would give him. This was summer. Their ham, bacon, sausage, and other smoked meats, had long since been exhausted. Not until the advancing season brought weather cold enough to keep meat would they have any except the wild things they shot. Expertly, Emma mixed milk with eggs and scrambled them in a skillet. She laid slices of homemade bread on the stove until they toasted, and lathered the toast thickly with home-churned butter.

Flushed with sleep, Barbara emerged from the room where she slept with her sister and went outside to the well. When she came back, freshly washed, she had seen the havoc wrought by the cows. She looked at her mother's face, and at her father's, and was tactfully silent. She was young and healthy, and, in spite of the disaster, she looked radiant, and for some reason that he could not explain, Joe felt better. Elemental himself, he thought of elemental things. Though he could not have explained it, part of the awe Barbara inspired in him sprang from the fact that she was a lovely young woman in whom, symbolically, all the hope of the future lay. Certainly, without her, there could be no future. Joe started eating the heaping plate of scrambled eggs and toast that Emma gave him, and he was half through his meal when there was a timid knock at the door.

Joe said, "Come in."

The door opened and Pete Domley stood framed within it. Somehow he seemed to have shrunk to half his small stature, as though he were a dwarf that had come begging. His eyes were red from lack of sleep, and blue bags were pendant beneath them. Through the open door, Joe caught a glimpse of the white horse Pete had ridden here. For a second Joe's anger flared anew; if Pete had watched his cattle the crops would not be ruined. Pity for this small man who was usually as aggressive as a bantam rooster, but who now was so abject, stole Joe's anger. He said,

"Have some breakfast, Pete."

Pete came through the door, a slow and tired man. He said, "Lance Trevelyan told me last night they'd gone, Joe. They left their pasture on Twoaday Crick and just went. You can't always figure what critters will do."

Joe said, "I know."

"I thought sure," Pete said, "that they'd head for the high pastures above Twoaday. I looked there until almost sun-up."

"So?"

"So I'll pay you, Joe. You or Elias Dorrance, whichever way you want it."

Joe repeated, "Have some breakfast, Pete."

Pete sat down and Emma served him. Joe ate without speaking, and he watched Pete devour his breakfast listlessly. Beef in St. Louis brought fantastic prices, and probably in eastern cities it brought prices even more fabulous. Joe didn't know. He did know that the man who raised that beef on the hoof, and who was the primary provider of the markets, didn't get the most money. Pete, with seven young ones of his own, worked hard. Often he worked much for very little return.

Besides, Pete had ridden all night to find his missing cattle. Finally realizing the truth, he must have looked for them at other farms before he came to see Joe. No man could possibly ask more than that from any other man, and who knew what a fool steer would decide to do? The most a person looking for cattle in the black of night could do was guess, and if the guess went wrong, what then? Pete Domley hadn't eaten or trampled Joe's oats, corn, and vegetables. Pete's cattle had. There was, Joe felt, no more sense in crucifying Pete than there had been in nailing Christ to the Cross. Pete finished his breakfast, and after a moment's silence he said,

"Who'll I pay, Joe? You or Elias?"

"Neither, Pete."

Pete said stubbornly, "What's right is right."

"Look, you buy me some more seed and let it go at that."

Pete opened surprised eyes. "You going to plant again?"

"What else?"

"Well—You know where I live and the money will be there when you go to plant."

Pete mounted his tired horse and rode homeward. Moodily, with mingled pity and sadness, Joe watched him go. Pete wasn't really to blame. But he felt that he was. He had, however unwittingly, dealt mortal injury to his very good friend and that thought would forever haunt him.

Joe wandered out to his own ravaged fields, and as soon as he was in them he confirmed what he had known anyway. In the oat patch, a few bruised stalks strove valiantly to raise battered heads toward the sun. The corn was ruined and the vegetable garden was gone. What remained was not one twentieth of what was needed.

Joe caught the mules and evaded their striking feet and slicing teeth as he fought them into harness. Having run free for four days, the mules were not inclined to work again. But they had to work, for the man who commanded them was stronger than they. They plunged and reared when the harness was buckled about them, and kicked and squealed when they were once fastened to the plow. That was all they could do.

Joe guided the plow down the first long, straight furrow, and even as he did he assured himself that the second crop of oats would be better than the first for the second would feed on the bodies of the first. Joe reversed his mutinous team to start the second furrow, and when he came to the end it seemed, quite unaccountably, that the day should also be ended. Then he looked at the scarcely risen sun and knew that it had not yet started.

He steered the mules down another furrow, and angered more at himself than at them, jerked hard on the reins. The plow had gone a bit to one side, so that instead of being in rhythm with all the rest, the furrow curved away from them. Joe stopped and passed a hand over his sweating forehead. Twenty years or more ago his father had whipped him unmercifully for plowing a crooked furrow. From then until now he had never plowed one.

Joe turned the mules and straightened the furrow so that it matched the rest. From that time on, in order not to repeat the error, he had to watch himself and that made plowing twice the work. With an exhaustion equal to—maybe greater than—last night's, Joe saw the first long shadows of evening.

For the first time, rather than providing a refuge from problems, his house seemed to admit them with him. There was no peace and none of the calm that paid for a day's work. When dinner was over, the almost electric restlessness that tormented him mounted to supercharged heights.

"Do you know what?" he said fiercely, "I wish we could go to a good hoedown tonight! A real rip-snorter with everything in it!"

"Go down to the store and find out when the next one is and where," Emma urged. "I wouldn't mind going to a party myself."

Joe walked down the path toward the store, and in his mind, as he walked, he tried to create some of the camaraderie he would know when he reached it. He could not.

The sky might as well have been nonexistent, and he was scarcely conscious of the cool night air fanning his cheek. It was not Elias alone. It was not his ruined crops alone. It was more that he couldn't stretch without bumping someone else's ribs. Unless a person had enough money to start with, or was exceptionally lucky, he was lost here. It was not the way to live and certainly it was not the way for his family to live. Mechanically Joe strode toward the store and he was on the point of entering when a man moved toward him.

"Hi, Joe," Elias Dorrance said.

"Hi."

"I heard," said the other, "that you lost your crops."

Joe waited an interminable moment, until it occurred to him that, by now, everyone must have heard it. Then he said, "That's right."

Elias Dorrance asked, "What will you do now?"

"Plant more crops."

"The frost will get them."

"That's a chance I take."

"I'm sorry," Elias said. "I'm really sorry, and I know you're worried about me. You don't have to worry. You're a good farmer and a man of your word, and you're honest. I'll take another note until next fall."

"On what?" Joe asked.

Elias Dorrance's shrug was half seen in the night. "Your mules, your harness, your wagon, your livestock, your household goods. You can cover it."

For a moment Joe stood blankly, the offer not even registering. Then a slow anger that mounted by leaps and bounds grew within him.

He'd been overwhelmed when Emma gave him the $600 and told him that, at last, he could have his farm. He still could not understand how she had saved such a vast sum; Joe had never earned $600 in any one year. But every penny of it, everything they had, represented the combined sweat and toil, and almost the life's blood, of Emma and himself. Joe thought of Nick Johnson.

He, too, had had a farm financed by Elias and he'd lost a crop. The next year he lost another, and Elias had taken everything except the clothes the Johnsons wore on their backs. Now hopeless and defeated, Nick Johnson was again a hired man and his courage was so broken that he never would be anything else. Joe thought of Emma's cherished household goods, the few things his children owned, of the mules, the cows, everything upon which Elias had no claim. For a moment he had a savage urge to smash his fist into the banker's face, and Elias must have sensed it for he took a backward step. Joe bit his words off and spat them out,

"Elias, you can take a long running jump into the nearest duck pond."

Without looking back and without entering the store, he turned and strode through the darkness toward his house. A man who turned his back on the land almost turned his back on God too. But one who risked everything his family had was not a man at all. Joe entered the house. Emma was sewing at the table and she looked up, and concern flooded her eyes.

"Was there nobody at the store?"

"I didn't go. I met Elias."

Emma waited expectantly. For a short space Joe strode up and down the floor. Then he turned to face her.

"Elias offered to carry us another year. All he wants is a mortgage on everything that isn't already mortgaged to him."

Emma gaped, and Joe said quickly, "I told him to—I told him no."

She half rose out of her chair. "Joe, maybe you should have—"

"No!" he interrupted almost fiercely. "I won't do it! We're in debt as far as we're ever going to be! Some things will remain ours!"

There was a short silence while both pursued their own thoughts. Emma turned a worried face to him.

"Do you think you can make another crop?"

Joe looked at Emma and then he looked beyond her. Outside the night was black, but in his mind's eye he could clearly see the ravaged fields. In his muscles he could feel the ache of the plowing and the planting of the new crop. In the pit of his stomach he could already feel the pain and rage that he would feel if the new crop should be destroyed by frost.

Emma waited, and then she got to her feet with an anxious haste. "Pete Domley will pay for the seed, Joe. Barbara and I can help with the planting."

Now suddenly he didn't want to comfort her any more, nor to bolster up her hopes about the new crop. This was a time for facing facts.

"Emma," he said, and his lips felt dry and tight with the effort to control himself. "Emma, there's free land for the taking in the west."