At breakfast, his wife ate sullenly, refusing to be drawn into the conversation, but by a wise compression of her lips and a flicker of amusement in her eyes, which seemed to say: "Oh, if only you could see how absurd you appear," she contrived very cleverly to render Martin miserably self-conscious. Hampered by this new and unexpected feeling, his attempts to be pleasant fell flat and he lapsed into his old grimness, while Rose, eating quickly, confined her remarks to her determination to go to town in search of a job. Had Martin not talked as he had to his wife he would have been able, undoubtedly, to disregard her and to continue the line of chatter which he had hit upon so happily and which he had never suspected was in him. But the fact, not so much that she knew, but that from this vantage point of knowledge she was ridiculing him, was too much for even his self-possession. It made the light banter impossible. Especially, as there was no doubt that Rose did not seem anxious for it.

For Martin had not been the only member of that household who had held early communion with himself. The girl had sat long and dreamily at her dressing table—the dainty one of rich, dark mahogany that Uncle Martin's thoughtfulness had provided. It seemed unbelievable, but there was no use pretending she was mistaken—Uncle Martin, Aunt Rose's husband, was falling in love with her. She felt a little heady with the excitement of it. He was so different from the callow youths and dapper fellows who had heretofore worshipped at her shrine. There was something so imposing, so important about him. She was conscious that a man so much older might not appeal to many girls of her age, but it so happened that he did appeal to her. She would be able to have everything she wished, too—didn't she know how good, how kind, how tender he could be. And her heart yearned toward him—he was so clearly misunderstood, unhappy. But what about Aunt Rose? Well, then, why had she let herself get to be so ugly? She looked as if the greases of her own kitchen stove had cooked into her skin, thought the girl, mercilessly. Didn't she know there was such a thing as a powder puff? Women like that brought their own troubles upon themselves, that's what they did. And she was an old prude, too. Anyone could see with half an eye that she didn't like the idea of Uncle Martin learning to dance—why, she didn't even like his getting the Victrola—when it was just what both he and Bill had been wanting. But for all that she was her aunt, her own mother's sister and, poor dear, she was a good soul. It would probably upset her awfully and besides, oh well, it just wasn't right.

Before her mirror Rose blushed furiously, quite ashamed of the light way in which she had been leading Uncle Martin on. "But I haven't said one solitary thing auntie couldn't have heard," she justified herself. Oh, well, no harm had been done. But she mustn't stay here, that was certain. She wouldn't say so, or hurt their feelings, for she wanted to be on the best of terms with them always, but she would stop flirting with Uncle Martin and just turn him back into a dear good friend. She hoped she was clever enough to do that much. And the dark-brown curls received a brushing that left no doubt of the vigor of her decisions.

She insisted that she go to Fallon that morning.

"I've been here eight whole days, Uncle Martin," she announced firmly, "eight whole days and haven't tried to get a thing. It's terrible, isn't it, Aunt Rose, how lazy I am. I'm going to have Bill take me in right straight after breakfast."

"If you're so set on it, I'll see about your position this afternoon," conceded Martin reluctantly. "We'll drive in in the car."

"Oh, Uncle Martin," she coaxed innocently, "let me try my luck alone first. Bill can tell me who the different men are and if I know he's waiting for me outside in the buggy, it will keep me from being scared." And her young cousin, only too pleased with the proposed arrangement, chimed in with: "That's the stuff, Rose. Folks have got to go it on their own, to get anywhere."

By evening she had a position in an insurance agent's office with wages upon which she could live with fair decency. As it had rained all day and her employer wanted her to begin the next morning, she had the best possible excuse for renting a room in Fallon and asking Bill to ride in horseback with some things which she would ask Aunt Rose, over the telephone, to pack. It rained all the next day, too, and Sunday, when she met Mrs. Wade and Bill at church, she told them she had some extra typing she had promised to do by Monday. "No, auntie, this week it is really and truly just impossible, but next week—honest and true!" she insisted as the older woman seconded rather impersonally her son's urgent invitation to chicken and noodles.

Soon winter was upon them in good earnest, and Rose's visits "home," as she always called it, were naturally infrequent. By Christmas time, she was receiving attentions from Frank Mall, Nellie's second son, a young farmer of twenty-five.

To Mrs. Wade's everlasting credit, she never twitted Martin with this, although she knew it from Rose's own lips, a month before he heard of it through Bill. She was too grateful for their narrow escape to feel vindictive and might have convinced herself they had merely endured a bad nightmare if it had not been for the shiny Victrola; the sight of it underscored the whole experience and she wished there were some way to get rid of the thing, a wish that was echoed even more fervently by Martin. In the evenings they would sit around the cleared supper table, she doing odd jobs of mending, Martin reading, checking up the interest dates on his mortgages or making entries in his account book, while Bill at his books, would study to the accompaniment of record after record, blissfully unconscious of what a thorn in the flesh he and his music were to both his parents.

It was all so unpleasant. To Mrs. Wade it brought up pictures. And it made Martin feel sheepish—the way he had felt that afternoon, decades ago, as he sat in the bakery eating a chocolate ice-cream soda and watching her walk across the Square. He would have told Bill to quit playing it—more than once the sharp words were on his tongue—but memories of the enthusiasm he had evinced the night he brought it home kept him silent. He was afraid of what the boy might say, afraid he might put two and two together, so he let it stay, although with his usual caution he had arranged for a trial and would have felt justified in packing it back as soon as the roads had permitted. Illogically, he felt it was all Bill's fault that he must endure this annoyance.

That fall, the boy started to high school in Fallon, making the long daily ride to and from town on horseback. He was a good pupil and the hours he spent with his lessons were precious; they made the farm drift away. To his mind, which was opening like a bud, it seemed that history was the recorded romance of men who were everything but farmers. School books told fascinating stories of conquerors, soldiers, inventors, writers, engineers, kings, statesmen and orators. He would sit and dream of the doers of great deeds. When he read of Alexander the Great, Bill was he. He was Caesar and Napoleon, Washington and Lincoln, Grant and Edison and Shakespeare. When railroads were built in the pages of his American History, it was Bill, himself, no less, who was the presiding genius. His imagination constructed and levelled, and rebuilt and remade.

One beautiful November afternoon, in his Junior year, at the sound of the last bell, which usually found him cantering out of town, he went instead to the school reading-room, and, sitting down calmly, opened his book and slowly read. The clock ticked off the seconds he was stealing from his father; counted the minutes that had never belonged to Bill before, but which now tasted like old wine on the palate. He cuddled down, lost to the world until five o'clock, when the building was closed. He left it only to march down a few blocks to the town's meager library, where another hour flew past. Gradually an empty feeling in his middle region became increasingly insistent, and briefly exploring his pockets, Bill decided upon a restaurant where he bought a stew and rolls for fifteen cents. Never had a supper tasted so satisfying. After it, he strolled around the town, feeling a pleasant warmth in his veins, a springiness to his legs, a new song in his heart. It was so good to be free to go where he pleased, to be his own master, if only for a stolen hour, to keep out of sight of a cow or a plow. He wondered why he had never done this before.

It was youth daring Fate, without show or bravado or fear; rolling the honey under his tongue and drawing in its sweetness; youth, that lives for the moment, that can be blind to the threatening future, that can forget the mean past; youth slipping along with some chewing-gum between his teeth and a warm sensation in his stew-crammed stomach, whistling, dreaming, happy; youth, that can, without premeditation, remain away from home and leave udders untapped and pigs unfed; sublime enigma; angering bit of irresponsibility to the Martins of a fiercely practical world. Bill was that rare kind of boy who could pull away from the traces just when he seemed most thoroughly broken to the harness.

It was ten o'clock before he got his pony out of the livery barn and started for home. Even on the way, he refused to imagine what would happen. He entered the house quietly, as though to tell his father that it was his next move, and setting his bundle of books on a chair, he glanced at his mother. She was at the stove, where an armful of kindling had been set off to take the chill out of the house. She looked at him mysteriously, as though he were a ghost of some lost one who had strayed in from a graveyard, but she said nothing. Bill did not even nod to her. He fumbled with his books, as though to keep them from slipping to the floor when, quite obviously, they were not even inclined to leave the chair. Rose let her eyes fall and then slide, under half-closed lids, until they had Martin in her view. She looked at him appealingly, but he was staring at a paper which he was not reading. He had been in this chair for two hours, without a word, pretending to be studying printed words which his mind refused to register. Martin had done Bill's share of the chores, with unbelief in his heart. He had never imagined such a thing. Who would have thought it could happen—a son of his!

His wife broke the silence with:

"What happened, Billy? Were you sick?"

"No, mother, I wasn't sick."

Martin was still looking at his paper, which his fists gripped tightly.

"Then you just couldn't get home sooner, could you? Something you couldn't help kept you away, didn't it?"

Bill shook his head slowly. "No," he answered easily. "I could have come home much sooner."

"Billy, dear, what DID happen?" She was beginning to feel panicky; he was courting distress.

"Nothing, mother. I just felt like staying in the reading-room and reading—"

"Oh, you HAD to do some lessons, didn't you! Miss Roberts should have known better—"

"I didn't have to stay in—I wanted to."

Martin still kept silent, his eyes looking over the newspaper wide open, staring, the muscles of his jaw relaxed. The boy was quick to sense that he was winning—the simple, non-resistance of the lamb was confounding his father.

"I wanted to stay. I read a book, and then I took a walk, and then I dropped in at the restaurant for a bite, and then I walked around some more, and then I went to a movie."

"Billy, what are you saying?"

Martin, slowly putting down his paper, remarked without stressing a syllable:

"You had better go to bed, Bill; at once, without arguing."

Bill moved towards the parlor, as though to obey. At the door he stopped a moment and said: "I wasn't arguing; I was just answering mother. She wanted to know."

"She does not want to know."

"Then I wanted her to know that I don't intend to work after school any more. I'll do my chores in the morning, but that's all. From now on nobody can MAKE me do anything."

"I am not asking you to do anything but go to bed."

"I don't intend to come home tomorrow afternoon until I'm ready. Or any afternoon. And if you don't like it—"

"Billy!" his mother cried; "Billy! go to bed!"

The boy obeyed.

Bill was fifteen when this took place. The impossible had happened. He had challenged the master and had won. Even after he had turned in, his father remained silent, feeling a secret respect for him; mysteriously he had grown suddenly to manhood. Martin was too mental to let anger express itself in violence and, besides, strangely enough, he felt no desire to punish; there was still the dislike he had always felt for him—his son who was the son of this woman, but though he would never have confessed aloud the satisfaction it gave him, he began to see there was in the boy more than a little of himself.

"Poor Billy," his mother apologized; "he's tired."

"He didn't say he was tired—"

"Then he did say he was tired of working evenings."

"That's different."

"Yes, it's different, Martin; but can you make him work?"

"No, I don't intend to try. He isn't my slave."

With overwhelming pride in her eyes, pride that shook her voice, she exclaimed: "Not anybody's slave, and not afraid to declare it. Billy is a different kind of a boy. He doesn't like the farm—he hates it—"

"I know."

"He loathes everything about it. Only the other day he told me he wished he could take it and tear it board from board, and leave it just a piece of bleak prairie, as it was when your father brought you here, Martin."

"You actually mean he said he would tear down what took so many years of work to build? This farm that gives him a home and clothes and feeds him?"

"He did, Martin. And he meant it—there was hatred burning in his eyes. There's that in his heart which can tear and rend; and there's that which can build. Oh, my unhappy Billy, my boy!"

"Don't get hysterical. What do you want me to do? Have I said he must work?"

"No, but you have tried to rub it into his soul and it just can't be done. You're not to be blamed for being what you are, nor is Billy—I'll milk his cows."

"I'm not asking that."

"But I will, Martin."

"And let him stand by and watch you?"

"Put it that way if you will. Billy must get away from here. I see that now."

"I haven't suggested it."

"But I do. I want him to be happy. We'll let him board in Fallon the rest of the year. The butter and egg money will be enough to carry him through. It won't cost much. If we don't send him, he'll run away. I know him. He's my boy, and your son, Martin. I won't see him suffer in a strange world, learning his lessons from bitter experiences. I want him to be taken care of."

"Very well, have it as you say. I'm not putting anything in the way. I thought this was his home, but I see it isn't. It isn't a prison. He can go, and good luck go with him." And after a long silence: "He would tear down this farm—the best in the county! Tear it down—board from board!"



IX. MARTIN'S SON SHAKES OFF THE DUST

THE very next day, Mrs. Wade rented a room for Bill in the same home in which Rose boarded, and for the rest of the winter she and Martin went on as before—working as hard as ever and making money even faster, while peace settled over their household, a peace so profound that, in her more intuitive moments, Bill's mother felt in it an ominous quality.

The storm broke with the summer vacation and the boy's point-blank refusal to return to farm work. His father laid down an ultimatum: until he came home he should not have a cent even from his mother, and home he should not come, at all, until he was willing to carry his share of the farm work willingly, and without further argument. "You see," he pointed out to his wife, "that's the thanks I get for managing along without him this winter. The ungrateful young rascal! If he doesn't come to his senses shortly—"

"Oh, Martin, don't do anything rash," implored Mrs. Wade. "Nearly all boys go through this period. Just be patient with him."

But even she was shaken when his Aunt Nellie, over ostensibly for an afternoon of sociable carpet-rag sewing, began abruptly: "Do you know what Bill is doing, Rose?"

"Working in the mines," returned his mother easily. "Isn't it strange, Nellie, that he should be digging coal right under this farm, the very coal that gave Martin his start?"

"Well, I'm not going to beat about the bush," continued her sister-in-law abruptly. "He's working in the mines all right, but he isn't digging coal at all, though that would be bad enough. I wouldn't say a word about it, but I think you ought to know the truth and put a stop to such a risky business—he's firing shots."

Rose's heart jumped, but she continued to wind up her large ball with the same uninterrupted motion.

"Are you sure?"

"I made Frank find out for certain. It's an extra dangerous mine because gas forms in it unusually often, and he gets fifteen dollars a day for the one hour he works. There's a contract, but he's told them he's twenty-one, and when you prove he's under age they'll make him stop."

Rose still wound and wound, her clear eyes, looking over her glasses, fixed on Nellie.

"It's bad enough, I'll say," rapped out the spare, angular woman, "to have everybody talking about the way Martin has ditched his son, without having the boy scattered to bits, or burned to a cinder. Already he's been blown twenty feet by one windy shot, and more than once he's had to lie flat while those horrible gases burned themselves out right over his head. His 'buddie,' the Italian who fires in the other part of the mine at the same time, told Harry Brown, the nightman, and he told Frank, himself. Why, they say if he'd have moved the least bit it would have fanned the fire downward and he'd have been in a fine mess. Sooner or later all shot-firers meet a tragic end. You want to put your foot down, Rose, and put it down hard—for once in your life—if you can," she added, half under her breath.

"It isn't altogether Martin's fault," began Rose, but Nellie cut her off with a short: "Now, don't you tell me a word about that precious brother of mine! It's as plain to me as the nose on your face that between his bull-headed hardness and your wishy-washy softness you're fixing to ruin one of the best boys God ever put on this earth."

"I'll talk to Billy," Rose promised.

It was the first time she ever had found herself definitely in opposition to her boy, but she felt serene in the confidence of her own power to dissuade him from anything so perilous. She understood the general routine of mining, and had been daily picturing him going down in the cage to the bottom, travelling through a long entry until he was under his home farm and located in one of the low, three-foot rooms where a Kansas miner must stoop all day. Oh, how it had hurt—that thought of those fine young shoulders bending, bending! She had visualized him filling his car, and mentally had followed his coal as it was carried up to the surface to be dumped into the hopper, weighed and dropped down the chute into the flat cars. Of course, there was always the danger of a loosened rock falling on him, but wasn't there always the possibility of accidents on a farm, too? Didn't the company's man always go down, first, into the mine to test the air and make certain it was all right? Rose had convinced herself that the risk was not so great, after all, though she could not help sharing a little of her husband's wonder that the boy could prefer to work underground instead of in the sweet, fresh sunshine. But she had thought it was because in the desperation of his complete revolt from Martin's domination anything else seemed to him preferable. Now, in a lightning flash, she understood. This reaction from a life whose duties had begun before sun-up and ended long after sundown, made danger seem as nothing in comparison with the marvellous chance to earn a comfortable living with only one hour's work a day.

Her conversation with Bill proved that she had been only too right. The boy was intoxicated with his own liberty. "I know I ought to have told you, mother," he confessed. "I wanted to. Honest, I did, but I was afraid you'd worry, though you needn't. The man who taught me how to fire has been doing it over twenty years. A lot of it's up to a fellow, himself. You can pretty near tell if the air is all right by the way it blows—the less the better it is. And if you're right careful to see that the tool-boxes the boys leave are all locked—so's no powder can catch, you know—and always start lighting against the air, so that if there's gas and it catches the fire'll blow away from you instead of following you up—and if you examine the fuses to see they're long enough and the powder is tamped in just right—each miner does that before he leaves and lots of firers just give 'em a hasty once-over instead of a real look—and then shake your heels good and fast after you do fire—"

"Billy!" Rose was white. "I can't bear it—to hear you go on so lightly, when it's your life, your LIFE, you're playing with. For my sake, son, give it up."

With an odd sinking of the heart, she observed the expression in his face which she had seen so often in his father's—the one that said as plainly as words that nothing could shake his determination. "A fellow's got a right to some good times in this world," he said very low, "and I'm getting mine now. I'm not going to grind away and grind away all my life like father and you've done. If anything did happen I'd have had a chance to dream and think and read instead of getting to be old without ever having any fun out of it all. Maybe you won't believe it, but some days for hours I just lie in the sun like a darky boy, not even thinking. Gee! it feels great! And sometimes I read all day until I have to go to the mine. There's one thing I'm going to tell you square," he went on, a firm ring in his voice, boyish for all its deep, bass note, "I'm never going back to the farm, never! Mother," he cried, suddenly, coming over to take her hand in both his. "Will you leave father? We could rent a little house and you'd have hardly anything to do. I'm making more than lots of men with families. And I'd give you my envelope without opening it every pay-day." "Oh, Billy, you don't know what you're saying! I couldn't leave your father. I couldn't think of it."

"What I don't see is how you can stand it to stay with him. He's always been a brute to you. He's never cared a red cent for either of us."

Rose was abashed before the harsh logic of youth. "Oh, son," she murmured brokenly, "there are things one can't explain. I suppose it may seem strange to you—but his life has been so empty. He has missed so much! Everything, Billy."

"Then it's his own fault," judged the boy. "If ever anybody's always had his own way and done just as he darn pleased it's father. I wish he'd die, that's what I wish."

"Bill!" His mother's tone was stern.

"There you are!" he marvelled. "You must have wished it lots of times yourself. I know you have. Yet you always talk as if you loved him."

In Rose's eyes, the habitual look of patience and understanding deepened. How could Bill, as yet scarcely tried by life, comprehend the purging flames through which she had passed or realize time's power to reveal unsuspected truths.

"When you've been married to a man nearly twenty-two years and have built up a place together, there's bound to be a bond between you," she eluded. "He just lives for this farm. It's almost as dear to him as you are to me, son, and it's a wonderful heritage, Bill, a magnificent heritage. Just think! Two generations have labored to build it out of the dust. Your father's whole life is in it. Your father's and mine. And your grandmother's. If only you could ever come to care for it!"

Bill fidgeted uneasily. "You mean you want me to go on with it?" he demanded. "You want me to come back to it, settle down to be a farmer—like father?"

The tone in which he asked this question made Rose choose her words carefully.

"What are your plans, son? What do you want to be—not just now, but finally?"

"I can't see what difference it makes what a fellow is—except that in one business a man makes more than in another. And I can't see either that it does a person a bit of good to have money. I'm having more fun right now than father or you ever had—more fun than anybody I know. Mother," and his face was solemn as if with a great discovery, "I've figured it out that it's silly to do as most people—just live to work. I'm going to work just enough to live comfortably. Not one scrap more, either. You can't think how I hate the very thought of it."

Rose sighed. Couldn't she, indeed! She understood only too well how deeply this rebellion was rooted. The hours when he had been dragged up from the far shores of a dreamful slumber to shiver forth in the chill darkness to milk and chore, still rankled. Those tangy frosty afternoons, when he had been forced to clean barns and plow while the other boys went rabbit and possum hunting or nutting, were afternoons whose loss he still mourned. Nothing had yet atoned for the evenings when he had been torn from his reading and sent sternly to bed because he must get up so early. Always work had stolen from him these treasures—dreams, recreation and knowledge. He had been obliged to fight the farm and his father for even a modicum of them—the things that made life worth living. And the irony of it—that eventually it would be this farm and Martin's driving methods which, if he became reconciled to his father, would make it possible for him to drink all the fullness of leisure.

It was too tragic that the very thing which should have stood for opportunity to the boy had been used to embitter him and drive him into danger. But he must not lose his birthright. An almost passionate desire welled in Rose's heart to hold on to it for him. True, she too had been a slave to the farm. Yet not so much a slave to it, she distinguished, as to Martin's absorption in its development. And of late years there had been for her, running through all the humdrum days, a satisfaction in perfecting it. In her mind now floated clearly the ideal toward which her husband was striving. She had not guessed how much it had become her own until she felt herself being drawn relentlessly by Bill's quiet, but implacable determination to have her leave it all behind. If only he would try again, she felt sure all would be so different! His father had learned a lesson, of that she was positive, and though he would not promise it, would not be so hard on the boy. And with this new independence of Bill's to strengthen her, they could resist Martin more successfully as different issues came up. She could manage to help her boy get what he wanted out of life without his having to pay such a terrible price as, the mine on one hand, and his father's displeasure on the other, might exact, for she knew that if he persisted too long, the break with Martin could never be bridged and that in the end his father would evoke the full powers of the law to disinherit him and tie her own hands as completely as possible in that direction.

But she was far too wise to press such arguments in her son's present mood. They would have to drift for a while, she saw that clearly, until she could gradually impress upon him how different farming would be if he were his own master. In time, he might even come to understand how much Martin needed her.

"Say you will," Bill, pleading, insistent, broke in on her train of reflections, "I've always dreamed of this day, when we'd go away, and now it's come. I can take care of you."

As he stood there, a glorious figure in his youthful self-confidence, a turn of his head reminded her a second time of Martin, recalling sharply the way her husband had looked the night he told her of his love for the other Rose. He had been bothered by no fine qualms about abandoning herself. She thought of his final surrender of love to wisdom. It was only youth that dared pursue happiness—to purchase delicious idleness by gambling with death. Billy was her boy. His dreams and hopes should be hers; her way of life, the one that gave him the most joy. She would follow him, if need be, to the end of the earth.

"Very well, son," she said simply, her voice breaking over the few words. "If a year from now you still feel like this, I'll do as you wish."

"You don't know how I hate him," muttered the boy. "It's only when I'm tramping in the woods, or in the middle of some book I like that I can forgive him for living. No, mother, I don't mean all that," he laughed, giving her a bear-like hug.

It was in this more reasonable side, this ability to change his point of view quickly when he became convinced he was wrong, that Mrs. Wade now put her faith. She would give him plenty of rope, she decided, not try to drive him. It would all come right, if she only waited, and she prayed, nightly, with an increasing tranquillity, that he might be kept safe from harm, taking deep comfort in the new light of contentment that was gradually stealing into his face. After all, each one had to work out his destiny in his own way, she supposed.

It was less than a month later that her telephone rang, and Rose, calmly laying aside her sewing and getting up rather stiffly because of her rheumatism, answered, thinking it probably a call from Martin, who had left earlier in the evening, to wind up a little matter of a chattel on some growing wheat. It had just begun to rain and she feared he might be stuck in the road somewhere, calling to tell her to come for him. But it was not Martin's voice that answered.

"Mrs. Wade?"

"Yes."

"Why"—there was a forbidding break that made her shudder. A second later she convinced herself that it seemed a natural halt—people do such things without any apparent cause; but she could not help shaking a little.

"Is it about Mr. Wade?" and as she asked this question she wondered why she had spoken her husband's name when it was Bill's that really had rushed through her mind.

"No, ma'am, it ain't about Martin Wade I'm callin' you up, it ain't him at all—"

"I see." She said this calmly and quietly, as though to impress her informant and reassure him. "What is it?" It was almost unnecessary to ask, for she knew already what had happened, knew that the boy had flung his dice and lost.

"It's your son, Mrs. Wade; it's him I'm a-callin' about. We're about to bring him home to you—an'—and I thought it'd be better to call you up first so's you might expect us an' not take on with the suddenness of it all. This is Brown—Harry Brown—the nightman at the mine down here. We've got the ambulance here and we're about ready to start." There was an evenness about the strange voice that she understood better than its words. If Bill had been hurt the man would have been quick and jerky in his speaking as though he were feeling the boy's pain with him; but he was so even about it all—as even as Death.

"Then I'll phone for Dr. Bradley so he'll be here by the time you come," said Rose, wondering how she could think of so practical a thing. Her mind had wrapped itself in a protecting armor, forbidding the shock of it all to strike with a single blow. She couldn't understand why she was not screaming.

"You can—if you want to, but Bill don't need him, Mrs. Wade,—he's dead."

Slowly she hung up the receiver, the wall still around her brain, holding it tight and keeping her nerves taut, afraid to release them for fear they might snap. She stood there looking at the receiver as her hands came together.

As though she were talking to a person instead of the telephone before her, she gasped: "So—so THIS is what it has all been for—this. Into the world, into Martin's world—and this way out of it. Burned to death—Billy."

The rain had lessened a little and now the wind began to shake the house, rattle the windows and scream as it tore its way over the plains. The sky flared white and the world lighted up suddenly, as though the sun had been turned on from an electric switch. At the same instant she saw a bolt of lightning strike a young tree by the roadside, heard the sharp click as it hit and then watched the flash dance about, now on the road, now along the barbed wire fencing. Then the world went black again. And a rumble quickly grew to an earth-shaking blast of thunder. It was as though that tree were Billy—struck by a gush of flying fire. The next bolt broke above the house, and the light it threw showed her the stripling split and lying on the ground. In the impenetrable darkness she realized that the house fuse of their Delco system must have been blown out, and she groped blindly for a match. She could hear the rain coming down again, now in rivers. There was unchained wrath in the downpour, viciousness. It was a madman rushing in to rend and tear. It frothed, and writhed, and spat hatred. Rose shook as though gripped by a strong hand. She was afraid—of the rain, the lightning, the thunder, the darkness; alone there, waiting for them to bring her Billy. She was too terrified to add her weeping to the wail of the wind—it would have been too ghastly. Would she never find a match! As she lit the lamp, like the stab of a needle in the midst of agony, came the thought of how long it had been after Martin had put in his electrical system and connected up his barns before she had been permitted to have this convenience in the house. What would he think now? She wished he were home. Anyone would be better than this awful waiting alone. She could only stand there, away from the window, looking out at the sheets of water running down the panes and shivering with the frightfulness and savageness of it all.

Her ears caught a rumble, fainter than thunder, and the splash of horses' hoofs—"it's too muddy for the motor ambulance," she thought, mechanically. "They're using the old one," and her heart contracting, twisting, a queer dryness in her throat, she opened the door as they stopped, her hand shading the lamp against the sudden inrush of wind and rain. "In there, through the parlor," she said dully, indicating the new room and thinking, bitterly, as she followed them, that now, when it could mean nothing to Billy, Martin would offer no objections to its being given over to him.

The scuffling of feet, the low, matter-of-fact orders of a directing voice: "Easy now, boys—all together, lift. Watch out; pull that sheet back up over him," and a brawny, work-stooped man saying to her awkwardly: "I wouldn't look at him if I was you, Mrs. Wade, till the undertaker fixes him up," and she was once more alone.

As if transfixed, she continued to stand, looking beyond the lamp, beyond the bed on which her son's large figure was outlined by the sheet, beyond the front door which faced her, beyond—into the night, looking for Martin, waiting for him to come home to his boy. She asked herself again and again how she had been so restrained when her Billy had been carried in. After what seemed interminable ages, she heard heavy steps on the back porch and knew that her husband had returned at last. He brought in with him a gust of wind that caused the lamp to smoke. She held it with both hands, afraid that she might drop it, and carrying it to the dining-room table set it down slowly, looking at him. He seemed huger than ever with his hulk sinking into the gray darkness behind him. There was something elephantine about him as he stood there, soaked to the skin, bending forward a little, breathing slowly and deeply, his fine nostrils distending with perfect regularity, his face in the dim light, yellow, with the large lines almost black. He was hatless and his tawny-gray hair was flat with wetness, coming down almost to his eyes, so clear and far-seeing.

"What's the matter with the lights? Fuse blown out?" he asked, spitting imaginary rain out of his mouth.

Rose did not answer.

"Awful night for visiting," Martin announced roughly, as he took off his coat. "But it was lucky I went, or all would have been pretty bad for me. Do you know, that rascal was delivering the wheat to the elevator—wheat on which I held a chattel—and I got to Tom Mayer just as he was figuring up the weights. You should have seen Johnson's face when I came in. He knew I had him cornered. 'Here,' I said, 'what's up?' And that lying rascal turned as white as death and said something about getting ready to bring me a check. I told him I was much obliged, but I would take it along with me—and I did. Here it is—fourteen hundred dollars, plus interest. And I got it by the skin of my teeth. I didn't stop to argue with him for I saw the storm coming on. I went racing, but a half mile north I skidded into the ditch. I really feel like leaving the car there all night, but it would do a lot of damage. I'll have to get a team and drag it in. I call it a good day's work. What do you say?" He looked at her closely, for the first time noticing her drawn face and far-away look.

"What's the matter? You look goopy—"

Rose settled herself heavily in the rocker close to the table.

"You're not sick, are you?"

She shook her head a few times and answered: "He's in there—"

"Who?" Martin straightened up ready for anything.

"Billy—"

"Oh!" A light flashed into Martin's face. "So he has come back, has he? Back home? What made him change toward this place? Is he here to stay?"

"No, Martin—"

"Then if he hasn't come to his senses, what is he doing here—here in my house, the home he hates—"

"He doesn't hate it now," Rose replied, struggling for words that she might express herself and end this cruel conversation, but all she could do was to point nervously toward the spare room.

"What is he doing in there? It's the one spot that Rose can call her own, poor child."

"He's on the bed, Martin—"

"What's the matter with the davenport he's always slept on? Is he sick? What in heaven's name is going on in this house?"

As Martin started toward the bedroom, his wife opened her lips to tell him the truth but the words refused to come; at the same instant it struck her that not to speak was brutal, yet just. She would let Martin go to this bed with words of anger on his lips, with feelings of unkindness in his heart. She would do this. Savage? Yes, but why not? There seemed to be something fair about it. Then her heart-strings pulled more strongly than ever. No; it was too hard. She must stop him, tell him, prepare him. But before the words came, he was out of the room and when she spoke he did not hear her because of the rain.

He saw the vague lines of the boy's body, hidden by the sheet, and thought quickly, "Bill's old ostrich-like trick," and while at the same instant something told him that a terrible thing had happened, the idea did not register completely until he had his hand on the linen. Then, with a short yank, he pulled away the cover and saw the boy's head. Dark as it was, it was enough to show him the truth. With a quick move he covered him again. There was a smeary wetness on his fingers, which he wiped away on the side of his trousers. They were drenched with rain, but he distinguished the sticky feel of blood leaving his hand as he rubbed it nervously.

His first emotion was one of anger with Rose. He was sure she had played this sinister jest deliberately to torture him and he had fallen into the trap. He wanted to rush back into the other room and strike her down. He would show her! But he dismissed this impulse, for he did not want her to see him like this, no hold on himself and his mind without direction. Sitting there, she would have the advantage. Without so much as a sound except for the slight noise he made in walking, Martin went through the parlor towards the front door and out to the steps, where he leaned for a moment against the weather-boarding, letting the rain fall on him as he stared dully down at the ground. It felt good to stand there. No eyes were on him, and the rain was refreshing. This had been too much for him. Never had he known himself to be so near to bewilderment. How fortunate that he had escaped by this simple trick of leaving the house. Then he thought of the car—a half-mile north—and the horses in the stable. He must do something. He would bring the car into the garage. It was relieving to hurry across the dripping grass toward the barn. How wonderful it was to keep the body doing something when the breath in him was short, his heart battering like an engine with burned-out bearings, his brain in insane chaos. As he applied a match to the lantern he thought of his wife again, and his face regained its scowl.

Only when he had his great heavy team in the yard, his lantern hanging from his arm, the reins in his hands, and was pulling back with all his strength as he followed the horses—only then did he permit himself to think about the tragedy that had befallen.

"He's dead—killed," he groaned. "It had to come. Shot-firers don't last long. Whoa, there, Lottie; not so fast, Jet, whoa!" His protesting team in control again, he trudged heavily behind. "It's terrible to die that way—not a chance in a thousand. And a kid of sixteen didn't have the judgment—couldn't have. But Bill knew what he was facing every evening. He didn't go in blindly. They'll blame me, as though it was my fault. I didn't want him to go there. I wanted him to take a hand here, to run the place by himself in good time. It was his mother who sent him away first." He went on like that, justifying himself more positively as excuse after excuse suggested itself.

Not until he had convinced himself that he was in no way responsible, did he allow his heart to beat a little for this boy of his. "Poor Bill," he thought on, "it has been a tough game for him. Lost in the shuffle. Born into something he didn't like and trying to escape, only to get caught. What did he expect out of life, anyway? Why didn't he learn that it's only a lot of senseless pain? Every moment of it pain—from coming into the world to going out. Oh, Bill, why didn't you learn what I know? You had brains, boy, but it would have been better if you had never used them. I've brains, too, but I've always managed to keep them tied down—buckled to the farm, to investments, and work—thinking about things that make us forget life. It's all dust and dust, with rain once in a while, only the rain steams off and it's dust again."

Martin began to review the course of his own past, and smiled bitterly. Others were able to live the same kind of an existence, but, unlike himself, took it as a preparation for another day, another existence which, it seemed to him, was measured and cut to order by professionals who understood how to fix up the meaning of life so that it would soothe and satisfy. He thought how much better it was to be a dumb, unquestioning beast, or a human being conscious of his soul, than to be as he was—alone, a materialist, who saw the meaninglessness of matter and whose mind, in some manner which he did not understand, had developed a slant that made him doubt what others accepted so easily as facts. Martin knew he was bound to things of substance but he followed the lure of property and accumulation as he might have followed some other game had he learned it, knowing all along that it was a delusion and at the same time acknowledging that for him there was nothing else as sufficing.

How simple, if Bill's future could be a settled thing in his mind as it was to the boy's mother. Or his own future! If only he could believe—then how different it would be for him. He could go on placidly and die with a smile. But he could not believe. His atheism was both mental and instinctive. It was something he could not understand, and which he knew he could never change, try as he might. Take this very evening. Here was death in his home. And he was escaping a lot of anguish, not by praying for Bill's soul or his own forgiveness, but by the simple process of harnessing a team and dragging a car through the mud. It was a great game, work was—the one weapon with which to meet life. This was not a cut and dried philosophy with him, but a glimmer that, though always suggesting itself but dimly, never failed when put to the test. Martin felt better. He began to probe a little farther, albeit with an aimlessness about his questions that almost frightened him. He asked himself whether he loved Bill, now that he was dead, and he had to admit that he did not. The boy had always been something other than he had expected—a disappointment. Did he love anyone? No. Not a person; not even any longer that lovely Rose of Sharon who had flowered in his dust for a brief hour. His wife? God Almighty, no. Then who? Himself? No, his very selfishness had other springs than that. He was one of those men, not so uncommon either, he surmised, who loved no one on the whole wide earth.

When he re-entered the house, he found his wife still seated in the rocker, softly weeping, the tears flowing down her cheeks and dropping unheeded into her lap. He pitied her.

"I feel as though he didn't die tonight," she mourned, looking at Martin through full eyes. "He died when he was born, like the first one."

"I know how you feel," said Martin, sympathy in his voice.

"I made him so many promises before he came, but I wasn't able to keep a single one of them."

"I'm sorry; I wish I could help you in some way."

"Oh, Martin, I know you're not a praying man—but if you could only learn."

Martin looked at her respectfully but with profound curiosity.

"There must be an answer to all this," Rose went on brokenly. "There must! Billy is lying in the arms of Jesus now—no pain, only sweet rest. I believe that."

"I'm glad you have the faith that can put such meaning into it all."

"Martin, I want to pray for strength to bear it."

"Yes, Rose."

"You'll pray with me, won't you?"

"You just said I wasn't a praying man."

"Yes, but I can't pray alone, with him in there alone, too, and you here with me, scoffing."

"I can't be other than I am, Rose; but you pray, and as you pray I'll bow my head."



X. INTO THE DUST-BIN

WITH the loss of her boy, time ceased to exist for Rose. The days came and went, lengthening into years, full of duties, leaving her as they found her, outwardly little changed and habitually calm and kind, but inwardly sunk in apathy. She moved as if in a dream, seeming to live in a strange world that would never again seem real—this world without Billy. Occasionally, she would forget and think he was out in the field or down in the mine; more rarely still, she would slip even further backward and wonder what he was about in his play. During these moments she would feel normal, but some object catching her eye would jerk her back to the present and the cruel truth. She and Martin had less than ever to say to each other, though in his own grim way he was more thoughtful, giving her to understand that there were no longer any restrictions laid upon her purchasing, and even suggesting that they remodel the house; as if, she thought impassively, at this late day, it could matter what she bought or in what she lived. His one interest in making money, just as if they had some one to leave it to, puzzled her. Always investing, then reinvesting the interest, and spending comparatively little of his income, his fortune had now reached the point where it was growing rapidly of its own momentum and, as there was nothing to which he looked forward, nothing he particularly wanted to do, he set himself the task of making it cross the half million mark, much as a man plays solitaire, to occupy his mind, betting against himself, to give point to his efforts.

Yet, it gave him a most disconcerting, uncanny start, when one bright winter day, he faced the fact that he, too, was about to be shovelled into the great dust-bin. Death was actually at his side, his long, bony finger on his shoulder and whispering impersonally, "You're next." "Very much," thought Martin, "like a barber on a busy Saturday." How odd that here was something that had never entered into his schemes, his carefully worked out plans! It seemed so unfair—why, he had been feeling so well, his business had been going on so profitably, there was something so substantial to the jog of his life, there seemed to be something of the eternal about it. He had taken ten-year mortgages but a few days ago, and had bought two thousand dollars' worth of twenty-year Oklahoma municipals when he could have taken an earlier issue which he had rejected as maturing too soon. He had forgotten that there was a stranger who comes but once, and now that he was here, Martin felt that a mean trick had been played on him. He cogitated on the journey he was to take, and it made him not afraid, but angry. It was a shabby deal—that's what it was—when he was so healthy and contented, only sixty-one and ready to go on for decades—two or three at least—forced, instead, to prepare to lay himself in a padded box and be hurriedly packed away. It had always seemed so vague, this business of dying, and now it was so personal—he, Martin Wade, himself, not somebody else, would suffer a little while longer and then grow still forever.

He would never know how sure a breeder was his new bull—the son of that fine creature he had imported; two cows he had spotted as not paying their board could go on for months eating good alfalfa and bran before a new herdsman might become convinced of their unreadiness to turn the expensive feed into white gold; he had not written down the dates when the sows were to farrow, and they might have litters somewhere around the strawstack and crush half the little pigs. His one hundred and seventy-five acres of wheat had had north and south dead furrows, but he had learned that this was a mistake in probably half the acreage, where they should be east and west. It would make a great difference in the drainage, but a new plowman might think this finickiness and just go ahead and plow all of it north and south, or all of it east and west and this would result in a lower yield—some parts of the field would get soggy and the wheat might get a rust, and other parts drain too readily, letting the ground become parched and break into cakes, all of which might be prevented. And there was all that manure, maker of big crops. He knew only too well how other farmers let it pile up in the barnyard to be robbed by the sun of probably twenty per cent of its strength. He figured quickly how it would hurt the crops that he had made traditional on Wade land. He considered these things, and they worried him, made him realize what a serious thing was death, far more serious than the average person let himself believe.

Martin had gone to the barn a week before to help a cow which was aborting. It had enraged him when he thought what an alarming thing this was—abortion among HIS cows—in Martin Wade's beautiful herd! "God Almighty!" he had exclaimed, deciding as he took the calf from the mother to begin doctoring her at once. He would fight this disease before it could establish a hold. Locking the cow's head in an iron stanchion, he had shed his coat, rolled up his right sleeve almost to the shoulder, washed his hand and arm in a solution of carbolic and hot water, carefully examining them to make sure there was no abrasion of any kind. But despite his caution, a tiny cut so small that it had escaped his searching, had come in contact with the infected mucous membrane and blood poisoning had set in. And here he was, lying in bed, given up by Doctor Bradley and the younger men the older physician had called into consultation and who had tried in vain to stem the spread of poison through his system. Martin was going to die, and no power could save him. The irony of it! This farm to which he had devoted his life was taking it from him by a member of its herd.

Martin made a wry little grimace of amusement as he realized suddenly that even at the very gate of death it was still on life, his life, that his thoughts dwelt. In these last moments, it was the tedious, but stimulating, battle of existence that really occupied his full attention. He would cling to it until the last snap of the thin string. This cavern of oblivion that was awaiting him, that he must enter—it was black and now more than ever his deep, simple irreligion refused to let fairy tales pacify him with the belief that beyond it was everlasting daylight. Scepticism was not only in his conscious thought but in the very tissues of his mind.

He remembered how his own father had died on this farm—he had had no possessions to think about; only his loved ones, his wife and his children; but he had brought them here that they might amass property out of Martin's sweat and the dust of the prairie. Now he, the son, dying, had in his mind no thought of people, but of this land and of stock and of things. And how strangely his mind was reacting to it. His concern was not who should own them all, but what would actually be the fate of each individual property child of his. Why, he had not even written a will. It would all go to his wife, of course, and how little he cared to whom she left it. He would have liked, perhaps, to have given Rose Mall twenty-five thousand or so—so she could always be independent of that young husband of hers—snap her fingers at him if he got to driving her too hard, and crushing out the flower-like quality of her—but his wife wouldn't have understood, and he had hurt her enough, in all conscience. The one thing he might have enjoyed doing, he couldn't. Outside of that he didn't care who got it. She could leave it to whomever she liked when her turn came. Not to whom it went, but what would happen to it—that was what concerned him.

By his side, Rose, sitting so motionless that he was scarcely conscious of her presence, was dying with him. With that peculiar gift of profoundly sympathetic natures she was thinking and feeling much of what he was experiencing. It seemed to her heart-breaking that Martin must be forced to abandon the only things for which he cared. He had even sacrificed his lovely Rose of Sharon for them—she had never been in any doubt as to the reason for that sudden emotional retreat of his seven years before. And she knew his one thought now must be for their successful administration.

He had worked so hard always and yet had had so little happiness, so little real brightness out of life. She felt, generously, with a clutching ache, that with all the disappointments she had suffered through him—from his first broken promises about the house to his lack of understanding of their boy which had resulted in Billy's death—with even that, she had salvaged so much more out of living than he. A great compassion swelled within her; all the black moments, all the long, gray hours of their years together, seemed suddenly insignificant. She saw him again as he had been the day he had proposed marriage to her and for the first time she was sure that she could interpret the puzzling look that had come into his eyes when she had asked him why he thought she could make him happy. What had he understood about happiness? With a noiseless sob, she remembered that he had answered her in terms of the only thing he had understood—work. And she saw him again, too, as he had been the night he had so bluntly told her of his passion for Rose. It seemed to her now, free of all rancor, unutterably tragic that the only person Martin had loved should have come into his life too late.

He was not to be blamed because he had never been able to care for herself. He should never have asked her to marry him—and yet, they had not been such bad partners. It would have been so easy for her to love him. She had loved him until he had killed her boy; since then, all her old affection had withered. But if it really had done so why was she so racked now? She felt, desperately, that she could not let him go until he had had some real joy. To think that she used to plan, cold-bloodedly, when Billy was little, all she would do if only Martin should happen to die! The memory of it smote her as with a blow. She looked down at the powerful hand lying so passively, almost, she would have said, contentedly, in her own. How she had yearned for the comfort of it when her children were born. She wondered if Martin realized her touch, if it helped a little. If it had annoyed him, he would have said so. It came to her oddly that in all the twenty-seven years she and her husband had been married this was the very first time he had let her be tender to him. Oh, his life had been bleak. Bleak! And she with such tenderness in her heart. It hadn't been right. From the depths of her rebellion and forgiveness, slow tears rose. Feeling too intensely, too mentally, to be conscious of them she sat unmoving as they rolled one by one down her cheeks and dropped unheeded.

"Rose," he called with a soft hoarseness, "I want to talk to you."

"Yes, Martin," and she gave his fingers a slight squeeze as though to convince him that she was there at his side. He felt relieved. It was good to feel her hand and be sure that if his body were to give its final sign that life had slipped away someone would be there to know the very second it had happened. It was a satisfactory way to die; it took a little of the loneliness away from the experience.

"Rose," he repeated. It sounded so new, the yearning tone in which he said it—"Rose!" It hurt. "Isn't it funny, Rose, to go like this—not sick, no accident—just dying without any real reason except that I absorbed the poison through a cut so small my eyes couldn't see it."

"It's a mystery, dear," the little word limped out awkwardly, "but God's ways are not ours."

"Not a mystery," he corrected, "just a heap of tricks; funny ones, sad ones, sensible ones, and crazy ones—and of all the crazy ones this is the worst. But, what's the use? If there's a God, as you believe, it doesn't do any good to argue with Him, and if it's as I think and there's no God, there's no one to argue with. But never mind about that now—it's no matter. You'll listen carefully, won't you, Rose?"

"Yes, Martin."

"This abortion in the herd. You know what a terrible thing it is."

"I certainly do; it's the cause of your leaving me."

"Rose, I know you'll be busy during the next few days—me dying, the things that have to be arranged, the funeral and all that. But when it's all over, you'll let that be the first thing, won't you?"

"Yes, the very first thing, if you wish it."

"I do. Get Dr. Hurton on the job at once, and have him fight it. He knows his business. Let him come twice a day until he's sure it's out of the herd. Keep that new bull out of the pasture. And if Hurton can't clean it up, you'd better get rid of the herd before it gets known around the country. You know how news of that kind travels. Don't try to handle the sale yourself. If you do, it'll be a mistake. The prices will be low if you get only a county crowd."

"Neighbors usually bid low," she agreed.

"Run up to Topeka and see Baker—he's the sales manager of the Holstein Breeders' Association. Let him take charge of it all—he's a straight fellow. He'll charge you enough—fifteen per cent of the gross receipts, but then he'll see to it that the people who want good stuff will be there. He knows how and where to advertise. He's got a big list of names, and can send out letters to the people that count. He'll bring buyers from Iowa down to Texas. Remember his name—Baker."

"Yes, Martin—Baker."

"I think you ought to sell the herd anyway," he went on. "I know you, Rose; you'll be careless about the papers—no woman ever realizes how important it is to have the facts for the certificates of registry and transfer just right. I'm afraid you'll fall down there and get the records mixed. You won't get the dates exact and the name and number of each dam and sire. Women are all alike there—they never seem to realize that a purebred without papers is just a good grade."

Rose made no comment, while Martin changed his position slowly and lost himself in thought.

"Yes, I guess it's the only thing to do—to get rid of the purebred stuff. God Almighty! It's taken me long enough to build up that herd, but a few weeks from now they'll be scattered to the four winds. Well, it can't be helped. Try to sell them to men who understand something of their value. And that reminds me, Rose. You always speak of them as thoroughbreds. It always did get on my nerves. That's right for horses, but try to remember that cows are purebreds. You'll make that mistake before men who know. Those little things are important. Remember it, won't you?"

"Thoroughbred for a horse, and purebred for a cow," Rose repeated willingly.

"When you get your money for the stock put it into mortgages—first mortgages, not seconds. Let that be a principle with you. Many a holder of a second mortgage has been left to hold the sack. You must remember that the first mortgage comes in for the first claim after taxes, and if the foreclosure doesn't bring enough to satisfy more than that, the second mortgage is sleeping on its rights."

"First mortgages, not seconds," said Rose.

"And while I'm on that, let me warn you about Alex Tracy, four miles north and a half mile east, on the west side of the road. He's a slippery cuss and you'll have to watch him."

"Alex Tracy, four miles north—"

"You'll find my mortgage for thirty-seven hundred in my box at the bank. He's two coupons behind in his interest. I made him give me a chattel on his growing corn. Watch him—he's treacherous. He may think he can sneak around because you're a woman and stall you. He's just likely to turn his hogs into that corn. Your chattel is for growing corn, not for corn in a hog's belly. If he tries any dirty business get the sheriff after him."

"It's on the GROWING corn," said Rose.

"And here's another important point—taxes. Don't pay any taxes on mortgages. What's the use of giving the politicians more money to waste? Hold on to your bank stock and arrange to have all mortgages in the name of the bank, not in your own. They pay taxes on their capital and surplus, not on their loans. But be sure to get a written acknowledgment on each mortgage from Osborne. He's square, but you can't ever tell what changes might take place and then there might be some question about mortgages in the bank's name."

"Keep them in the bank's name," said Rose.

"And a written acknowledgment," Martin stressed.

"A written acknowledgment," she echoed.

For probably fifteen minutes he lay without further talk; then, a little more weariness in his voice than she had ever known before, he began to speak again.

"I've been thinking a great deal, Rose." There was still that new tenderness in the manner in which he pronounced her name, that new tone she had never heard before and which caused her to feel a little nervous. "I've been thinking, Rose, about the years we've lived together here on a Kansas prairie farm—"

"It lacks just a few months of being twenty-eight years," she added.

"Yes, it sounds like a long time when you put it that way, but it doesn't seem any longer than a short sigh to me lying here. I've been thinking, Rose, how you've always got it over to me that you loved me or could love me—"

"I've always loved you, Martin—deeply."

"Yes, that's what's always made me so hard with you. It would have been far better for you if you hadn't cared for me at all. I've never loved anybody, not even my own mother, nor Bill, nor myself for that matter." Their eyes shifted away from each other quickly as both thought of one other whom he did not mention. "I wasn't made that way, Rose. Now you could love anything—lots of women are like that, and men, too. But I wasn't. Life to me has always been a strange world that I never got over thinking about and trying to understand, and at the same time hustling to get through with every day of it as fast as I could by keeping at the only thing I knew which would make it all more bearable. There's a lot of pain in work, but it's only of the muscles and my pain has always been in the things I've thought about. The awful waste and futility of it all! Take this farm—I came here when this was hardly more than a desert. You ought to have seen how thick the dust was the first day we got down here. And I've built up this place. You've helped me. Bill didn't care for it—even if he had lived, he'd never have stayed here. But you do, in spite of all that's happened."

"Yes, Martin, I do," she returned fervently. "It's a wonderful monument to leave behind you—this farm is."

His eyes grew somber. "That's what I've always thought it would be," he answered, very low. "I've felt as if I was building something that would last. Even the barns—they're ready to stand for generations. But this minute, when the end is sitting at the foot of this bed, I seem to see it all crumbling before me. You won't stay here. Why should you—even if you do for a few years you'll have to leave it sometime, and there's nothing that goes to rack and ruin as quickly as a farm—even one like this."

"Oh, Martin, don't think such thoughts," she begged. "Your fever is coming up; I can see it."

"What has it all been about, that's what I want to know," he went on with quiet cynicism. "What have I been sweating about—nothing. What is anyone's life? No more than mine. We're all like a lot of hens in a backyard, scratching so many hours a day. Some scratch a little deeper than those who aren't so skilled or so strong. And when I stand off a little, it's all alike. The end is as blind and senseless as the beginning on this farm—drought and dust."

Martin closed his eyes wearily and gave a deep sigh. To his wife's quickened ears, it was charged with lingering regret for frustrated plans and palpitant with his consciousness of life's evanescence and of the futility of his own success.

She waited patiently for him to continue his instructions, but the opiates had begun to take effect and Martin lapsed into sleep. Although he lived until the next morning, he never again regained full consciousness.



XI. THE DUST SETTLES

ROSE'S grief was a surprise to herself; there was no blinking the fact that her life was going to be far more disrupted by Martin's death than it had been by Bill's. There were other differences. Where that loss had struck her numb, this quickened every sensibility, drove her into action; more than that, as she realized how much less there was to regret in the boy's life than in his father's, how much more he had got out of his few short years, the edge of the older, more precious sorrow, dulled. During quite long periods she would be so absorbed in her thoughts of Martin that Bill would not enter her mind. Was it possible, that this husband who with his own lips had confessed he had never loved her, had been a more integral part of herself than the son who had adored her? What was this bond that had roots deeper than love? Was it merely because they had grown so used to each other that she felt as if half of her had been torn away and buried, leaving her crippled and helpless? Probably it would have been different if Bill had been living. Was it because when he had died, she still had had Martin, demanding, vital, to goad her on and give the semblance of a point to her life, and now she was left alone, adrift? She pondered over these questions, broodingly.

"I suppose you'll want to sell out, Rose," Nellie's husband, Bert Mall, big and cordial as Peter had been before him, suggested a day or two after the funeral. "I'll try to get you a buyer, or would you rather rent?"

"I haven't any plans yet, Bert," Mrs. Wade had evaded adroitly, "it's all happened so quickly. I have plenty of time and there are lots of things to be seen to." There had been that in her voice which had forbidden discussion, and it was a tone to which she was forced to have recourse more than once during the following days when it seemed to her that all her friends were in a conspiracy to persuade her to a hasty, ill-advised upheaval.

Nothing, she resolved, should push her from this farm or into final decisions until a year had passed. She must have something to which she could cling if it were nothing more than a familiar routine. Without that to sustain and support her, she felt she could never meet the responsibilities which had suddenly descended, with such a terrific impact, upon her shoulders.

In an inexplicable way, these new burdens, her black dress—the first silk one since the winter before Billy came—and the softening folds of her veil, all invested her with a new and touching majesty that seemed to set her a little apart from her neighbors.

Nellie had been frankly scandalized at the idea of mourning. "Nobody does that out here—exceptin' during the services," she had said sharply to her daughter-in-law when Rose had told her of the hasty trip she and her aunt had made to the largest town in the county. "Folks'll think it's funny and kind o' silly. You oughtn't to have encouraged it."

"Oh, Mother Mall, I didn't especially," the younger woman had protested. "She just said in that quiet, settled way she has, that she was going to—she thought it would be easier for her. And I believe it will, too," she added, feeling how pathetic it was that Aunt Rose had never looked half so well during Uncle Martin's life as she had since his death.

"Oh, well," Mall commented, "Rose always was sort of sentimental, but there's not many like her. She's right to take her time, too. It'll be six or eight months, anyway, before she can get things lined up. She's got a longer head than a body'd think for. Look at the way she run that newspaper office when old Conroy died."

"That was nearly thirty years ago," commented his wife crisply, "and Rose's got so used to being bossed around by Martin that she'll find it ain't so easy to go ahead on her own."

With her usual shrewdness, Nellie had surmised the chief difficulty, but it dwindled in real importance because of the fact that Rose so frequently had the feeling that Martin merely had gone on a journey and would come home some day, expecting an exact accounting of her stewardship. His instructions were to her living instructions which must be carried out to the letter.

She had attended with conscientious promptness to checking the trouble that had brought about his death. "I promised Mr. Wade it should be the first thing," she had explained to Dr. Hurton. "'You'll let it be the first thing, won't you?' Those were his very words. He depended on us, Doctor."

When the time came to plan definitely for the disposal of the purebred herd, she went herself to Topeka to arrange details with Baker. She was constantly thinking: "Now, what would Martin say to this?" or "Would he approve of that?" And her conclusions were reached accordingly. The sale itself was an event that was discussed in Fallon County for years afterwards. The hotel was crowded with out-of-town buyers. Enthused by the music from two bands, even the local people bid high, and through it all, Rose, vigilant, remembered everything Martin would have wanted remembered. She felt that even he would have been satisfied with the manner in which the whole transaction was handled, and with the financial results.

She began to take a new pleasure in everything, the nervous pleasure one takes when going through an experience for what may be the last time. The threshing—how often she had toiled and sweated over those three days of dinners and suppers for twenty-two men. Now she recalled, with an aching tightness about her heart, how delicious had been her relaxation, when, the dinner dishes washed, the table reset and the kitchen in scrupulous order with the last fly vanquished, she and Nellie had luxuriated in that exquisite sense of leisure that only women know who have passed triumphantly through a heavy morning's work and have everything ready for the evening. Later there had been the stroll down to the field in the shade of the waning afternoon, to find out what time the men would be in for supper; and the sheer delight of breathing in the pungent smell of the straw as it came flying from the funnel, looking, with the sinking sun shining through it, like a million bees swarming from a hive, while the red-brown grain gushed, a lush stream, into the waiting wagon.

"It always makes me think of a ship sailing into port, Nellie," Rose had once exclaimed, "the crop coming in. It gives me a queer kind of giddiness, makes me feel like laughing and crying all at once," to which her sister-in-law had returned with more than her usual responsiveness: "Yes, it's the most excitin' time of the year, unless it's Christmas."

More nebulous were the memories of those early mornings when she had paused in the midst of getting breakfast to sniff in the clover-laden air and think how wonderful it would be if only she needn't stay in the hot, stuffy kitchen but could be free to call Bill and go picnicking or loaf deliciously under one of the big elms. Most precious of all—the evenings she and her boy had sat in the yard, with the cool south breeze blowing up from the pasture, the cows looking on placidly, the frogs fluting rhythmically in the pond, the birds chirping their good-night calls, and the dip and swell of the farm land pulling at them like a haunting tune, almost too lovely to be endured. Oh, there had been moments all the sweeter and more poignant because they had been so fleeting.

As she passed successfully through one whole round of planting, harvesting and garnering of grain, she began to realize her own ability and to be tempted more and more seriously to remain on the farm. She understood it, and Martin would have liked her to run it. If it had not been for the problem of keeping dependable hired hands and the sight of the mine-tipple, which, towering on the adjoining farm, reminded her more and more constantly of Bill, she would not even have considered the offer of Gordon Hamilton, one of Fallon's leading business men, to buy her whole section.

"There's a bunch going into this deal, together, Rose," Bert Mall explained. "They want to run a new branch of their street car line straight through here and they're going to plat this quarter into streets and lots. The rest they'll split up into several farms and rent for the present. It's a speculation, of course, but the way the mines are moving north and west it's likely this'll be a thickly settled camp in another two or three years."

"But they only offer seventy-five an acre," Rose expostulated, "and it's worth more than that as farm land. There's none around here as fertile as Martin made this—and then, all the improvements!"

"They'll have to dispose of them second-hand. It's a pity they're in exactly the wrong spot. Well, of course, I'm not advising you, Rose," he added, "but forty-five thousand ain't to be sneezed at, is it, when it comes in a lump and you own only the surface? You may wait a long while before you get another such bid. Seems to me you've worked hard enough. I'd think you'd want a rest."

In the end, Mrs. Wade capitulated to what, as Martin had foreseen so clearly, was sooner or later inevitable. She was a little stunned by the vast amount of available money now in her possession and at her disposal. "But it's all dust in my hands," she thought sadly. "What do I want of so much? It's going to be a terrible worry. I don't even know who to leave it to," and she sighed deeply, pressing her hands, with her old, characteristic gesture, to her heart. Everybody would approve, she supposed, if she left it to Rose and Frank—her niece and Martin's nephew—but she couldn't quite bring herself to welcome that idea—not yet. And anyway it might be better to divide it among more people, so that it would bring more happiness.

Her own needs were simple. The modest five-room house which she purchased was set on a pleasant paved street in Fallon and was obviously ample for her. She hoped that during part of each year she could rent the extra bed-room to some one, preferably a boy, like Bill, who was attending high school. There was a barn for her horse and the one cow she would keep, a neat little chicken-house for the twenty-five hens that would more than supply her with eggs and summer fries, and a small garage for Martin's car. It would seem very strange, she thought, to have so few things to care for and she wondered how she would fill her time, she whose one problem always had been how to achieve snatches of leisure. She saw herself jogging on and on, gradually getting to be less able on her feet, a little more helpless, until she was one of those feeble old ladies who seem at the very antipodes of the busy mothers they have been in their prime. How could it be that she who had always been in such demand, so needed, so driven by real duties, should have become suddenly such a supernumerary, so footloose, and unattached?

But when it came to that, wasn't Fallon full of others in the same circumstances? It was not an uncommon lot. There was Mrs. McMurray. Rose remembered over what a jolly household she had reigned before she, too, had lost her husband and three children instead of just one, like Billy. Two of them had been grown and married. Now she was living in a little cottage, all alone, doing sewing and nursing, yet always so brave and cheerful; not only that, but interested, really interested in living. And Mrs. Nelson. Her children were living and married and happy, but she had given up her home, sold it—the pretty place with the hospitable yard that used to seem to be fairly spilling over with wholesome, boisterous boys and chatty, beribboned little girls. She was rooming with a family, taking her meals at a restaurant, keeping up her zest in tomorrow by running a shop. She thought of how her friend, Mrs. Robinson, gracious, democratic woman of wide sympathies that she was, had lived alone after David Robinson's death, taking his place as president of the bank, during the years her only daughter, Janet, had been off at college and later travelling around the country "on the stage"—of all things for a daughter of Fallon. When hadn't the town been full of these widowed, elderly women made childless alike by life and by death? What others had met successfully, she could also, she told herself sternly, and still the old Rose, still struggling toward happiness, she tried to think with a little enthusiasm of her new life, of the things she would do for others. One recreation she would be able to enjoy to her heart's content when she moved into town—the movies. They would tide her over, she felt gratefully. When she was too lonely, she would go to them and shed her own troubles and problems by absorption in those of others. She who had been married for years and had borne two children without ever having had the joy of one overwhelming kiss, would find romance at last, for an hour, as she identified herself with the charming heroines of the films.

She was to surrender the farm and the crops as they stood in June, but as there was to be no new immediate tenant in her old house it was easily arranged that she could continue in it until the cottage in Fallon would be empty in September.

Meanwhile, preparations were begun for the new car line which would pass where the big dairy barn was standing. As the latter went down, board by board, it seemed to Mrs. Wade that this structure which, in the building, had been the sign and symbol of her surrender and heartbreak, now in its destruction, typified Martin's life. It was as if Martin, himself, were being torn limb from limb. All that he had built would soon be dust. The sound of the cement breaking under the heavy sledges, was almost more than she could bear. It was a relief to have the smaller buildings dragged bodily to other parts of the farm.

Only once before in her memory had there been such a summer and such a drought. The corn leaves burned to a crisp brown, the ground cracked and broke into cakes and dust piled high in thick, velvety folds on weeds and grass. It seemed too strange for words to see others harvest the wheat and to know that the usual crop could not be put in.

Rose was thankful when her last evening came. Most of her furniture had been moved in the morning, her boxes had left in the afternoon, and the last little accessories were now piled in the car. As, hand on the wheel, she paused a moment before starting, she was conscious of a choking sensation. It was over, finished—she, the last of Martin, was leaving it, for good. Before her rolled the quarter section, except for the little box-house, as bare of fences and buildings as when the Wades had first camped on it in their prairie schooner. With what strange prophetic vision had Martin foreseen so clearly that all the construction of his life would crumble. Would Jacob and Sarah Wade have had the courage to make all their sacrifices, she wondered, if they had known that she and she alone, daughter of a Patrick and Norah Conroy, whom they had never seen, would some day stand there profiting by it all? She thought of the mortgages in the bank and the bonds, of the easier life she seemed to be entering. How strange that she whom Grandfather and Grandmother Wade had not even known, she whom Martin had never loved, should be the one to reap the real benefits from their planning, and that the farm itself, for which her husband had been willing to sacrifice Billy and herself, should be utterly destroyed. A sudden breeze caught up some of the dust and whirling it around let it fall. "Martin's life," thought Rose, "it was like a handful of dust thrown into God's face and blown back again by the wind to the ground."

THE END