Sarah Brailsford hurried through the April downpour holding her lantern with its shining reflector high above her and picking her way among the puddles which gleamed in the lantern light. Now and then she would stop to listen or would hallo in her sweet, anxious voice, "Stanley! Oh, Stan!"

The lantern cast gigantic shadows behind each boulder, fence-post and clump of hazel bushes as she splashed along between the rushing buggy ruts with an unreasonable panic in her heart. The willow branches from the trees beside the ditch whipped wetly across her face and shoulders. She brushed them aside without stopping and crossed the bridge over the flooded creek.

She lowered her head to fight the mounting wind, and labored up the hill through muddy torrents until she stood at last beneath the giant cottonwood with half the world below her. Then as she rested, panting from her climb, the distant lightning flared and the panic left her.

There lay the lake she had known since she was a child, the marshes, the great banks of peat, the far dark mound covered with oak trees which was Charley's Bluff, the limestone cliff at Lake House Point rising white and majestic above the black, rain-swept waters. The fields and woods and rivers of Wisconsin lay all about her like the walls of home.

She hurried on now, certain that she would find him, knowing that any moment she might hear the clop, clop of the horse's hooves and the creaking of the light spring wagon. And she was not surprised when at the turn of the road she heard his deep, full voice which even now that she had reached her forty-third year could move her. The man was roaring a hymn above the storm.

But she was not prepared for the sight which greeted her eyes when the lightning flashed again. Stud Brailsford was between the thills where the horse should have been, trotting through the rain, singing and hatless. The rain was in his graying curls and running down his face. He looked a giant in the lantern light.

"Stanley! Stanley! what's happened? And who's that in the wagon? You'll both catch your death."

She rushed to meet them crying out her surprise, and before her husband could answer had lifted the lantern to look into the eyes of the drenched girl on the wagon seat, eyes very bright and expectant, curls the color of straw bursting from under a wide-brimmed picture hat from which drooped two dilapidated ostrich plumes. The girl of perhaps eighteen straightened under Sarah's gaze.

"Lightning struck Old Peg," the man explained, "so I played horse for Early Ann."

It's after midnight, Sarah thought. He's come from town with a strange girl, and....

"You must be about tuckered out," she said.

"Me, tuckered?" The big man laughed. "You should have seen me come up Gravel Store Hill."

"He's a good horse," the girl said. Her laughter was deep and unexpected. Her voice strangely rich for one so young.

"Get up in the wagon with the girl and put your coat around her."

Worrying about the child instead of me, thought Sarah climbing over the wheel to the wagon seat. She shared her rain coat with the shivering girl and warmed her with her own body, while Stanley Brailsford, with the strength of a stallion, pulled them both along the road, splashing and singing.

At last the girl ceased to shiver. She tilted her hat and pillowed her head upon the older woman's shoulder. And there she rested until Brailsford cried, "Here we are!"

And so it was that Early Ann Sherman came to the Brailsford farm on Crab Apple Point in the dairy country of southern Wisconsin in April of the year 1913.

2

Stud Brailsford was a breeder famed throughout southern Wisconsin. He had a Poland China boar, a Jersey bull, and a Percheron stallion which were the talk of the countryside. He had cornfed sows which looked like minor blimps wallowing in his pig yards and scratching their ample backs against mail-order scratching posts which turned like screws twisting sinuous curls of soothing grease upward to salve the noble porcine flanks; soft-eyed Jersey cows whose pedigrees compared favorably with that of any reigning monarch; Shetland ponies, Shropshire sheep, and a small herd of goats.

On the little pond which lay like a blue mirror in a hollow between the hills a quarter of a mile north of the house he had tame geese, three varieties of tame ducks, as well as wild mallards, pintails, redheads, and canvasbacks brought home wounded from the fall duck hunting, clipped and kept to propagate more of their species. Wild Canadian geese he also had whose honking overhead in the short flights they essayed about the farm had all the fierce challenge of their kind, all the longing for distant marshes, and the fire of spring.

For spring was upon the land—

Spring had come rushing up the Mississippi valley out of the warm Gulf states, out of the bayous and river bottoms bringing the fragrance of wet earth and leaf mold, the sweet smell of sap running in the maples, the acrid smells of dung and marshland. At Rock Island, Illinois, spring, and the wild fowl, had turned off the main stream to follow the Rock River valley up through Rockford, Beloit, Janesville, until at last with a final onslaught they had taken Lake Koshkonong and the farms and oak woods along its shores.

Overnight wildflowers bloomed on the hills, buttercups, anemones, dog violets, real violets, and the gaudy dandelions which children held beneath each other's chins to discover with great certainty who did and who did not like butter. Pickerel began to run up the creeks and back into the marshy bays of the lake; the little streams were flooded, and furry buds no larger than the ears of mice began to show on the black, gnarled branches of the oak trees.

And spring to Stanley Brailsford meant plowing.

"Hi up there, Bess!" he shouted. "Get a move on, Jinny."

He guided the plow with one hand for a moment, using the other to slap the reins sharply across the sweating flanks of the team of mares. He turned them with an expert grace at the end of the furrow, went down along the fencerow and around the outer edge of the field.

A dozen white chickens, two or three bold robins, and Shep, the mischievous young farm dog followed the furrow in an absurd parade. The birds were greedy for the pink angle-worms, fat, purple night-crawlers, and succulent grubs. The dog delighted in making the chickens leap six feet into the air with playful passes at their proud white tails.

"Get along you lazy hunks of horseflesh," Stud told the team. "Pretty near time we had this twenty planted. What you horses going to eat next winter, sawdust?"

He stopped for a moment to wipe his forehead with his red bandana pulled from the voluminous depths of his overalls pocket, gazed back over the neatly pleated acres of moist, black soil to the meadow beyond, and to the sandy beach of the big lake beyond that. A pickerel splashed in the shallow water.

"Holy Moses, that must've weighed twenty pounds," Stud told the dog.

Even the fish were frisky today. Shep was frisky and so was Stud. Ulysses S. Grant was acting like a wild boar, Napoleon more like a Texas longhorn than a Jersey, while Admiral Dewey, the Shetland pony stallion was the worst of the lot.

The Admiral had a habit of biting bigger horses' legs, then leaping about, prancing and whinnying. Stud knew it was a bad policy to let a stallion run loose in the pasture but he couldn't find it in his heart to shut the little rascal in the barn. The Admiral and Mrs. Dewey were the happiest married couple he had ever seen. They had been running together for five years now. Five pony colts had made Mrs. Dewey look a bit matronly, but the little Stallion was still a holy terror.

"Sarah's a bit like Mrs. Dewey," thought the man. "Quiet, and good and sort of sweet. But me, I'm like the Admiral."

The dinner bell cut across his thoughts with its distant hollow clangor, now full and near as the breeze brought it directly to his ears, now remote and thin as the wind veered. The horses pricked up their ears and stamped impatiently, Stud, whistling loudly and merrily, unsnapped the tugs and clucked. Released from their dragging burden the team trotted over the soft earth at such a pace that Stud Brailsford had to break into a run; and the three of them, the two beasts and the man, came into the barnyard in a whirl of leaping, screeching chickens, hissing ganders, and the hearty hallo of Early Ann.

3

On the broad kitchen stoop Brailsford scraped the black dirt from his shoes, then, whistling, went in to wash. Sarah hurried to prime the cistern pump which wheezed and creaked as it gushed forth a clear stream of clean-smelling rain water. He scrubbed face and hands with a coarse yellow soap, dried himself vigorously on the crash roller-towel, ran the family comb through his curls, and hesitated for a second to look at himself in the uneven glass of the old walnut-framed mirror.

What he saw evidently pleased him: clear blue eyes which could laugh or be very angry, wrinkles at the outer corners more from smiling than from squinting into the sun, a two-days' growth of heavy black stubble over cheeks both ruddy and tan, a good, straight English nose which went oddly but well with the slightly spoiled, pouting mouth; good teeth, a high forehead which bulged at the temples, but was in no way out of proportion to the leonine head with its mass of graying curls. He pulled at his jowls tentatively. No use shaving until Sunday morning.

"Thought you rang the dinner bell, Sarah," he said smilingly as the hot, somewhat harassed woman shuttled back and forth from the roaring cook stove to the kitchen table. "Guess we'll have time for a tune."

He crossed the wide, low-ceilinged room to the graphophone on the big desk under the north window, pushed aside mail-order catalogues, the ten-pound family Bible and back numbers of farm magazines, gave the little crank a dozen turns, and from a homemade box studded with big wooden pegs drew a heavy cylinder record.

"Edison record," the huge tin horn painted like a tiger lily bragged in a cracked barytone. "For I Picked a Lemon in the Garden of Love Where They Say Only Peaches Grow...."

"You play that just to tease me," the woman said. She spoke softly and indulgently as a mother might speak to a mischievous child.

Early Ann came in with an armload of smoothly split oak and hickory which she dumped into the wood box. Her strong round arms looked very capable for the task and there was something delightful about the disarray of her blond curls and the little beads of perspiration on her forehead. Her movements were effortless and unstudied.

Stanley found himself perplexed. Where had he seen the girl before, years ago? There was a momentary flash of moonlight and willow trees, but the vision evaded him. He gave up the puzzling problem as Gus, the hired man, came in from the barns.

"It's hawg cholera this time all right," announced the excruciatingly ugly man. "I don't doubt every one of them Poland Chinas'll be dead by next Sunday."

"That ain't hog cholera, and you know it," said Stud.

"Well, if it ain't it ought to be," said Gus, slouching into his chair at the table. "I'm plumb sick of them hawgs."

"They're good hogs," Stud said. "What's the matter with 'em?"

"Matter!" said Gus. "There's plenty the matter. You treat 'em better than you treat your hired help, that's what's the matter. I'll probably be sittin' up all night with that sow holding a hoof and takin' her temperature."

"It's better company than you usually keep nights," said Stud.

"There you go again," Gus complained, "always accusing me of being out nights. You know as well as I do that I ain't courted a girl in twenty years."

"And with all the girls from Brailsford Junction to the Fort raring around like mares in heat every time they get sight of you."

"Hush, Stanley," said Sarah, "don't forget Early Ann."

"She'll just have to get used to us, Sarah," Stanley said. "She'll have to get used to the way we talk around here."

"Ain't we going to eat sometime today?" Gus asked. "I thought I heard the dinner bell."

"There, the duck's just done," said Sarah. She slipped it deftly onto the willow-ware platter.

"Duck on a Saturday?" asked Stud with mild surprise. He viewed the sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, the great bowl of gravy, baked apples, bread-and-butter pickles, the pile of hot homemade bread in thick slices, the apple and gooseberry pies and large graniteware pot of coffee with something like lust.

"Duck on a week-day?"

"You know Peter came home today. He.... Oh, Stanley, he's quit school! He said he couldn't stand it another day."

"And so we kill the fatted calf," said Stanley quietly. "Well, why doesn't he come to dinner? What's keeping him?"

"He's upstairs changing into his overalls. You might as well begin."

She stopped half way between the stove and table as Stud began the blessing. She cast her eyes down as the words ran on.... "God is great and God is good, and we thank Him for this food...." She saw the wide pine boards of the kitchen, worn white and smooth from years of scrubbing. Then she shut her eyes and said a little prayer of her own for Peter and for Stanley Brailsford.

4

Something was troubling young Peter Brailsford, something he couldn't quite get at or understand. He wasn't at all certain why he had run away from school in Brailsford Junction, or why he had come home instead of hooking a freight for Chicago as he had originally planned.

He hated school, and the farm, and most of all himself. He hated all the girls in the world. He was shy in the presence of his father, and sometimes felt a flare of impatience, almost dislike for the older man. He had left the dinner table quietly, slipped on a sweater patched at the elbows, glad to be away from the hired man's teasing, from his mother's over-solicitous love.

He strode across the lawn, leaped the fence, and started up the lane to look for the ponies, wondering in his mind who this new girl could be, thinking of the hot, angry scene in the Principal's office when he had announced that he was quitting, remembering how he had thrown his books into the creek, and jumped on his new red motorcycle, wild to be feeling the wind in his hair.

But even the thought of that happy, rebellious ride on his fine fast motorcycle with its shining nickel headlight and bright red mudguards was not enough to keep his mind from running hot with the vague injustices of the world. He kicked viciously at the tall dandelions and convenient lumps of dirt. Yet he could not have told precisely what it was that angered him, nor why the great peaceful spring had not caught him up as it had the rest of the world to warm his blood.

He'd show them! He'd show everybody! All the stuck-up town kids with their smart ways, all the girls, Stanley, his mother, Gus, everybody!

There was a great deal wrong with the world young Peter thought. Much that could be better. He had never noticed before he went away to high school how his father and the hired man bullied his mother with their laughing banter, nor how cluttered the parlor was with its stuffed birds.

Momentarily he hated every inch of it: the stink of the barnyards, the cruelties of birth and death forever taking place about the farm; Gus the lecherous hired hand whispering to him of secret pleasures,—Gus forever proclaiming his hatred for women yet tearing out the underwear-clad wenches in the mail-order catalogues to hide in his bureau drawer.

Then with the inconsistency of youth in springtime Peter forgot his troubles upon seeing Lake Koshkonong spread out before him, flecked with whitecaps in the sun. He forgot his hatred for school, his contempt for farming. He cut himself a thorn stick and swished it through the deepening grass, whistled "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and with an awkward attempt at the tango whirled and bent and thumped his feet holding his visionary partner with a grace which he imagined would have shamed Vernon Castle.

He clapped for an encore, bowed deeply to the girl, then feeling in his pockets found fish-hooks, sinkers, and dead night crawlers. "I'll go fishing catfish," he thought with excitement. "I'll get me some dead minnies, some rotten liver, and some clams."

Swinging along the lane, throwing stones at sparrows and adventurous woodchucks, he came at last to the back pasture covered with hazel bushes, sumac and thorn-apple trees. He made his way along the cowpaths calling the ponies, looking behind the clumping elderberry bushes until at last he came upon them.

The little Admiral ran up whinnying to nuzzle for the sugar lumps Peter usually carried, and there beyond stood the patient mare guarding her new-born colt, the wickedest-looking little fellow who ever tried to scamper on unsteady legs.

He had been licked as clean as down and his small black hooves were as bright as jewels in the wet grass. The mare regarded him with troubled eyes and every now and again ran her wide nostrils over his flanks tenderly. So this was why the mare hadn't come down to the barnyard that morning! Peter slipped his arms under the warm pony colt to carry him home. The mare patiently followed.