When Stud returned from Horicon there was little time to think of Tess, Early Ann, Sarah, or any other woman for the farm was up to its ears in preparation for the Rock County Fair. Three magnificent stud animals were to be entered: Napoleon, the bull; Teddy Roosevelt, the stallion; and Ulysses S. Grant, the boar.

Napoleon, the dark and silky black Jersey bull, whose pedigree covered several pages and included such ancestors as Imperial Delight, sired by Royal Edward out of Queen of the Channel Islands, looked every bit an aristocrat. National and international prize-winning blood ran in his veins. Mothers and grandmothers with amazing udders were listed on his family tree, and two or three of his bovine ancestors had sailed from the Isle of Jersey on a cattle boat named the Mayflower. With massive head and fiery eyes, he seemed to challenge the whole world to battle. In reality he was as gentle as a lamb and loved to be scratched behind the ears with a corn cob.

As for Teddy Roosevelt, the Percheron stallion, with arching neck and melodramatic proportions, undoubtedly the blood of medieval chargers ran in his veins. Sired by the pride of Normandy, and himself the sire of scores of the finest Percherons in Southern Wisconsin, he walked as though a golden armored youth were on his back and plumes behind his ears.

Finally there was Ulysses S. Grant, the mettlesome and vicious Poland China boar, who was growing more temperamental daily about his highly commercial amours. Stud often threatened to turn this valuable piece of breeding machinery into second rate ham and bacon, for as sure as some admiring farmer came ten miles with a seductive and highly amenable sow, Ulysses would sulk in his private bath of mud, capricious as a Roman emperor. There was no accounting for his taste which was usually plebeian.

But to the judges at the county fair, Ulysses was annually the sweetest thing on cloven hooves. Manicured and groomed as he always was, his pink snout pointed at a most entrancing angle, his tightly curled tail and glowing bristles the picture of health and good breeding, this porcine Apollo usually won in a walk.

"All personality and no character," was the way Stud fondly put it.

Although a cholera epidemic was rampant that summer, and Gus with pardonable pessimism predicted that Ulysses would contract the disease from sheer pig-headedness, no such thing occurred. He did acquire a singular case of temperament, however.

Like the other animals which were to be entered Ulysses was brushed, beautified and pampered for days preceding the fair, and in former years he had seemed to enjoy not only the extra corn but the effortless scratching. This year, however, he squealed with rage whenever Stud entered the pen, gleamed wickedly at his trainers out of small, blood-shot eyes, and more than once tried to annihilate his owner.

The boar's private quarters were closed off from the main pig pen by a stout, narrow gate through which one entered at his own risk. One day when Stud brought Sarah down to observe how beautifully the boar was pointing up, he started into the inner pen and was charged by the infuriated animal. Brailsford took one step backward, tripped over a trough, and falling struck his head on a stone. The next moment the boar was upon him.

Sarah seized a five-pronged manure fork which was leaning against the fence and drove it with all her strength into the shoulder of the boar, turning him at the crucial moment.

Stud leapt to his feet, one arm bleeding, and despite Sarah's cry of warning plunged barehanded into the fight. He kicked the great ringed nose again and again with his heavy boot, grabbed a large hind leg for a brief but titanic struggle to drag the beast back into his pen, at last drove him through the gate with a piece of two-by-four.

Gus and Early Ann came running. Sarah managed to use the pitch fork effectively from the top of the fence. But Stud motioned them all away. This was now his fight and he wanted to handle it alone.

To their cries that he come away Stud turned a deaf ear. Years of pent up fury went into the struggle. The boar was blind with rage yet respectful of the giant with his heavy stick. The man was filled with righteous anger against this stubborn beast and ready for a showdown. They fought and maneuvered, charged and leapt aside, the man shouting incoherently, the big animal squealing and tearing up the earth.

"I'll fix the bastard," Stud cried. His shirt was ripped. His muscles knotted and gleaming.

Again and again the boar charged and went crashing into the fence as Stud scrambled to safety. And time after time Stud brought the two-by-four crashing down between the maddened animal's eyes.

At last they were both too tired to fight. The boar lay squealing and panting in impotent rage across the pen, while Stud, proud that he could walk from the arena, smiled as he climbed the fence.

"Well, there's one blue ribbon gone to holy blazes," said Gus. "But by golly it was worth it."

2

The fight with the boar had two immediate consequences: Sarah suffered a nervous collapse, and Ulysses S. Grant, although carefully tended, proved conclusively that he would not be prize-winning material for the fall of 1913.

It was the veterinarian who was called first and later the family doctor.

"Now don't you worry about me," Sarah said. "I'm all right. You just take care of Ulysses and go on getting ready for the fair. I don't need to go this year."

"Why, I couldn't go without you, Mother," Stud said, "and ... and without Ulysses."

Old Doc Carlyle, the vet who had tended Ulysses ever since he was a small, squealing red suckling, shook his head sadly. He had a genuine fondness for the vicious old boar and had always claimed that he would make blue ribbon material.

"You hadn't ought to beat no dumb animal like you beat Ulysses," he told Stud. "It ain't Christian."

The less efficient and far more callous general practitioner, Doctor Whitehead, who came to see Sarah, took her pulse with his inch-thick stem-winder and as usual lost count at eleven. He took her temperature with a thermometer which had not been properly sterilized in three years, and looked down her throat with a spoon.

He pooh-poohed her fear that she had been internally injured during the fight with the boar.

"Probably some female ailment," he insisted, shaking several harmless pink powders onto papers which he folded deftly and left upon the dresser. "You ain't bad off. You'll be up and around in no time."

Sarah watched a spider making his web in the corner of the ceiling. She continued to watch him long after the doctor's Ford could no longer be heard down the road.

"Spin your pretty web," she told him. "I won't brush it down. I'm just going to let myself be sick. I reckon I got a right to lie back and be sick one time in my life."

3

Stud tried to straighten his back at the end of the row. The sweat poured from his temples and the grizzled creases of his stubbled cheeks. The pain went in wide, flat bands down the heavy muscles on either side of his spine.

It was weakness to show this pain. One must laugh, throw down the shining tobacco hatchet beside the shagbark hickory, snatch up the heavy, brown-earthenware jug, tip it deftly over the shoulder and slosh long, cool swigs of cider down one's parched and dusty throat.

"Uuufff, Uuuggg," said the big tobacco harvester, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve and spitting into the dust. "Sure tastes good, don't it?"

"Fair to middling," said Gus.

"It's darn good cider," said Ansel Ottermann, "even iffen it is full of rotten apples and worms and such."

"Don't need to drink no more than you like," said Stud, holding the jug just out of Ansel's reach. "Is it good cider or ain't it?"

"It's good cider," Ansel said.

The almanac had predicted early frost that year, and although the entire family scoffed at almanac predictions Stud had cleaned and sharpened his tobacco axes, suckered his tobacco plants, cleaned out the sheds and gathered together a crew.

On the stroke of six one hazy blue Indian summer morning the noisy crowd of farmers and men from Brailsford Junction began the backbreaking labor. Up one row and down the next went the sweating workers. The left hand grasped the stalk, the right sent the tobacco hatchet cleanly through the heavy-fibered stem. Flash, flash went the bright steel in the sunlight.

"Great crop this year," said Vern Barton. "Just heft them stalks."

"Too darned good a crop," growled Gus. "I got a crick in my back like a he-dog in April."

"That's what you get gallivantin' around nights," said Stud. The men laughed.

"How you do talk," said Gus. "You know I ain't took a girl into a haymow for twenty years."

"How about a cornfield?" Stud asked.

Laths tipped with steel were spudded through the butt ends of the stalks—five or six plants to each lath. The tobacco was then loaded upon wagons and hauled to the sheds. Men climbed nimbly among the poles hanging the heavily laden laths, tier upon tier. The hot, suffocating air was pungent with the smell of green tobacco.

The thick, moss-green leaves were soft and heavy as velvet to the touch. Later they would be brown and brittle. Still later, when to the vast excitement of the countryside "case" weather began, they would be fine and pliable as thin brown leather.

The swallows had gathered long weeks before, and, as though at some invisible signal sent along the thousands of miles of wire on which they were mobilized, had left over night for the south. The fields were strewn with yellowing pumpkins and swelling hubbard squashes, knobbed, burly, and deep green. The first ducks were dropping in from the north. Soon it would be time for the Rock County Fair.

As fair week approached, however, Stud announced his decision to remain at home. He declared that since Ulysses and Sarah were both laid up, Peter still thrashing, and Early Ann of necessity tied to the housework, he too would pass up the event of the year.

He looked over the fence into the pen of Ulysses S. Grant and shook his head sadly.

"We're just a couple of darned old fools!"

"Oink," said the boar.

"First fair you and me have missed in five years."

The boar sighed gustily and lay down in his consoling bath of mud.

Stud helped Gus give the bull and stallion their final beauty treatments, loaded the big bull into the wagon, and hitched the Percheron on behind. Early Ann gave the bow of blue ribbon on the stallion's tail a final twist and pat. Stud slipped Gus a twenty dollar bill. And off went the shining green wagon, its bright yellow wheels looking like huge sunflowers as they flashed in the sunlight. The tug links played a merry tune, the stallion whinnied gently, while Stud and Early Ann cheered the debonair farm hand on his way.

"You better bring home some cups and ribbons," Early Ann called after the retreating cavalcade.

"Trust me," shouted Gus, waving his derby.

The girl and man stood as if entranced until they could no longer hear the rattle of the wagon, and until the dust had settled on the roadway.

4

Sarah continued to feel ailing despite pink powders, herb tea, and a highly advertised variety of vegetable compound.

The work was thrown completely upon the shoulders of Early Ann. Stud would have been blind not to have noticed how well she bore up under this burden and how gladly she cared for Sarah. The girl could cook as fine a meal as he had ever tasted, and be as gay and fresh after hours over the cook stove as when she came clicking down the stairs with the chamber pots at four in the morning.

She never asked Stud to kill chickens for her. She went to the chicken house herself, chased down a pair of plump friers, and chopped off their heads without more ado. These she scalded, plucked, singed, drew, washed in cold well water, rolled in egg and flour, and fried to a crisp golden brown. It made Stud's mouth fairly water to think of those chicken dinners: hot biscuits, mashed potatoes, lots of chicken gravy, coffee with Jersey cream, and hot mince pie for dessert.

Such roasts, fries and stews! Such homemade bread, dumplings, pies and cakes! Her cooking was better than hotel dinners, Stud averred. There was a tang to everything she cooked and everything she did.

Stud had never before been completely aware of the work a woman must do around a farm. He had rather thought that Sarah was having the best of the bargain all these years. Now, perversely, he was conscious of every task a farm-wife must perform.

He noticed how from Monday morning when she started pumping cistern water for the week's washing, until Saturday night when she put over water for baths Early Ann never sat down to rest. He noticed particularly how clean she kept the house and milk house; how shining and sweet-smelling were the milk pails and separator; how the meals were always on the dot and the dishes cleared away promptly after the meal. She canned, churned, carried in cords of wood.

Stud found himself wondering if there were not some way to heat flatirons save over a roaring cook stove. Somehow the mountains of dishes seemed unnecessary.

But Early Ann did not complain. She sang as she worked.

Watching her now, as with hair and dress blowing she fed five hundred snowy chickens, Stud told himself she was a "darned good hired girl and would make some lucky fellow a good wife."

The phone rang two longs and three shorts the following Saturday. It was Gus calling jubilantly from Janesville. He had squandered a quarter to inform the family that Napoleon was not only the greatest Jersey bull in the county, but, according to the judges who awarded him a silver loving cup, the greatest bull of any variety. Teddy, the stallion, had won a blue ribbon, while Sarah's raspberry preserves had been judged the best in their class. Peter's pumpkin was three pounds and four ounces heavier than its nearest rival, and Gus had won a kewpie doll for Early Ann by hitting a nigger baby with a baseball.

Stud could hear the subdued exclamations from every kitchen on the party line.

"But I didn't get nothing in the wood-chopping contest," Gus complained. "I got licked seven-ways-for-Sunday by a lady from East Fulton."

The family celebrated with homemade ice cream eaten in Sarah's bedroom.

That evening at dusk a storm arose. Lightning quivered along the horizon, and a wind sprang up. Early Ann, throwing her apron over her head to protect it from the spattering drops, hurried down to the old mill to get in a late brood of chicks raised by the fierce old one-legged hen who every summer stole her nest.

As she reached the doorway of the mill Joe Valentine grabbed her around the waist and put a large, hairy hand over her mouth. He pulled her into the dark building and began talking to her in a hoarse whisper.

"You're my step daughter," he said. "You're coming with me."

She bit his fingers in fury and cried out for help, but the moaning of the wind and the rush of the rain muffled her words. She forgot all the nice ways and pretty talk she had learned from Sarah Brailsford and kicked and fought and swore.

"I'll scratch your eyes out, Joe!"

"You're my girl. You ran away from me." He nursed his bitten hand.

"I'll tell everybody how you treated Maw."

"Come along now." He tried to pull her toward the door, then stopped. "I was good to your maw," he said.

"You killed her," the girl cried. "You made her take in washings, and ... and worse."

"You can't teach an old cat new tricks."

"You killed her," Early Ann shouted.

"Shut your mouth, you little bastard," Joe said.

He tried to kiss her and she began to fight again. He slapped her face methodically a dozen times.

"You're my girl," Joe said. "You're my step daughter, and you ain't eighteen yet."

"I am eighteen," she panted. "Let me go, Joe." She sunk her teeth into his arm while he screamed.

"Now you're going to get it," he said. He ripped her dress and bent her backward until she thought he would break her back. Then she went limp and did not fight any more, but nothing happened. A moment later he flung her away.

"You ain't any good to me, either," he said with a great, wistful sigh. She saw his face in a flash of lightning. There was no lust there nor anger. A cat rubbed against her leg purring loudly.

She went out past the man who did not try to stop her. She hurried through the rain toward the hollow of lantern light which was approaching.

"Are you all right, Early Ann?" Stud cried. He came running and held up the lantern to look at her. He saw the torn dress and disheveled hair.

"Who was it?" he cried. "Where is he?"

She shook her head.

"You know, but you won't tell."

"Yes."

He pushed past her angrily and went into the mill holding the lantern high. He snatched up a piece of iron pipe and plunged through the dark rooms shouting. A cat rubbed against him, a big black fellow. Stud heard laughter out in the storm, hurried out into the rain, but could find no one.

In the kitchen once more he threw off his wet jacket, hung up the lantern, took Early Ann by the shoulders and tried to make her meet his eyes.

"You're not my daughter," he said. "I ... I could...."

"No, Mr. Brailsford, please!" She was crying quietly.

He let his hands drop from her shoulders, turned and looked out through the black, dripping window toward the lake. He could hear the waves rushing up on the shore and breaking, the wind soughing through the elms and maples. He thought of Sarah lying pale and weak on her bed, and he thought of the robust girl standing in the lamp light behind him.

Very deliberately he left the kitchen and climbed the narrow, dark stairs to his bed.

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BOOK THREE

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