In the early autumn of 1913 a French flyer looped the loop to the amazement of an incredulous world. More troops were ordered to the Mexican border. In Chicago the Bon Ton girls were the last word in burlesque. Smart horses wore bobbed tails and well-cropped manes. Forty-four thousand eight hundred tons of dynamite tore away the barrier at the Pacific end of the Panama Canal while Shriners cheered. Prime favorites on the piano rolls were "Good-bye Boys," "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine" and "You're a Great Big Blue-Eyed Baby." Wheat sold at around ninety cents in Chicago with hogs close to nine dollars. Aunt Martha of the Needle Notes column found that one could cut whalebone to any desired length by warming it first before the fire. German and American yachts raced off Marblehead, and Lieutenant Governor Thomas Morris of Wisconsin told an attentive audience that never again would his fair state become a coaling station for Wall Street, nor a water tank for the Rockefeller and Morgan interests.

But to Peter Brailsford, impatient with his youth; torn with fear of God, of hell, and of sex; romantic, inexperienced, wistful; anxious to get ahead in the world, yet essentially unworldly; intolerant, rebellious, headstrong; filled with hatreds, jealousies, and a morbid interest in death; saddled with concepts of duty, patriotism, and courage which were fatal to millions of his generation; big, clumsy, lovable; obsessed with the idea that he was only a country boy; almost as supersensitive as Sarah and nearly as lusty as Stud; fine, intelligent, mechanically minded, and above all a considerate and good hearted young fellow....

To this healthy but unhappy product of English ancestry, Methodist theology, and the American public school system the tumult of the outer world meant little compared to the tumult within his brain.

Now, striding along Main Street in greasy coveralls, glowering at the Saturday afternoon sun through eyes dark with anger, kicking defiantly through drifts of yellow elm leaves, flaunting rebellion and stubborn pride at every step, he was just a kid coming home from work at the "Trailer" to those he met; but to himself, Peter was quite naturally the center of the Universe.

He would show the world and particularly Mike O'Casey and the front office gang what sort of a boy they had greasing their trailers. He would invent some new and world-revolutionizing trailer which would make them pop-eyed with amazement. And when he had been made vice-president of the company he would call Bud Spillman into his office and dismiss him with great dignity.

Peter told himself that he was talking nonsense and acting like an unbroken yearling. He knew that he should be the happiest boy in the world and should thank God for his good fortune. Nevertheless as he elbowed his way through clots of gossiping farmers whose rigs and Fords lined Main Street he knew that he was far from being happy.

Maybe life in town wasn't so perfect after all. Perhaps after he had taken a crack at this trailer job.... But no. He would never go back to the farm. Not even if he could be thrashing boss every year with twenty men under him. He would stick it out greasing trailers until the day he died. Bud Spillman or anyone else couldn't whip Peter Brailsford.

He stopped before the Bentley Brothers' Hardware store, irrepressibly drawn by the beautiful stag and pearl-handled jack-knives in the window, and remembered the jack-knife he had stolen from a boy at country school and how he had known that God had seen him steal the knife, and how for days he went in constant dread that God would strike him dead for his sin. He still had an overwhelming desire for pearl-handled jack-knives. He remembered how he had thought that eternal damnation was not too great a price to pay for that shining knife, which was as cool and smooth as slippery elm between his fingers.

Looking in at the hardware store window cluttered with milk pails, muskrat traps, fish poles, pitchforks and spades he suddenly caught sight of his own offensive image in the glass: ears that stuck out on either side of his head like sails, a thatch of dark, unruly curls which would never stay combed, big brown calf's eyes which might have graced a Jersey heifer, and pouting lips.

He wondered how anyone could look so ugly. "What you need," he said irrelevantly, "is a good swift kick in the pants." Undoubtedly, with a face like that, he was getting more than he deserved from a most generous world.

He began to count his blessings, unconvinced but hopeful. He was away from the farm at last, had freedom, a job, and a room in town. His third weekly paycheck of twenty-two dollars and fifty cents was in his pocket. He had a girl who some day might give him a kiss, and a dapper little employer, Mike O'Casey, whom he admired beyond all power of expression.

Still he was miserable.

The very eminence of O'Casey was deflating to Peter. How could a country lout with big feet and clumsy red hands ever hope to reach such pinnacles of success? The president of O'Casey Trailers was not only a man of the world, a fine mechanic, an inventor of proven genius, a baritone soloist, and a buck and wing dancer. He was also the most popular and best dressed man in town. Peter bet that nobody in New York's Four Hundred was better looking or a classier dresser.

The boy leaned against the hitching rail and sighed as his hero went roaring past in his big red car with cutout open. Peter wished that Mr. O'Casey would turn and nod, but no such miracle occurred.

Peter asked himself what he was mooning about. But he knew all too well. Bud Spillman, out of all the hundreds of thousands of possible men, had been made his straw-boss at the "Trailer." Peter remembered once when he was going to kill Bud Spillman. He had waited for hours behind the Methodist church with a piece of pipe. He had stood all that he could possibly stand from the bully, had been kicked in the stomach when he was down, had been insulted in the showers before all the other boys, had had his clothes tied in knots in the locker room, and his tennis shoes filled with tacks.

He had stood in the cold behind the Methodist church waiting for Spillman who usually took that short cut home. He had envisioned just how the bully would look when he lay there pale and dead, and he had planned all his own actions: what he would do if he were chased, and where he would jump the freight which was to take him from Brailsford Junction forever. A wishful little song from childhood echoed and re-echoed in his brain:

"Moonlight, starlight,
I guess the bears ain't out tonight."

But Bud had gone home another way.

And now, out of all the possible fellows in Brailsford Junction, Bud Spillman had been made his straw-boss. Bud, his rival for Maxine, and his instinctive enemy since childhood.

Ruthaford S. Spillman, Bud's father, and owner of the biggest livery stable in Brailsford Junction had been one of the twenty backers who had put up money with which O'Casey had built his factory. It had been a snap for Bud to get the job.

Peter's adventure had started so auspiciously that he could scarcely believe this new turn of events. He had come steaming into town sixty miles an hour on his motorcycle, dressed in his best serge suit and wearing his brightest tie. After an hour of agony and anticipation he had been ushered into the awe-inspiring offices of president Mike O'Casey.

"Know anything about trailers?" asked O'Casey.

"No, but I could learn."

"Is that your motorcycle out in front?"

"Yes sir."

"Can you take'er apart and put'er together?"

"You're darned right I can ... I mean, yes sir. And I know all about Fords and thrashing machines."

Mr. O'Casey smiled at the serious, eager young man before him.

"I'm seventeen going on eighteen," Peter said.

"I guess you'll do, Kid."

Peter walked out, floating on air.

He started work the next morning and was temporarily assigned to the paint shop where a shipment of the crude semi-trailers of that day, based on the early Martin patents, were being painted a snowy white for a Chicago milk company. He was clever with a brush and soon acquired the knack of enameling and varnishing without leaving a sag or a brush mark. All went well until the second week when Bud Spillman came to work at the "Trailer." From that moment on Peter was miserable.

"So you wanted a job as a mechanic?" asked Bud. "I'll see what I can do."

Several days later Peter was transferred to the assembly plant where from morning until night he greased trailers and plant machinery. Bud promised to have him cleaning out toilets and spittoons by the end of the month.

To hell with all of them! Some day Brailsford Junction would wake up to the fact that Peter was a genius. They would go around telling anecdotes of his youth, and laugh about the time he quit school, told "Indian Face" Bolton where he could go, and tossed his school books into the creek. He would invent an "equalizer" to take the "whip" out of the action between car and trailer. He would make a half a million dollars and would live in a large house on Shannon's Hill with Maxine Larabee and their many children.

The day began to brighten all about him as he dreamed. The farmers and their wives looked more kindly, the girls more handsome and the men more noble. By the time Peter had reached the Brailsford Junction National Bank he was noticing how blue the sky seemed overhead, how bright the leaves, how keen the wood-smoke in the air. Not even the appearance of the prissy Mr. Clarence Bolton, principal of the Brailsford Junction high school of recent and unpleasant memory could take the sunshine out of this newly discovered Saturday afternoon.

Peter stopped to admire a brace of mallards which Hank Vetter the butcher was just taking from his Ford roadster. Hank said that in his opinion Mike O'Casey was a card and highly worthy of the admiration of every young man in town. In front of the pool hall, men sat on the hitching rail watching the farm girls go by. Cats dreamed happily on piles of fresh vegetables in the grocery store windows. The loafers sitting on the steps of the cigar store spat idly at the wooden Indian.

In Peter's new frame of mind even Old Man Mulroy who was teaching his bow-legged grandson to say "God damn" before a highly appreciative male audience in front of the livery stable, was mildly amusing on this day.

"Dod damn," said the toddler.

The men slapped their thighs and guffawed.

Old Man Mulroy, drooling tobacco juice at the corners of his toothless mouth, grinned slyly.

A job in town. A paycheck in his pocket. The boy whistled gayly as he marched along.

He looked in over the swinging half-doors of the Red Moon Bar and felt that the time would never come when he would be twenty-one and could stand with one foot on the brass rail and drink with the rest of the men. A new and brilliant bock-beer billy goat was charging out of a sign on the back wall. A large red bull, and a superior cowboy rolling a cigarette with one hand advertised a well-known brand of cigarette tobacco.

Peter wished that he dared to smoke on the street. He wished quite violently that he could roll a cigarette with one hand like the superior cowboy in the picture.

He paused before the Palace theater where he examined the bright billboards displaying a serial queen poised in midair between precipice and precipice, another view of the same harassed young woman to whom the villain was touching a torch, while the hero of the affair looked on calmly from his rearing mount.

Life was very full and romantic, thought Peter Brailsford. He realized that he could see every movie that came to Brailsford Junction without making the least impression upon his nearly inexhaustible weekly stipend. He could even buy himself a new suit and some dazzling new ties.

A room of his own, no school work. He could skip church and Sunday School if he wished.

But no, he could not. A momentary cloud passed over his sunny landscape as Peter came abreast of the Dingle Brothers' General Store into which Temperance Crandall was just disappearing. He really liked the fussy creature even if she did make him go to church, knit him wristlets which he dared not wear and equally dared not refuse, brought him soapstones on chilly autumn nights, and saw that his flannel nightgown was warmed before the base burner before he went to bed. But he did wish that she would be a little less curious as to where he went evenings and what time he got in.

Rooms were scarce in Brailsford Junction with the "Trailer" booming. Peter had taken what he could get. He could abide the games of Authors and Flinch played with Temperance and her mother in the latter's upstairs bedroom, with the oil heater making weird patterns of light and shadow on the ceiling, and the kerosene lamp spluttering. But he did not like to be crossquestioned about Maxine Larabee.

"Maxine Larabee!" He rolled the syllables over his tongue and felt the excitement that even her name produced. How delicate and fine and unattainable she was. He felt like a great clumsy oaf beside her. He felt as awkward and shy as the boys in the milling stag corner at the Firemen's Ball.

He only asked to be allowed to watch her from a distance, to wait outside the library hoping that she would speak to him, or to wander disconsolately back and forth before her house, wondering which room was hers, wishing that some marauder might attempt to break in so that he could prove his love by cracking the fellow over the head.

Love-sick and divinely miserable he walked the streets at night listening to the wind in the trees, holding imaginary conversations with his beloved, devising tests and trials for his devotion. Sometimes the sweet pain of his affliction seemed more than he could bear. But when he had a chance to speak to her there was nothing of this he could express. He was apt to be rough and boisterous, or merely shy and dumb.

His emotions could scarcely have been phrased by Shakespeare nor captured in music by Beethoven, yet the most that found utterance was:

"Gee, you look swell tonight."

Coming upon her as he rounded the corner at Main Street and Albion he managed a loud and joyous greeting. But Maxine had no answering shout. She took one look at his greasy coveralls, his blackened hands and face, then turned away. She did not speak as she passed.

2

At the iron sink in the Crandall kitchen Peter Brailsford labored to remove the dirt and grease so offensive to the eyes of Maxine Larabee. He scoured with violence, grimly pleased by the stinging of his outraged skin and the smart of the soap in his eyes. He scowled at himself in the broken mirror, scrubbed his ears until they burned, wiped the last trace of his recent shame on Temperance Crandall's roller towel and was running a comb through his wet curls when Early Ann burst radiantly through the kitchen door followed by the less impulsive Gus.

"Early Ann! Gus!" cried the young fellow.

"Peter! Peter!" cried the girl. "I've inherited a farm. We'll all go to the movies."

"Not really?" said the astonished Peter as Early Ann danced him in mad circles about the kitchen.

"Really," said Early Ann. "And it's been sold, and I've got the three hundred dollars above the mortgage."

"Look out," cried the hired man. But his warning came too late. They had jarred the lamp from its shelf, and it fell with a crash scattering glass all over the kitchen floor.

At this inopportune moment Temperance Crandall returned from shopping. She had been cheated two cents on eggs, sniggered at by the pool hall gang, and despite two trips the length of Main Street had not caught so much as a glimpse of Timothy Halleck. Now she discovered her kitchen strewn with glass. Early Ann had her hat over one eye, Peter's shirt tail was out, and Gus was studying the floor.

"I didn't mean to," said Gus. "I was just hunting for some matches for my pipe."

"Didn't mean to," mimicked Temperance. "Didn't mean to. Well you'd just better get busy and clean up that mess."

"Yes, mam," said Gus, looking around for broom and dustpan.

Early Ann giggled. Peter tucked in his shirt tail. Temperance Crandall whisked off shawl and bonnet, donned an apron, clattered the griddles and stoked the fire preparatory to getting supper.

"You're Sarah's hired girl, ain't you?" she asked over her shoulder.

"I'm Early Ann Sherman."

"When your maw used to work for us...." Temperance began. Then catching a murderous look in the kitchen mirror she changed her tune. "Well now, you and Gus had better stay for supper," she said. "There's plenty for all."

"No," said Early Ann. "We're eating at the Ritz Royal this evening. I've inherited a farm." She pulled her coat about her in an Anna Held gesture, adjusted her hat, tilted her lovely chin and started for the door. "Come along, Gus."

"Oh, stay," said Peter.

"A farm!" said Temperance.

"Yes, a farm," said Gus, bent double with the dustpan and feeling surly.

"Nevertheless," said Temperance, "you'd just better stay for supper. What would Sarah ever think if I didn't feed you? Take off your coat, Miss Sherman. And Gus, you can dump that busted glass out on the ash pile."

Smiling again, Early Ann tossed her hat and coat over a chair, tied an apron about her waist, and with the uncanny instinct of one woman in another woman's kitchen began to set the table and to help get supper.

Watching the girl, Temperance sighed. She felt old and tired today. She had never inherited a farm, and never in her life had she had such a peaches-and-cream complexion as Early Ann's. She wished she might have a girl like this one to help her about the house. She supposed that Miss Sherman wouldn't be working any more now that she had come into property, and she put the question to the newly made heiress.

"You bet I'll go on working," said Early Ann. "I'm going to save my money. Except enough for some dresses and maybe a two-week trip to Chicago."

"Are you going to Chicago all by yourself?" asked the horrified Temperance. But Early Ann had made up her mind that she had told the town gossip more than enough.

Gus returned from the ash pile and settled himself in the kitchen rocker with a copy of the "Modern Priscilla" replete with corset advertisements, while Peter loudly announced that if he were taking Early Ann to the movies he would have to shave.

"Shave," scoffed Early Ann. "Let's see...." She ran her fingers over the soft down which covered his cheeks.

"Pin feathers," she said.

Peter ignored her. He dipped hot water from the reservoir at the end of the stove, examined his beard critically in the mirror, and began to lather in a business-like manner. He wished that Maxine might see him now.

Upstairs, Old Mrs. Crandall lay in her bed wondering what it was that had shaken the house a few minutes before. After a time she smelled coffee and knew that there must be company. Temperance and Peter always drank tea for supper.

Deaf and bed-ridden, the old woman still kept in touch with the world with her other senses. Through a rift in the trees she could see the front of the Methodist Episcopal church and in through one of the basement windows. She knew what went on in the elderberry bushes to the south of the church, and she had seen a flash of Kate Barton's red dress through the blinds of the belfry last Thursday and had seen the pigeons and sparrows come out in dreadful fright. You couldn't tell Mrs. Crandall that Kate was practicing and Joe Whalen pumping the organ that afternoon.

Mrs. Pat O'Toole looked to be about five months along with her ninth. Peter Brailsford, from the way he was mooning around, was certainly in love, probably with Maxine Larabee.

Unlike Temperance, Old Mrs. Crandall had no desire to reform mankind. She liked to hum popular music and feel the vibration. She enjoyed love-making, fights, and all the other delightful and rowdy actions of mortals. She lay in a world of almost complete silence, looking out wistfully at the young people going by, and the blowing autumn leaves; feeling the wind pushing against the house. She did not want to die. She wanted passionately to be alive next spring when the lilacs bloomed in her front yard.

The odor of frying meat came up to her from the kitchen, and finally the vibration of her daughter's feet on the stairs. She hastily brushed aside two big tears.

"Temperance," she scolded, "you're late with my victuals."

Supper that evening was of sufficient social importance so that Temperance covered the kitchen oil cloth with her red and white gingham table cloth, but not of a caliber which demanded the use of the gloomy dining room adorned with chromos of dead ducks, fruit, and fish; it was a function worthy of the Crandall cut-glass teaspoon tumbler, but scarcely a feast which necessitated the crocheted and paraffined napkin rings. Temperance brought out her tureen which she herself had painted with blue birds and daisies, but she used the bone-handled knives and forks rather than the silver plate.

"I hear there's been a man snooping around out your way," Temperance began after a hasty blessing, followed by a pan to plate service of fried potatoes, liver and bacon.

"No one you'd be interested in," said Early Ann, as saucily as she dared.

"Don't try to be funny," said Temperance.

Temperance had little luck in eliciting any information about the prowler or about Early Ann's farm. The conversation turned to the latest antics of Ulysses, and of his son Ulysses Jr., who was proving to be a chip off the old block, to Sarah's convalescence, the fall plowing, the hickory nut crop and the plans for a new silo. Not until the dishes had been cleared away and Gus had gone his chaste and solitary way did Early Ann begin to feel confidential.

On the way to the movies she was surprised to find herself telling Peter all about how she had inherited the farm at Horicon, about her mother, and a comic version of the latest Joe Valentine business. She claimed that she had beaten off Joe with a stick of stove wood and she had run him off the place.

"You don't need to worry about me," said Early Ann. "I can certainly take care of myself. I'll bet I can even lick you in a wrastle."

"I'll bet you can't," said Peter indignantly. "Any old day!"

3

Stud Brailsford and Timothy Halleck had been instrumental in getting Early Ann her small inheritance. Now Stud wondered whether he had been wise. Not that Early Ann had been spoiled by her riches. She was still the same rosy-cheeked, hardworking, saucy spitfire she had always been. She was still devoted to Sarah, Peter, Gus and Stud, and she announced quite passionately that she intended to live with the Brailsfords and do their work until the day she died. But now, added to all the other barriers which kept Stud from the girl, there was the fact that she was independently wealthy.

Three hundred dollars was not to be sneezed at in 1913. True, automobiles and mushroom-brimmed velvet hats smothered in ostrich plumes were rather expensive, but the lisle stockings worn by all the virtuous women of the period were priced at six pairs for a dollar; high buttoned shoes usually described as classy, nobby, or natty sold for two dollars a pair; and no woman dreamed of squandering more than fifty-nine cents on a pair of drawers, a corset cover, or a princess slip.

Free, white, eighteen, full of mustard and vinegar, and with three hundred dollars in the bank, the Brailsfords' hired girl was distinctly a person to be reckoned with. Her new clothes from Sears Roebuck were the talk of the party line.

And now, to increase Stud's worries, Early Ann was insisting on a two weeks' trip to Chicago. It was unheard of that a girl should make such an excursion unchaperoned.

It took less than six hours on the C., M. & St. P. to reach the sinful, brightly lighted metropolis on Lake Michigan; nevertheless Chicago was fifty years and a half a world from the muddy village of Brailsford Junction.

Chicago might rag; make fortunes in wheat, hogs, and steel; discuss atheism, Freud, and the early H. L. Mencken. But Brailsford Junction still attended barn dances and revival meetings. It lived by the laws of Solomon and Moses only slightly conditioned by the paganism of Omar and the invasion of the Ford.

These Junctionites lived by the crude practical joke, the rough and ready generosity of their pioneer grandparents, by gossip and by Jesus. They lived in a world of lamp light and lantern light, of full corn cribs and Sunday School picnics. Chicago was almost as remote as Mars.

Even Stud would have made the journey to Chicago with misgivings; and for an unmarried young woman to make such a trip was unthinkable. They all pleaded with her to be sensible.

"I'd never forgive myself," said Sarah. "It's up to me to keep you safe from harm. I'd worry myself sick every day you were gone."

"Never heard of a girl going off to Chicago alone," said Stud. "It ain't right."

"It's a big, wicked city," said Gus, knowingly. "I went to Chicago once for the Columbian Exposition. And by golly, the way little Egypt shook her ..."

"Sh-h-h," said Sarah.

"Well, I'm going," said Early Ann, "and that's that. But, Mrs. Brailsford, you mustn't worry for a minute. I grew up as wild as a chipmunk and I guess I can take care of myself."

"But why do you want to go?" Stud asked the bright-eyed girl, whose ripe young breasts under her middy rose and fell with her breathing, and whose well-turned ankles under her sailor skirt were a treat to the eye.

"I've been wanting all my life to see Chicago," Early Ann said. "I never seen a tall building, or rich ladies riding in limousines, or the silver dollars in the Palmer House floor. I never seen Irene Castle dance, or heard Grand Opera, or had people wait on me like they do in a hotel."

"Yes, Early Ann, I know, I know," said Sarah, earnestly. "You got a right to have one good time like that in your life. Everybody has got a right to be happy just once."

"But I won't budge out of this house if you ain't well enough yet," said Early Ann. "You've only been up and around for six days, Mrs. Brailsford."

"No, no, Early Ann. You mustn't stay on my account. I'm fit as a fiddle. It's only for your own good I want you to stay."

"Then I'm going tomorrow on the ten o'clock train," said Early Ann. She began to pack in the parlor while the family showered advice and ran errands.

Sarah kissed her goodby tearfully. Gus was suspiciously misty-eyed as he carried her telescope suitcase out to the Ford, and Stud drove her recklessly to the station where he insisted on paying for her round-trip ticket and for a chair on the parlor car—a luxury he had never allowed himself.

"You hang on to your money, young lady," he said. "And don't make up to any city fellows."

He stood watching the train until it had passed out of sight around the curve, then leaping into his Ford roared back to the farm where he began two weeks of mad labor. He worked on the fences, set posts, strung shining lines of new barbed wire, pruned several trees and filled a small ravine with boulders. He trapped a weasel that had been getting his chickens, put barrels around his young fruit trees to save them from the rabbits. He sent for a new stump-puller, seductively described in the mail order catalogue, hoping to clean out the brush lot in the slack months which were ahead.

One morning he noticed that the barns needed painting. He called in Mack Curren, who had finally given up hope of being a great portrait painter. Mack and his crew gave the buildings a new red coat visible for miles.

"Might as well be fancy and add white trimmings," Stud told the willing Mr. Curren.

Stud himself was hard at work on the new silo. He drove himself happily these days, and he drove Gus who was not so happy concerning his employer's sudden desire to move the world, to paint the farm from end to end, and to add a wing to the milk house.

Stud remembered to bring in frosty asters and goldenrod to Sarah. He told her that what she needed was a wild duck dinner, and he fixed himself a blind beside the lake and waited, watching his decoys.

The shotgun shells were heavy and cool in his hand. The long, clean barrels of his gun shone like blue fire when he looked through them at the sun. Not a speck of dust! Every part oiled and working like a seventeen-jewel watch. The carved walnut stock was as smooth as satin to his fingers, and the gun balanced perfectly as he threw it to his shoulder.

He had carved the decoys himself from white pine and had painted the intricate markings from memory. He knew the glossy green head and bold coloration of the drake mallard, as well as the more modest hues of his mate. He was familiar to the last tail feather with the tones and patterns which distinguish canvasback, redhead, bluebill, widgeon, goldeneye, and black mallard. He could imitate the quack of a duck or the honk of a Canadian goose almost too well for his own safety.

Bright water bugs skimmed the quietly heaving surface of the lake. A muskrat with reeds in his mouth, his nose barely above the water, his tail trailing for a rudder, swam past the blind. Stud's live decoys anchored in the shallow water, preened, tipped for food, gossiped of the days when they themselves were free to skim southward ahead of the storms, bound for southern bayous.

Stud lay back looking up at the immensity of sky, never more deeply blue, he thought, than above Wisconsin in the autumn. He watched a flight of coots but let them pass; followed a wood duck with his gun but did not shoot. A hell-diver was playing among his decoys, and a couple of green-winged teal went by just out of gunshot, their wings whirring like toy windmills in a cyclone.

"Nothing but a ruddy can outfly them," Stud observed, "and the ruddies fly so darned fast it's a wonder they don't catch fire."

Toward sunset the flight began in earnest, and for about ten minutes Stud banged away like the Federal gunboats before Vicksburg. He shot his bag limit without crippling a bird, waded out in hip boots to bring them ashore, and went singing home, loaded down with rice-fattened mallards.

One morning he crossed the field of wheat stubble stretching yellow and frosty on either hand and went into the brown woods to choose his trees for winter cutting. It would be good to swing an axe again, to take big white chips out of a tree, to hear it crash to the ground and settle with a sigh. It would be good to get on one end of a cross-cut saw again, to make Gus cry out for mercy as they sliced through three feet of oak. His big muscles yearned for the sixteen pound mall he used for driving wedges, a sledge which made the average man pant like a one-cylinder gas engine, but which was a plaything for Stud.

At night he came in tired, soaked with sweat, but almost happy. Sarah noticed and was glad.

Fall, with the red of sumac and of hard maple, the leathery brown of hickory leaves, and the pale yellow of elm was upon the land. The leaves drifted in the brisk winds, and the wind sighed through the pines of the front yard. The marshes turned to brown and almost overnight the muskrat houses sprang up in rough brown piles along the deeper channels through the grass. The orchard was a wilderness of ripening, fragrant fruit, yellow, scarlet and deep red. The house was banked about with shocks of corn. Five cords of wood were already sawed and split, and more would come out of the woods as the days grew colder.

Gus came running in from the mail box one morning with a postcard from Early Ann. It had a picture of a huge hotel where Early Ann was staying and in a large, girlish hand:

"Having a good time. Wish you were here!"