MADELINE is sitting at the table, in her hand a torn, wrinkled piece of brown paper-peering at writing almost too fine to read.  After a moment her hand goes out to a beautiful dish on the table—­an old dish of coloured Hungarian glass.  She is about to take something from this, but instead lets her hand rest an instant on the dish itself Then turns and through the open door looks out at the hill, sitting where her GRANDFATHER MORTON sat when he looked out at the hill.

Her father, IRA MORTON, appears outside, walking past the window, left.  He enters, carrying a grain sack, partly filled.  He seems hardly aware of MADELINE, but taking a chair near the door, turned from her, opens the sack and takes out a couple of ears of corn.  As he is bent over them, examining in a shrewd, greedy way, MADELINE looks at that lean, tormented, rather desperate profile, the look of one confirming a thing she fears.  Then takes up her piece of paper.

MADELINE:  Do you remember Fred Jordan, father?  Friend of our Fred—­and of mine?

IRA:  (not wanting to take his mind from the corn) No.  I don’t remember him. (his voice has that timbre of one not related to others)

MADELINE:  He’s in prison now.

IRA:  Well I can’t help that. (after taking out another ear) This is the best corn I ever had. (he says it gloatingly to himself)

MADELINE:  He got this letter out to me—­written on this scrap of paper.  They don’t give him paper. (peering) Written so fine I can hardly read it.  He’s in what they call ‘the hold’, father—­a punishment cell. (with difficulty reading it) It’s two and a half feet at one end, three feet at the other, and six feet long.  He’d been there ten days when he wrote this.  He gets two slices of bread a day; he gets water; that’s all he gets.  This because he balled the deputy warden out for chaining another prisoner up by the wrists.

IRA:  Well, he’d better a-minded his own business.  And you better mind yours.  I’ve got no money to spend in the courts. (with excitement) I’ll not mortgage this farm!  It’s been clear since the day my father’s father got it from the government—­and it stays clear—­till I’m gone.  It grows the best corn in the state—­best corn in the Mississippi Valley.  Not for anything—­you hear me?—­would I mortgage this farm my father handed down to me.

MADELINE:  (hurt) Well, father, I’m not asking you to.

IRA:  Then go and see your Uncle Felix.  Make it up with him.  He’ll help you—­if you say you’re sorry.

MADELINE:  I’ll not go to Uncle Felix.