FEJEVARY:  Yes.  Good old Colonel.

SILAS:  You’d had a long run o’ off luck.  Hadn’t got things back in shape since the war.  But say, you didn’t lose him, did you?

FEJEVARY:  Thanks to you.

SILAS:  Thanks to the medicine I keep in the back kitchen.

FEJEVARY:  You encouraged him.

GRANDMOTHER:  Silas has a way with all the beasts.

SILAS:  We’ve got the same kind of minds—­the beasts and me.

GRANDMOTHER:  Silas, I wish you wouldn’t talk like that—­and with Felix just home from Harvard College.

SILAS:  Same kind of minds—­except that mine goes on a little farther.

GRANDMOTHER:  Well I’m glad to hear you say that.

SILAS:  Well, there we sat—­you an’ me—­middle of a starry night, out beside your barn.  And I guess it came over you kind of funny you should be there with me—­way off the Mississippi, tryin’ to save a sick horse.  Seemed to—­bring your life to life again.  You told me what you studied in that fine old university you loved—­the Vienna,—­and why you became a revolutionist.  The old dreams took hold o’ you and you talked—­way you used to, I suppose.  The years, o’ course, had rubbed some of it off.  Your face as you went on about the vision—­you called it, vision of what life could be.  I knew that night there was things I never got wind of.  When I went away—­knew I ought to go home to bed—­hayin’ at daybreak.  ‘Go to bed?’ I said to myself.  ’Strike this dead when you’ve never had it before, may never have it again?’ I climbed the hill.  Blackhawk was there.

GRANDMOTHER:  Why, he was dead.

SILAS:  He was there—­on his own old hill, with me and the stars.  And I said to him—­

GRANDMOTHER:  Silas!

SILAS:  Says I to him, ’Yes—­that’s true; it’s more yours than mine, you had it first and loved it best.  But it’s neither yours nor mine,—­though both yours and mine.  Not my hill, not your hill, but—­hill of vision’, said I to him.  ’Here shall come visions of a better world than was ever seen by you or me, old Indian chief.’  Oh, I was drunk, plum drunk.

GRANDMOTHER:  I should think you was.  And what about the next day’s hay?

SILAS:  A day in the hayfield is a day’s hayin’—­but a night on the hill—­

FELIX:  We don’t have them often, do we, Uncle Silas?

SILAS:  I wouldn’t ‘a’ had that one but for your father, Felix.  Thank God they drove you out o’ Hungary!  And it’s all so dog-gone queer.  Ain’t it queer how things blow from mind to mind—­like seeds.  Lord A’mighty—­you don’t know where they’ll take hold.

(Children’s voices off.)

GRANDMOTHER:  There come those children up from the creek—­soppin’ wet, I warrant.  Well, I don’t know how children ever get raised.  But we raise more of ’em than we used to.  I buried three—­first ten years I was here.  Needn’t ‘a’ happened—­if we’d known what we know now, and if we hadn’t been alone. (With all her strength.) I don’t know what you mean—­the hill’s not yours!