The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name.  It had been hundreds of years since the first Westerveld came to America, and they had married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost entirely disappeared.  They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County, then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills, majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances.  But to the practical Westerveld mind hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their relation to crops and weather.  Ben, though, had a way of turning his face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for clouds.  You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring flight of a partridge across the meadow.  He liked farming.  Even the drudgery of it never made him grumble.  He was a natural farmer as men are natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen.  Things grew for him.  He seemed instinctively to know facts about the kinship of soil and seed that other men had to learn from books or experience.  It grew to be a saying in that section “Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on rock.”

At picnics and neighbourhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run faster and pull harder than any of the farmer boys who took part in the rough games.  And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold her at arm’s length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real ecstasy.  The girls all liked Ben.  There was that about his primitive strength which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness appealed to their softer side.  He liked the girls, too, and could have had his pick of them.  He teased them all, took them buggy riding, beaued them about to neighbourhood parties.  But by the time he was twenty-five the thing had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm adjoining Westerveld’s.  There was what the neighbours called an understanding, though perhaps he had never actually asked the Byers girl to marry him.  You saw him going down the road toward the Byers place four nights out of the seven.  He had a quick, light step at variance with his sturdy build, and very different from the heavy, slouching gait of the work-weary farmer.  He had a habit of carrying in his hand a little twig or switch cut from a tree.  This he would twirl blithely as he walked along.  The switch and the twirl represented just so much energy and animal spirits.  He never so much as flicked a dandelion head with it.

An inarticulate sort of thing, that courtship.

“Hello, Emma.”

“How do, Ben.”

“Thought you might like to walk a piece down the road.  They got a calf at Aug Tietjens with five legs.”

“I heard.  I’d just as lief walk a little piece.  I’m kind of beat, though.  We’ve got the threshers day after to-morrow.  We’ve been cooking up.”

Beneath Ben’s bonhomie and roguishness there was much shyness.  The two would plod along the road together in a sort of blissful agony of embarrassment.  The neighbours were right in their surmise that there was no definite understanding between them.  But the thing was settled in the minds of both.  Once Ben had said:  “Pop says I can have the north eighty on easy payments if—­when—­”