The resonant winter note rang out loud, strange in that sultry summer air.  She looked from afar at the tree, holding its mighty crest high above the tiny house, high above the tiny human beings who had doomed it.  So many winters, so many summers, so many suns and moons and rains and snows had gone to make it what it was.  Like the men who had planted it and lived beneath its shade, it had drawn silently from the depths of the earth and the airy treasures of the sky food to grow strong and live its life.  And now to be killed in an hour, in attempted expiation of a deed for which it bore no guilt!

Marise was coming closer now.  The axe-strokes stopped for a moment as though the chopper drew breath.  The silence was heavy over the breathless summer field.

But by the time she had arrived at the back door of the house, the axe-blows were renewed, loud, immediate, shocking palpably on her ear.  She knocked, but knew that the ringing clamor of the axe drowned out the sound.  Through the screen-door she saw old Mrs. Powers, standing by the table, ironing, and stepped in.  The three children were in the pantry, beyond, Ralph spreading some bread and butter for his little brother and sister.  Ralph was always good to the younger children, although he was so queer and un-childlike!  Nelly was not there.  Mrs. Powers looked up at Marise, and nodded.  She looked disturbed and absent.  “We’re at it, you see,” she said, jerking her head back towards the front of the house.  “I told you ’bout ‘Gene’s sayin’ he’d gi’n in to Nelly about the big pine.”

Marise made a gesture of dismay at this confirmation.  The old woman went on, “Funny thing . . .  I ain’t a Powers by birth, Lord knows, and I never thought I set no store by their old pine tree.  It always sort o’ riled me, how much ’Gene’s father thought of it, and ’Gene after him . . . sort of silly, seems like.  But just now when we was all out there, and ’Gene heaved up his axe and hit the first whack at it . . . well, I can’t tell you . . . it give me a turn most as if he’d chopped right into me somewhere.  I got up and come into the house, and I set to ironin’, as fast as I could clip it, to keep my mind off’n it.  I made the children come in too, because it ain’t no place for kids around, when a tree that size comes down.”

Marise demurred, “’Gene is such a fine chopper, he knows to a hair where he’ll lay it, of course.”

“Well, even so, who knows what notion a kid will take into his head?  They was playin’ right there on a pile of pole-wood ’Gene’s brought in from the woods and ain’t got sawed up into stove-lengths yet.  I didn’t want to take no chances; maybe they wouldn’t ha’ moved quick enough when their papa yelled to them.  No, ma’am, I made ’em come in, and here they’ll stay.  Nelly, she’s out there, walkin’ round and round watchin’ ‘Gene.  She’s awfully set up havin’ it come down.  ’Gene he’s told her he’ll give her the money from the lumber in it.  There’ll be a sight of boards, too.  It’s the biggest pine in the valley.”