But if the five miles of Providence Road had been a delight, as Redwheels and I ran along it, the dirt lane that led to The Briers was an intoxicating joy.  The wet earth, the drenched cedars, the oak buds, the spongy moss, the reddening blackberry-bushes, and the sprouting grain, all mingled in a queer creation odor that went right through the pores of my skin into my vitals and made me feel as strong as an ox, or rather, as Sam’s new mule.  I caught a glimpse of that mule through a vista before I came out of the lane, plodding along before Sam and the plow with a great splendid lurch of a gait that threw the black dirt as high as Sam’s knees as he plunged along at the plow-handles.  I stopped the car at the cedar-pole gate of Eden and stood up and shouted at the top of my lungs, but Sam plowed on heroically, with never a glance in my direction, and I just stood and looked at him and the mule.  Seeing a man plow cuts right down to the bottom of a woman’s nature, because I suppose it looks so—­so fundamental.  At least that is about the way I felt though it was much more so until I remembered the blistered heel and shouted again, this time in alarm.  At my cry of distress Sam suddenly looked up and jerked the mule’s head so that he, too, stopped and regarded me.  They looked like wary jungle things that had been belled from the thicket, but for just a second; then Sam threw his line around the plow-handle, thus hitching the mule to himself, and came running across the field to me, as lightly as the blue jay skimmed from over my head into the branches of another cedar in answer to the same twit I had heard the day I first came out into the habitation of the birds.  The pleasure of seeing Sam run to me was almost as keen as the pain of seeing him run away from me, but it was mitigated by my alarm over the poor sore foot.

“Gracious sakes, Betty! is that a mud-scow you came out in?” he asked, as he started to take my hand in his, which was brown with mud, and ended by rubbing his cheek in my palm.  That seemed to be about the only member he had kept clean enough for the greeting.

“Aren’t you hurting your heel plowing like that, Sam?” I asked, anxiously.

“Heel—­what heel?  Oh, that’s all right.  I haven’t heard from it since you tucked it away in the cream Tuesday night.  I have cold-bucketed myself every morning, standing on one leg with it up on the wash-bench so as not to wake it up.  Come on up to the house.  I’ll walk, because I’m too muddy to get in with you in your sedan-chair.”

“No; you go back to the plowing and I’ll go and unload and begin my work,” I answered, with positive heroism.  I wanted to get out and go and be introduced to the mule, but I came to Sam to be not a clinging vine, but a competent garden-hoe to him.

“All right,” said Sam, in the nice way he has of acquiescing in all my serious moods until they pass.  “I’ll be through after about three more rounds and then I’ll come and help you.  Say, Bettykin, what do you think of that for good land?” And as he looked back at the great square of black earth he had upturned, Sam’s eyes flecked with the blue sky and snapped with enthusiasm.