“’Tain’t just what you’d call an agreeable subject,” he answered, with the sinister humor of the frontiersman who has learned to make a crony of death.

She was tempted to kiss him—­they were not given to demonstrations, this pair—­then decided it were kinder to him, less suggestive of what they anticipated, not to deviate from their undemonstrative marital routine.

“Do you want your breakfast now?”

“I guess you might bring it along.”

And for the same reason that she refrained from kissing him, she repressed a desire to wring the neck of a young broiler and cook it for his breakfast, remembering that she had heard they gave folks pretty much what they wanted when they wouldn’t want it long.  So Jim got his usual breakfast of bacon, uncooked canned tomatoes, soda-biscuit, and coffee.  She sat with him while he ate, but they spoke no more of “them” or of how soon “they” might be expected.  She told him that young Jim had pretended that morning that he had a cactus thorn in his foot, so that he might have a piece of dried apple.  And old Jim, in an excess of parental fondness and pride, said:  “The damned little liar, he’ll get to Congress yet!”

But the children were a dangerous topic for overstrained nerves at this particular time, so Alida told Jim that she had put the black hen to set and she thought they’d have some chickens at last.  Jim smoked while Alida washed the dishes, and when Jim’s back was turned she examined the lock on the door—­a good push would open it.  Then she looked at the brown bureau, and the recklessness of despair came into her eyes.  In the room beyond, Jim was reading a two weeks’ old newspaper and smoking.  He looked like a lazy ranchman taking his ease.

As she went about her household tasks that morning, Alida noticed things as she had never noticed them before.  A sunbeam came through the shutterless window of the house and writhed and quivered on the wall as if it were a live thing.  She read a warning in this, and in the color of the sun, that was red, like blood, and in the whirr of the grasshoppers, that was sinister and threatening.  The creeks had dried, and their slimy beds crept along the willows like sluggish snakes.  Gaunt range-cattle bellowed in their thirst, and the parched earth crackled beneath the sun that hung above the house like a flaming disk.  Sometimes she sank beneath the burden of it; then she would wring her hands and call on God to help them; they were beyond human power.  She and Jim were alone all the morning; they did not again refer to what they knew would happen.  He read his old paper and she put her house in order.  She did it with especial care.  It was meet to have things seemly in the house of the dead.  And every time she glanced at Jim she repressed the desire to fling herself on his breast and cry out the anguish that consumed her.