The country neighbours, who were always amused at the Wheelers’ doings, got almost as much pleasure out of Ralph’s lavishness as he did himself.  One said Ralph had shipped a new piano out to Yucca county, another heard he had ordered a billiard table.  August Yoeder, their prosperous German neighbour, asked grimly whether he could, maybe, get a place as hired man with Ralph.  Leonard Dawson, who was to be married in October, hailed Claude in town one day and shouted;

“My God, Claude, there’s nothing left in the furniture store for me and Susie!  Ralph’s bought everything but the coffins.  He must be going to live like a prince out there.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” Claude answered coolly.  “It’s not my enterprise.”

“No, you’ve got to stay on the old place and make it pay the debts, I understand.”  Leonard jumped into his car, so that Claude wouldn’t have a chance to reply.

Mrs. Wheeler, too, when she observed the magnitude of these preparations, began to feel that the new arrangement was not fair to Claude, since he was the older boy and much the steadier.  Claude had always worked hard when he was at home, and made a good field hand, while Ralph had never done much but tinker with machinery and run errands in his car.  She couldn’t understand why he was selected to manage an undertaking in which so much money was invested.

“Why, Claude,” she said dreamily one day, “if your father were an older man, I would almost think his judgment had begun to fail.  Won’t we get dreadfully into debt at this rate?”

“Don’t say anything, Mother.  It’s Father’s money.  He shan’t think I want any of it.”

“I wish I could talk to Bayliss.  Has he said anything?”

“Not to me, he hasn’t.”

Ralph and Mr. Wheeler took another flying trip to Colorado, and when they came back Ralph began coaxing his mother to give him bedding and table linen.  He said he wasn’t going to live like a savage, even in the sand hills.  Mahailey was outraged to see the linen she had washed and ironed and taken care of for so many years packed into boxes.  She was out of temper most of the time now, and went about muttering to herself.

The only possessions Mahailey brought with her when she came to live with the Wheelers, were a feather bed and three patchwork quilts, interlined with wool off the backs of Virginia sheep, washed and carded by hand.  The quilts had been made by her old mother, and given to her for a marriage portion.  The patchwork on each was done in a different design; one was the popular “log-cabin” pattern, another the “laurel-leaf,” the third the “blazing star.”  This quilt Mahailey thought too good for use, and she had told Mrs. Wheeler that she was saving it “to give Mr. Claude when he got married.”

She slept on her feather bed in winter, and in summer she put it away in the attic.  The attic was reached by a ladder which, because of her weak back, Mrs. Wheeler very seldom climbed.  Up there Mahailey had things her own way, and thither she often retired to air the bedding stored away there, or to look at the pictures in the piles of old magazines.  Ralph facetiously called the attic “Mahailey’s library.”