Ralph dashed down the cellar stairs, lit a lantern, and searched the fruit closet.  Sure enough, there were no pickled peaches.  When he came back and began packing his fruit, Mahailey stood watching him with a furtive expression, very much like the look that is in a chained coyote’s eyes when a boy is showing him off to visitors and saying he wouldn’t run away if he could.

“Go on with your work,” Ralph snapped.  “Don’t stand there watching me!”

That evening Claude was sitting on the windmill platform, down by the barn, after a hard day’s work ploughing for winter wheat.  He was solacing himself with his pipe.  No matter how much she loved him, or how sorry she felt for him, his mother could never bring herself to tell him he might smoke in the house.  Lights were shining from the upstairs rooms on the hill, and through the open windows sounded the singing snarl of a phonograph.  A figure came stealing down the path.  He knew by her low, padding step that it was Mahailey, with her apron thrown over her head.  She came up to him and touched him on the shoulder in a way which meant that what she had to say was confidential.

“Mr. Claude, Mr. Ralph’s done packed up a barr’l of your mudder’s jelly an’ pickles to take out there.”

“That’s all right, Mahailey.  Mr. Wested was a widower, and I guess there wasn’t anything of that sort put up at his place.”

She hesitated and bent lower.  “He asked me fur them pickled peaches I made fur you, but I didn’t give him none.  I hid ’em all in my old cook-stove we done put down cellar when Mr. Ralph bought the new one.  I didn’t give him your mudder’s new preserves, nudder.  I give him the old last year’s stuff we had left over, and now you an’ your mudder’ll have plenty.”  Claude laughed.  “Oh, I don’t care if Ralph takes all the fruit on the place, Mahailey!”

She shrank back a little, saying confusedly, “No, I know you don’t, Mr. Claude.  I know you don’t.”

“I surely ought not to take it out on her,” Claude thought, when he saw her disappointment.  He rose and patted her on the back.  “That’s all right, Mahailey.  Thank you for saving the peaches, anyhow.”

She shook her finger at him.  “Don’t you let on!”

He promised, and watched her slipping back over the zigzag path up the hill.

XIV

Ralph and his father moved to the new ranch the last of August, and Mr. Wheeler wrote back that late in the fall he meant to ship a carload of grass steers to the home farm to be fattened during the winter.  This, Claude saw, would mean a need for fodder.  There was a fifty-acre corn field west of the creek,—­just on the sky-line when one looked out from the west windows of the house.  Claude decided to put this field into winter wheat, and early in September he began to cut and bind the corn that stood upon it for fodder.  As soon as the corn was gathered, he would plough up the ground, and drill in the wheat when he planted the other wheat fields.