“What made you so pig-headed?  Did you want to frighten me? or to show me how well you could drive?”

“Neither.  I wanted to get home.  Good-night.”

Claude settled back in his chair and shaded his eyes.  She did feel that this was home, then.  She had not been afraid of his father’s jokes, or disconcerted by Mahailey’s knowing grin.  Her ease in the household gave him unaccountable pleasure.  He picked up a book, but did not read.  It was lying open on his knee when his mother came back half an hour later.

“Move quietly when you go upstairs, Claude.  She is so tired that she may be asleep already.”

He took off his shoes and made his ascent with the utmost caution.

IV

Ernest Havel was cultivating his bright, glistening young cornfield one summer morning, whistling to himself an old German song which was somehow connected with a picture that rose in his memory.  It was a picture of the earliest ploughing he could remember.

He saw a half-circle of green hills, with snow still lingering in the clefts of the higher ridges; behind the hills rose a wall of sharp mountains, covered with dark pine forests.  In the meadows at the foot of that sweep of hills there was a winding creek, with polled willows in their first yellow-green, and brown fields.  He himself was a little boy, playing by the creek and watching his father and mother plough with two great oxen, that had rope traces fastened to their heads and their long horns.  His mother walked barefoot beside the oxen and led them; his father walked behind, guiding the plough.  His father always looked down.  His mother’s face was almost as brown and furrowed as the fields, and her eyes were pale blue, like the skies of early spring.  The two would go up and down thus all morning without speaking, except to the oxen.  Ernest was the last of a long family, and as he played by the creek he used to wonder why his parents looked so old.

Leonard Dawson drove his car up to the fence and shouted, waking Ernest from his revery.  He told his team to stand, and ran out to the edge of the field.

“Hello, Ernest,” Leonard called.  “Have you heard Claude Wheeler got hurt day before yesterday?”

“You don’t say so!  It can’t be anything bad, or they’d let me know.”

“Oh, it’s nothing very bad, I guess, but he got his face scratched up in the wire quite a little.  It was the queerest thing I ever saw.  He was out with the team of mules and a heavy plough, working the road in that deep cut between their place and mine.  The gasoline motor-truck came along, making more noise than usual, maybe.  But those mules know a motor truck, and what they did was pure cussedness.  They begun to rear and plunge in that deep cut.  I was working my corn over in the field and shouted to the gasoline man to stop, but he didn’t hear me.  Claude jumped for the critters’ heads