The boy answered, promptly, “None your business,” and went up the steps before the young man, with a lop-eared, liver-colored mongrel at his heels.  He pulled off his ragged straw hat and flung it on the floor of the porch.  “Dinner over?” he demanded.

His father made no answer; his mother looked at the boy’s hands and face, all of much the same earthen cast, up to the eaves of his thatch of yellow hair, and said:  “You go and wash yourself.”  At a certain light in his mother’s eye, which he caught as he passed into the house with his dog, the boy turned and cut a defiant caper.  The oldest son sat down on the bench beside his father, and they all looked in silence at the mountain before them.  They heard the boy whistling behind the house, with sputtering and blubbering noises, as if he were washing his face while he whistled; and then they heard him singing, with a muffled sound, and sharp breaks from the muffled sound, as if he were singing into the towel; he shouted to his dog and threatened him, and the scuffling of his feet came to them through all as if he were dancing.

“Been after them woodchucks ag’in,” his father huskily suggested.

“I guess so,” said the mother.  The brother did not speak; he coughed vaguely, and let his head sink forward.

The father began a statement of his affairs.

The mother said:  “You don’t want to go into that; we been all over it before.  If it’s come to the pinch, now, it’s come.  But you want to be sure.”

The man did not answer directly.  “If we could sell off now and get out to where Jim is in Californy, and get a piece of land—­” He stopped, as if confronted with some difficulty which he had met before, but had hoped he might not find in his way this time.

His wife laughed grimly.  “I guess, if the truth was known, we’re too poor to get away.”

“We’re poor,” he whispered back.  He added, with a weak obstinacy:  “I d’know as we’re as poor as that comes to.  The things would fetch something.”

“Enough to get us out there, and then we should be on Jim’s hands,” said the woman.

“We should till spring, maybe.  I d’know as I want to face another winter here, and I d’know as Jackson does.”

The young man gasped back, courageously:  “I guess I can get along here well enough.”

“It’s made Jim ten years younger.  That’s what he said,” urged the father.

The mother smiled as grimly as she had laughed.  “I don’t believe it ’ll make you ten years richer, and that’s what you want.”

“I don’t believe but what we should ha’ done something with the place by spring.  Or the State would,” the father said, lifelessly.

The voice of the boy broke in upon them from behind.  “Say, mother, a’n’t you never goin’ to have dinner?” He was standing in the doorway, with a startling cleanness of the hands and face, and a strange, wet sleekness of the hair.  His clothes were bedrabbled down the front with soap and water.