Bea, the chubby and humming Bea, impartially gave cookies and scoldings to both children, and if Carol refused a cup of coffee and a wafer of buttered knackebrod, she was desolated.

Miles had done well with his dairy.  He had six cows, two hundred chickens, a cream separator, a Ford truck.  In the spring he had built a two-room addition to his shack.  That illustrious building was to Hugh a carnival.  Uncle Miles did the most spectacular, unexpected things:  ran up the ladder; stood on the ridge-pole, waving a hammer and singing something about “To arms, my citizens”; nailed shingles faster than Aunt Bessie could iron handkerchiefs; and lifted a two-by-six with Hugh riding on one end and Olaf on the other.  Uncle Miles’s most ecstatic trick was to make figures not on paper but right on a new pine board, with the broadest softest pencil in the world.  There was a thing worth seeing!

The tools!  In his office Father had tools fascinating in their shininess and curious shapes, but they were sharp, they were something called sterized, and they distinctly were not for boys to touch.  In fact it was a good dodge to volunteer “I must not touch,” when you looked at the tools on the glass shelves in Father’s office.  But Uncle Miles, who was a person altogether superior to Father, let you handle all his kit except the saws.  There was a hammer with a silver head; there was a metal thing like a big L; there was a magic instrument, very precious, made out of costly red wood and gold, with a tube which contained a drop—­no, it wasn’t a drop, it was a nothing, which lived in the water, but the nothing looked like a drop, and it ran in a frightened way up and down the tube, no matter how cautiously you tilted the magic instrument.  And there were nails, very different and clever—­big valiant spikes, middle-sized ones which were not very interesting, and shingle-nails much jollier than the fussed-up fairies in the yellow book.

II

While he had worked on the addition Miles had talked frankly to Carol.  He admitted now that so long as he stayed in Gopher Prairie he would remain a pariah.  Bea’s Lutheran friends were as much offended by his agnostic gibes as the merchants by his radicalism.  “And I can’t seem to keep my mouth shut.  I think I’m being a baa-lamb, and not springing any theories wilder than ‘c-a-t spells cat,’ but when folks have gone, I re’lize I’ve been stepping on their pet religious corns.  Oh, the mill foreman keeps dropping in, and that Danish shoemaker, and one fellow from Elder’s factory, and a few Svenskas, but you know Bea:  big good-hearted wench like her wants a lot of folks around—­likes to fuss over ’em—­never satisfied unless she tiring herself out making coffee for somebody.