“Once she kidnapped me and drug me to the Methodist Church.  I goes in, pious as Widow Bogart, and sits still and never cracks a smile while the preacher is favoring us with his misinformation on evolution.  But afterwards, when the old stalwarts were pumphandling everybody at the door and calling ’em ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister,’ they let me sail right by with nary a clinch.  They figure I’m the town badman.  Always will be, I guess.  It’ll have to be Olaf who goes on.  ’And sometimes——­Blamed if I don’t feel like coming out and saying, ’I’ve been conservative.  Nothing to it.  Now I’m going to start something in these rotten one-horse lumber-camps west of town.’  But Bea’s got me hypnotized.  Lord, Mrs. Kennicott, do you re’lize what a jolly, square, faithful woman she is?  And I love Olaf——­Oh well, I won’t go and get sentimental on you.

“Course I’ve had thoughts of pulling up stakes and going West.  Maybe if they didn’t know it beforehand, they wouldn’t find out I’d ever been guilty of trying to think for myself.  But—­oh, I’ve worked hard, and built up this dairy business, and I hate to start all over again, and move Bea and the kid into another one-room shack.  That’s how they get us!  Encourage us to be thrifty and own our own houses, and then, by golly, they’ve got us; they know we won’t dare risk everything by committing lez—­what is it? lez majesty?—­I mean they know we won’t be hinting around that if we had a co-operative bank, we could get along without Stowbody.  Well——­As long as I can sit and play pinochle with Bea, and tell whoppers to Olaf about his daddy’s adventures in the woods, and how he snared a wapaloosie and knew Paul Bunyan, why, I don’t mind being a bum.  It’s just for them that I mind.  Say!  Say!  Don’t whisper a word to Bea, but when I get this addition done, I’m going to buy her a phonograph!”

He did.

While she was busy with the activities her work-hungry muscles found—­washing, ironing, mending, baking, dusting, preserving, plucking a chicken, painting the sink; tasks which, because she was Miles’s full partner, were exciting and creative—­Bea listened to the phonograph records with rapture like that of cattle in a warm stable.  The addition gave her a kitchen with a bedroom above.  The original one-room shack was now a living-room, with the phonograph, a genuine leather-upholstered golden-oak rocker, and a picture of Governor John Johnson.

In late July Carol went to the Bjornstams’ desirous of a chance to express her opinion of Beavers and Calibrees and Joralemons.  She found Olaf abed, restless from a slight fever, and Bea flushed and dizzy but trying to keep up her work.  She lured Miles aside and worried: 

“They don’t look at all well.  What’s the matter?”

“Their stomachs are out of whack.  I wanted to call in Doc Kennicott, but Bea thinks the doc doesn’t like us—­she thinks maybe he’s sore because you come down here.  But I’m getting worried.”