ause its fertile top
layer was tenaciously root-bound and free from boulders. And while the
biggest brother plowed it up, the other two came slowly along with the
Studebaker, chopped the sods into pieces twice as long as they were
wide, and laid them carefully on the bed of the wagon.

The little girl let the biggest brother hang the gad about his neck and
helped for a while with the sod-carrying. But every time she put her
chubby arms around a slab, it broke in two; so her brothers told her to
stop. Then she climbed to the wagon-seat and drove the horses beside the
furrows, and, later, went to the farm-yard with a load.

The smoke-house was being built beside the corn-cribs. Before any sod
had been laid, the eldest brother had marked out on the ground with a
stick a nine-foot square, and in one side of it had left a narrow
door-space where two scantlings were driven in upright to serve as sides
of the casing. Then, with the dirt lines as a guide, he had begun the
walls, giving them the thickness of two sods. When the little girl rode
up they were already above her head. But she did not wait to see the
load she had accompanied bring them up to the eldest brother's waist,
for it was close upon noon and it occurred to her that there would soon
be a table to set in the kitchen, so she hurried out of call up the
weedy path between the wheat and the corn, to where the oxen were still
lazily drawing the plow.

She picked up the gad again and sent it whisking about the black flanks
of the steers. But when she had gone up and down till three long sods
lay lapping each other like heavy ruffles, she grew tired of following
the biggest brother and went up the carnelian bluff to the stone pile
and sat down.

Her mother, standing at the kitchen door, shading her eyes with her
hand, saw the fluttering blue calico on the hillside and smiled at it
through tears. Nearly four years and a half had passed since the
rock-covered mound had risen among the snow-drifts, yet during all this
time the little girl had never been told its sad secret, for the family
wished her to go about the farm without fear.

She had often wondered, however, why, when her mother wanted to have a
good cry, she always sat at the kitchen window that looked out across
the row of stunted apple-trees, the sorghum patch, and finally the
corn, to where the carnelian bluff lifted its pebbly head; and why,
whenever the big brothers saw their mother weeping there, if i