ss, dissatisfied, empty-headed, he was the despair of his father.
He drove the farm horses as if they were racers, lashing them up hill
and down dale. He was forever lounging off to the village or wheedling
his mother for money to take him to Commercial. It was before the day of
the ubiquitous automobile. Given one of those present adjuncts to farm
life, John would have ended his career much earlier. As it was, they
found him lying by the roadside at dawn one morning after the horses had
trotted into the yard with the wreck of the buggy bumping the road
behind them. He had stolen the horses out of the barn after the help was
asleep, had led them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off
to a rendezvous of his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not
have hurt him, but he evidently had been dragged almost a mile before
his battered body became somehow disentangled from the splintered wood
and the reins.

That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his wife
together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness and her
hatred of the locality and the life.

"I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endless
reproach. "I hope you're good an' satisfied. You was bound you'd make a
farmer out of him, an' now you finished the job. You better try your
hand at Dike now for a change."

Dike was young Ben, sixteen; and old Ben had no need to try his hand at
him. Young Ben was a born farmer, as was his father. He had come
honestly by his nickname. In face, figure, expression, and manner he was
a five-hundred-year throwback to his Holland ancestors. Apple-cheeked,
stocky, merry of eye, and somewhat phlegmatic. When, at school, they had
come to the story of the Dutch boy who saved his town from flood by
thrusting his hand into the hole in the dike and holding it there until
help came, the class, after one look at the accompanying picture in the
reader, dubbed young Ben "Dike" Westerveld. And Dike he remained.

Between Dike and his father there was a strong but unspoken feeling. The
boy was crop-wise, as his father had been at his age. On Sundays you
might see the two walking about the farm looking at the pigs--great
black fellows worth almost their weight in silver; eying the stock;
speculating on the winter wheat showing dark green in April with rich
patches that were almost black. Young Dike smoked a solemn and judicious
pipe, spat expertly, and voiced the opinion that the winter whea