, was the end of hope and pride, the reward of years of
self-denial, the insult to all this poverty. For the time, even the
awful nature of his avowal made no impression.

After a long silence, the father asked feebly:--

"WHY HAVE YOU COME BACK HERE?"

Suddenly he rose, and striding across to his son, struck him one blow
with his mind:--

"OH, I ALWAYS KNEW THERE WAS NOTHING IN YOU!"

It was a kick of the foot.

X

More than two months had passed. Twilight of closing February was
falling over the frozen fields. The last crow had flapped low and
straight toward the black wood beyond the southern horizon. No sunset
radiance streamed across the wide land, for all day a solitude of cloud
had stretched around the earth, bringing on the darkness now before its
time.

In a small hemp field on an edge of the vast Kentucky table-land, a
solitary breaker kept on at his work. The splintered shards were piled
high against his brake: he had not paused to clear them out of his way
except around his bootlegs. Near by, the remnant of the shock had
fallen over, clods of mingled frost and soil still sticking to the
level butt-ends. Several yards to windward, where the dust and refuse
might not settle on it, lay the pile of gray-tailed hemp,--the coarsest
of man's work, but finished as conscientiously as an art. From the
warming depths of this, rose the head and neck of a common shepherd
dog, his face turned uneasily but patiently toward the worker. Whatever
that master should do, whether understood or not, was right to him; he
did not ask to understand, but to love and to serve. Farther away in
another direction leaned the charred rind of a rotting stump. At
intervals the rising wind blew the ashes away, exposing live
coals--that fireside of the laborer, wandering with him from spot to
spot over the bitter lonely spaces.

The hemp breaker had just gone to the shock and torn away another
armful, dragging the rest down. Exhausting to the picked and powerful,
the work seemed easy to him; for he was a young man of the greatest
size and strength, moulded in the proportions which Nature often
chooses for her children of the soil among that people. Striding
rapidly back to his brake, the clumsy five-slatted device of the
pioneer Kentuckians, he raised the handle and threw the armful of
stalks crosswise between the upper and the lower blades. Then swinging
the handle high, with his body wrenched violently forward and the
st