never set foot
in my house, ner I in her'n. Sam ken keep her, but what on, I don't
know. He gits right out of this here farm the day he marries her,
and he don't come back, not while I'm a-livin'."

It was all this that made old Billy Norris morose, and Mrs. Norris
silent and patient and laughless, for Sam married the despised
"gosling" right at harvest time, when hands were so scarce that
farmers wrangled and fought, day in and day out, to get one single
man to go into the field.

This was Sam's golden opportunity. His father's fields stood yellow
with ripening grain to be cut on the morrow, but he deliberately
hired himself out to a neighbor, where he would get good wages
to start a little home with; for, farmer-like, old Billy Norris
never paid his son wages. Sam was supposed to work for nothing but
his clothes and board as reward, and a possible slice of the farm
when the old man died, while a good harvest hand gets board and
high wages, to boot. This then was the hour to strike, and the
morning the grain stood ready for the reaper Sam paused at the
outside kitchen door at sunrise.

"Mother," he said, "I've got to have her. I'm going to marry her
to-day, and to-morrow start working for Mr. Willson, who will pay me
enough to keep a wife. I'm sorry, mother, but--well, I've got to
have her. Some day you'll know her, and you'll love her, I know you
will; and if there's ever any children--"

But Mrs. Norris had clutched him by the arm. "Sammy," she
whispered, "your father will be raging mad at your going, and
harvest hands so scarce. I _know_ he'll never let me go near you,
never. But if there's ever any children, Sammy, you just come for
your mother, and I'll go to you and her _without_ his letting."

Then with one of the all too few kisses that are ever given or
received in a farmhouse life, she let him go. The storm burst at
breakfast time when Sam did not appear, and the poor mother tried
to explain his absence, as only a mother will. Old Billy waxed
suspicious, then jumped at facts. The marriage was bad enough,
but this being left in the lurch at the eleventh hour, his son's
valuable help transferred from the home farm to Mr. Willson's, with
whom he always quarreled in church, road, and political matters, was
too much.

"But, father, you never paid him wages," ventured the mother.

"Wages? Wages to one's own son, that one has raised and fed and
shod from the cradle? Wages, when he knowed he'd come in fer p