e until dark to make up for the shirking of those
other hands.

It was the trail experience over again, and it was an experience that
dragged through the years without change or betterment. Marthy wanted
to "get ahead." Jase wanted to sit in the sun with his knees drawn up,
just--I don't know what, but I suppose he called it thinking. When he
felt unusually energetic, he liked to dangle an impaled worm over a
trout pool. Theoretically he also wanted to get ahead and to have a
fine ranch and lots of cattle and a comfortable home. He would plan
these things sometimes in an expansive mood, whereupon Marthy would
stare at him with her hard, contemptuous look until Jase trailed off
into mumbling complaints into his beard. He was not as able-bodied as
she thought he was, he would say, with vague solemnity. Some uh these
days Marthy'd see how she had driven him beyond his strength.

When one is a Marthy, however, with ambitions and a tireless energy and
the persistence of a beaver, and when one listens to vague mutterings
for many hard laboring years, one grows accustomed to the complainings
and fails to see certain warning symptoms of which even the complainer
is only vaguely aware.

She kept on working through the years, and as far as was humanly
possible she kept Jase working. She did not soften, except toward
Billy Louise, who rode sometimes over from her father's ranch on the
Wolverine to the flowery delights of the Cove. The place was a perfect
jungle of sweetness, seven months of each year; for Marthy owned and
indulged a love of beauty, even if she could not realize her dream of
prosperity. Wherever was space in the house-yard for a flower or a
fruit tree or a berry bush, Marthy planted one or the other. You could
not see the cabin from April until the leaves fell in late October,
except in a fragmentary way as you walked around it. You went in at a
gate of pickets which Marthy herself had split and nailed in place; you
followed a narrow, winding path through the sweet jungle--and if you
were tall, you stooped now and then to pass under an apple branch. And
unless you looked up at the black, lava-rock rim of the bluff which
cupped this Eden incongruously, you would forget that just over the
brim lay parched plain and barren mountain.

When Billy Louise was twelve, she had other ambitions than the making
of cookies with "raisings" on them. She wanted to do something big,
though she was hazy as to the p