n to the Wolverine that stormy night in January. The distrust had
left his eyes, and that guarded remoteness was gone from his manner.
He thought and he planned as other men thought and planned, and looked
into the future eagerly, and dreamed dreams of his own; dreams that
brought the hidden smile often to his lips and his eyes.

Still, the thing those dreams were built upon was yet locked tight in
his heart, and not even Billy Louise, whose instinct was so keen and so
sure in all things else, knew anything of them or of the bright-hued
hope they were built upon. Fortune's football was making ready to
fight desperately to become captain of the game, that he might be
something more to Billy Louise.

CHAPTER V

MARTHY BURIES HER DEAD AND GREETS HER NEPHEW

Jase did not move or give his customary, querulous grunt when Marthy
nudged him at daylight, one morning in mid-April. Marthy gave another
poke with her elbow and lay still, numbed by a sudden dread. She moved
cautiously out of the bed and half across the cramped room before she
turned her head toward him. Then she stood still and looked and
looked, her hard face growing each moment more pinched and stony and
gray.

Jase had died while the coyotes were yapping their dawn-song up on the
rim of the Cove. He lay rigid under the coarse, gray blanket, the
flesh of his face drawn close to the bones, his skimpy, gray beard
tilted upward.

Marthy's jaw set into a harsher outline than ever. She dressed with
slow, heavy movements and went out and fed the stock. In stolid calm
she did the milking and turned out the cows into the pasture. She
gathered an apron full of chips and started a fire, just as she had
done every morning for twenty-nine years, and she put the coffee-pot on
the greasy stove and boiled the brew of yesterday--which was also her
habit.

She sat for some time with her head leaning upon her grimy hand and
stared unseeingly out upon a peach-tree in full bloom, and at a pair of
busy robins who had chosen a convenient crotch for their nest. Finally
she rose stiffly, as if she had grown older within the last hour, and
went outside to the place where she had been mending the irrigating
ditch the day before; she knocked the wet sand off the shovel she had
left sticking in the soft bank and went out of the yard and up the
slope toward the rock wall.

On a tiny, level place above the main ditch and just under the wall,
Marthy began to dig, setti