" said Morgan, obliterating all claim with a sweep of his
hand.

"I think you'd better take back what's coming to you," suggested Joe.

Morgan turned to him with stiff severity.

"Are you the watch-dog of the old man's treasury?" he sneered.

"Maybe I am, for a day or two," returned Joe, "and if you step on me
I'll bite."

He leveled his steady gray eyes at Morgan's shifting orbs, and held them
there as if to drive in some hidden import of his words. Morgan seemed
to understand. He colored, laughed shortly, and busied himself buttering
a griddle-cake.

Ollie, pale and silent, had not looked up during this by-passage between
the two men. Her manner was of one who expected something, which she
dreaded and feared to face.

Morgan took the road early. Joe saw him go with a feeling of relief. He
felt like a swollen barrel which had burst its close-binding hoops, he
thought, as he went back to the place where he dropped his scythe
yesterday.

As he worked through the long morning hours Joe struggled to adjust
himself to the new conditions, resulting from the discovery of his own
enlargement and understanding. It would be a harder matter now to go on
living there with Ollie. Each day would be a trial by fire, the weeks
and months a lengthening highway strewn with the embers of his own
smoldering passion. Something might happen, almost any day, youth and
youth together, galled by the same hand of oppression, that would
overturn his peace forever. Yet, he could not leave. The bond of his
mother's making, stamped with the seal of the law, held him captive
there.

At length, after spending a harrowing morning over it, he reached the
determination to stand up to it like a man, and serve Isom as long as he
could do so without treason. When the day came that his spirit weakened
and his continence failed, he would throw down the burden and desert.
That he would do, even though his mother's hopes must fall and his own
dreams of redeeming the place of his birth, to which he was attached by
a sentiment almost poetic, must dissolve like vapor in the sun.

It was mid-afternoon when Joe finished his mowing and stood casting his
eyes up to the sky for signs of rain. There being none, he concluded
that it would be safe to allow yesterday's cutting to lie another night
in the field while he put in the remainder of the day with his scythe in
the lower orchard plot, where the clover grew rank among the trees.

Satisfied that he had