stranger come on dis place an' cut his
wheat--you know he ain'."

There seemed nothing more to say. In the darkness tears were slowly
trickling down Annie's cheeks, and she could not stop them.

"Well--good-night."

"Good-night, my lamb, good-night. I gwi' name you en your tribulations
in my prayers dis night."

She had never felt so abandoned, so alone. She could not even make the
effort to force herself to believe that Wes would not commit this
crime against all Nature; instead, she had a vivid and complete
certainty that he would. She went over it and over it, lying in
stubborn troubled wakefulness. She put it in clear if simple terms. If
Wes persisted in his petty childish anger and wasted this wheat, it
meant that they could not save the money that they had intended for
the child that was coming. They would have, in fact, hardly more than
their bare living left them. The ridiculous futility of it swept her
from one mood to another, from courage to utter hopelessness. She
remembered the first time that she had seen Wes angry, and how she had
lain awake then and wondered, and dreaded. She remembered how, later,
she had planned to manage him, to control him. And she had done
nothing. Now it had come to this, that her child would be born in
needless impoverishment; and, worse, born with the Dean curse full
upon him. She clenched and unclenched her hands. The poverty she might
bear, but the other was beyond her power to endure. Sleep came to her
at last as a blessed anodyne.

In the first moment of the sunlit morning she forgot her trouble, but
instantly she remembered, and she dressed in an agony of apprehension
and wonder. Wes was gone, as was usual, for he got up before she did,
to feed his cattle. She hurried into her clothes and came down, to
find him stamping in to breakfast, and with the first glance at him
her hope fell like a plummet.

He did mean it--he did! He did not mean to cut that wheat. She watched
him as he ate, and that fine-spun desperation that comes when courage
alone is not enough, that purpose that does the impossible, took hold
of her.

When he had finished his silent meal he went leisurely out to the
little front porch and sat down. She followed him. "Wes Dean, you
going to cut that wheat?" she demanded; and she did not know the sound
of her own voice, so high and shrill it was.

The vein in his forehead leered at her. What was she to pit her
strength against a mood like this? He did