he sweat springing up on the young farmer's
brow and fingers, despite the cold breeze that blew. The bulldog pliers
trembled as though responding to the throbbing of an engine. Suddenly,
as though about to be jerked from Aaron's hands, the pliers tugged
downward so forceably that he had to lift his elbows and flex his wrists
to hold onto them. "Put a little pile of stones here, Waziri," he said.
"We'll have the diggers visit as soon as the ground thaws."

[Illustration]

Waziri shook his head. "Haruna, they will not touch soft earth until the
first grass sprouts," he said.

"Time enough," Aaron said. He looked up to satisfy himself that his
prospective well-site was high enough to avoid drainage from his
pig-yard, then left the Murnan boy to pile up a cairn for the diggers.
It would be good to have a windmill within ear-shot of the house, he
mused; its squeaking would ease Martha with a homey sound.

[Illustration]

Alone for a few minutes, Aaron retired to the workshop in the cellar of
the barn. He planed and sanded boards of a native lumber very like to
tulipwood. Into the headboard of the cradle he was making, he
keyhole-sawed the same sort of broad Dutch heart that had marked his own
cradle, and the cradles of all his family back to the days in the
Rhineland, before they'd been driven to America.

Martha Stoltzfoos was speaking Hausa better than she'd spoken English
since grade-school days, and she kept busy in the little bacteriological
laboratory on her sunporch, keeping fresh the skills she'd learned at
Georgetown and might some day need in earnest; but she still grew
homesick as her child-coming day drew nearer. It was wrong, she told
Aaron, for an Amishwoman to have heathen midwives at her lying-in. For
all their kindness, the Murnan women could never be as reassuring as the
prayer-covered, black-aproned matrons who'd have attended Martha back
home. "Ach, Stoltz," she told her husband, "if only a few other of
_unser sart Leit_ could have come here with us."

"Don't worry, Love," Aaron said. "I've eased calves and colts enough
into the world; man-children can't come so different."

"You talk like a man," Martha accused him. "I wish my Mem was just down
the road a piece, ready to come a-running when my time came," she said.
She put one hand on her apron. "_Chuudes Paste!_ The little rascal is
wild as a colt, indeed. Feel him, Stoltz!"

Aaron dutifully placed his hand to sense the child's quickening. "He