-lot. At first she tried to
keep dry, but she gave it up, and there was pleasure in being defiantly
dirty. She tramped straight through puddles; she wallowed in mud. In the
wood-lot was long grass which soaked her stockings till her ankles felt
itchy. Claire had never expected to be so very intimate with a
brush-pile. She became so. As though she were a pioneer woman who had
been toiling here for years, she came to know the brush stick by
stick--the long valuable branch that she could never quite get out from
under the others; the thorny bough that pricked her hands every time she
tried to reach the curious bundle of switches.

Seven trips she made, carrying armfuls of twigs and solemnly dragging
large boughs behind her. She patted them down in front of all four
wheels. Her crisp hands looked like the paws of a three-year-old boy
making a mud fort. Her nails hurt from the mud wedged beneath them. Her
mud-caked shoes were heavy to lift. It was with exquisite self-approval
that she sat on the running-board, scraped a car-load of lignite off her
soles, climbed back into the car, punched the starter.

The car stirred, crept forward one inch, and settled back--one inch. The
second time it heaved encouragingly but did not make quite so much
headway. Then Claire did sob.

She rubbed her cheek against the comfortable, rough, heather-smelling
shoulder of her father's coat, while he patted her and smiled, "Good
girl! I better get out and help."

She sat straight, shook her head. "Nope. I'll do it. And I'm not going
to insist on being heroic any longer. I'll get a farmer to pull us out."

As she let herself down into the ooze, she reflected that all farmers
have hearts of gold, anatomical phenomena never found among the snobs
and hirelings of New York. The nearest heart of gold was presumably
beating warmly in the house a quarter of a mile ahead.

She came up a muddy lane to a muddy farmyard, with a muddy cur yapping
at her wet legs, and geese hissing in a pool of purest mud serene. The
house was small and rather old. It may have been painted once. The barn
was large and new. It had been painted very much, and in a blinding red
with white trimmings. There was no brass plate on the house, but on the
barn, in huge white letters, was the legend, "Adolph Zolzac, 1913."

She climbed by log steps to a narrow frame back porch littered with
parts of a broken cream-separator. She told herself that she was simple
and friendly in goin