f
yellow hair, and said: "You go and wash yourself." At a certain light in
his mother's eye, which he caught as he passed into the house with his
dog, the boy turned and cut a defiant caper. The oldest son sat down on
the bench beside his father, and they all looked in silence at the
mountain before them. They heard the boy whistling behind the house, with
sputtering and blubbering noises, as if he were washing his face while he
whistled; and then they heard him singing, with a muffled sound, and
sharp breaks from the muffled sound, as if he were singing into the
towel; he shouted to his dog and threatened him, and the scuffling of his
feet came to them through all as if he were dancing.

"Been after them woodchucks ag'in," his father huskily suggested.

"I guess so," said the mother. The brother did not speak; he coughed
vaguely, and let his head sink forward.

The father began a statement of his affairs.

The mother said: "You don't want to go into that; we been all over it
before. If it's come to the pinch, now, it's come. But you want to be
sure."

The man did not answer directly. "If we could sell off now and get out to
where Jim is in Californy, and get a piece of land--" He stopped, as if
confronted with some difficulty which he had met before, but had hoped he
might not find in his way this time.

His wife laughed grimly. "I guess, if the truth was known, we're too poor
to get away."

"We're poor," he whispered back. He added, with a weak obstinacy: "I
d'know as we're as poor as that comes to. The things would fetch
something."

"Enough to get us out there, and then we should be on Jim's hands," said
the woman.

"We should till spring, maybe. I d'know as I want to face another winter
here, and I d'know as Jackson does."

The young man gasped back, courageously: "I guess I can get along here
well enough."

"It's made Jim ten years younger. That's what he said," urged the father.

The mother smiled as grimly as she had laughed. "I don't believe it 'll
make you ten years richer, and that's what you want."

"I don't believe but what we should ha' done something with the place by
spring. Or the State would," the father said, lifelessly.

The voice of the boy broke in upon them from behind. "Say, mother, a'n't
you never goin' to have dinner?" He was standing in the doorway, with a
startling cleanness of the hands and face, and a strange, wet sleekness
of the hair. His clothes were bedrabbled down the