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“I’d have come to the fence when I saw you, if I hadn’t had the colt,” he said kindly. “What’s wanted?”

The old woman’s face twitched. She pushed her sunbonnet back with one trembling hand.

“Jason,” she said, with a little jerk in her voice, “your paw’s alive.”

The man arranged the lines carefully along the colt’s back; then he took off his hat and wiped the top of his head on his sleeve, looking away from his mother with heavy, dull embarrassment.

“I expect you’d ‘most forgot all about him,” pursued the old woman, with a vague reproach in her tone.

“I hadn’t much to forget,” answered the man, resentment rising in his voice. “He hasn’t troubled himself about me.”

“Well, he didn’t know anything about you, Jason, he went away so soon after we was married. It’s a dreadful position to be placed in. It ‘u’d be awfully embarrassing to–to the Moxom girls.”

The man gave her a quick, curious glance. He had never heard her speak of his half-sisters in that way before.

“They’re so kind of high-toned,” she went on, “just as like as not they’d blame me. I’m sure I don’t know what to do.”

Jason kicked the soft earth with his sunburnt boot.

“Where is he?” he asked sullenly.

“In Californay.”

“How’d you hear?”

“I got a letter. He wrote to Burtonville and directed it to Mrs. Angeline Weaver, and the postmaster give it to some of your uncle Samuel’s folks, and they put it in another envelope and backed it to me here. I thought at first I wouldn’t say anything about it, but it seemed as if I’d ought to tell you; it doesn’t hurt you any, but it’s awful hard on the–the Moxom girls.”

The man shifted his weight, and kicked awhile with his other foot.

“Well, I’d just give him the go-by,” he announced resolutely. “You’re a decent man’s widow, and that’s enough. He’s never”–

“Oh, I ain’t saying anything against your step-paw, Jason,” the old woman broke in anxiously. “He was an awful good man. It seems queer to think it was the way it was. Dear me, it’s all so kind of confusing!”

The poor woman looked down with much the same embarrassment over her matrimonial redundance that a man might feel when suddenly confronted by twins.

“I’m sure I don’t see how I could help thinking he was dead,” she went on after a little silence, “when he wrote he was going off on that trip and might never come back, and the man that was with him wrote that they got lost from each other, and water was so scarce and all that. And then, you know, I didn’t get married again till you was ‘most ten years old, Jason. I’m sure I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to mortify anybody, but I’d like to know just what’s my dooty.”

“Well, I can tell you easy enough.” The man’s voice was getting beyond control, but he drew it in with a quick, angry breath. “Just drop the whole thing. If he’s got on for forty years, mother, I guess he can manage for the rest of the time.”

“But it ain’t so easy managin’ when you begin to get old, Jason. I know how that is.”

Her son jerked the lines impatiently, and the colt gave a nervous start.

“I suppose you know this farm really came to you from your paw, don’t you, Jason?” she asked humbly.

“Don’t know as I did,” answered the man, without enthusiasm.

“Well, you see, after we was married, your grandfather Weaver offered your paw this quarter-section if he’d stay here in Ioway; but he had his heart set on going to Californay, and didn’t want it; so after it turned out the way it did, and you was born, your grandfather gave me this farm, and I done very well with it. That’s the reason your step-paw insisted on you having it when we was dividing things up before he died.”