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“Seems to me father worked pretty hard on this place himself.”

The man said the word “father” half defiantly.

“Mr. Moxom? Oh, yes, he was a first-rate manager, and the kindest man that ever drew breath. I remember when your sister Angie was born–oh, dear me!”–the old woman felt her voice giving way, and stopped an instant,–“it seems so kind of strange. Well, I guess we’d better just drop it, Jason. I must go back to the house. Emma didn’t like my coming for lettuce. She’ll think I’ve planted some, and am waitin’ for it to come up.”

She gave her son a quivering smile as she turned away. He stood still and watched her until she had crossed the plowed ground. It seemed to him she walked more feebly than when she came out.

“That’s awful queer,” he said, shaking his head, “calling her own daughters ‘the Moxom girls.'”

III

Ethel Weaver had been to Ashland for the mail, and was driving home in the summer dusk. A dash of rain had fallen while she was in the village, and the air was full of the odor of moist earth and the sweetness of growing corn. The colt she was driving held his head high, glancing from side to side with youthful eagerness for a sensation, and shying at nothing now and then in sheer excess of emotion over the demand of his monotonous life.

The girl held a letter in her lap, turning the pages with one unincumbered hand, and lifting her flushed face with a contemptuous “Oh, Barney, you goose!” as the colt drew himself into attitudes of quivering fright, which dissolved suddenly at the sound of her voice and the knowledge that another young creature viewed his coquettish terrors with the disrespect born of comprehension. As they turned into the lane west of the house, Ethel folded her letter and thrust it hastily into her pocket, and the colt darted through the open gate and drew up at the side door with a transparent assumption of serious purpose suggested by the proximity of oats.

“Ed!” called the girl, “the next time you hitch up Barney for me, I wish you’d put a kicking-strap on him. I had a picnic with him coming down the hill by Arbuckle’s.”

Ed maintained the gruff silence of the half-grown rural male as he climbed into the buggy beside his sister and cramped the wheel for her to dismount.

“They haven’t any quart jars over at the store, mother,” said Ethel, entering the house and walking across to the mirror to remove her hat. “They’re expecting some every day. Well, I do look like the Witch of Endor!” she exclaimed, twisting her loosened rope of hair and skewering it in place with a white celluloid pin. “That colt acted as if he was possessed.”

“Oh, I’m sorry about the jars,” said Mrs. Weaver regretfully. “I wanted to finish putting up the curr’n’s to-morrow.”

“Did you get any mail?” quavered grandmother Moxom.

“I got a letter from Rob.”

There was a little hush in the room. The girl stood still before the mirror, with a sense of support in the dim reflection of her own face.

“Is he well?” ventured the old woman feebly, glancing toward her daughter-in-law.

“Yes, he’s well; he’s got steady work on some road up the mountain. He writes as if people keep going up, but he never tells what they go up for. He said something about a lot of burros, and at first I thought he was in a furniture store, but I found out he meant mules. An old man keeps them, and hires them out to people. Rob calls him ‘old Mosey.’ They’re keeping bach together. Rob tried to make biscuits, and he says they tasted like castor oil.”

As her granddaughter talked, Mrs. Moxom seemed to shrink deeper and deeper into the patchwork cushion of her chair.

“Rob wants me to come out there and be married,” pursued the girl, bending nearer to the mirror and returning her own gaze with sympathy.