“Yes, I remember, Oscar, . . . you said you was so impatient waitin’ for Martha you had to take it out on something.”

“Well. . . .” He was silent so long that Abbie thought he had finished with the subject. “. . . Martha’s been gone twenty-two years . . .” The old man fussed with his watch. “Twenty-two years! Went down to Plattsmouth yestidy ’n’ kicked the post again . . . like I was waitin’ for somethin’ . . . a boat to come in . . . or somethin’. . . . Foolish, wasn’t it? Kind of a ceremony, I guess.”

After the old settlers’ reunion, Abbie spent a few days with Margaret Baker in Lincoln. John Deal took his mother up in the big sedan. On the same road that Abbie had driven her team over thirty years before, stopping at Stevens Creek to eat her lunch, John took his mother now over the hard packed gravel in forty minutes. He growled a good deal at the county commissioners over a mile stretch in which he had to slow down a little.

The Bakers had one of the lovely new homes of the city, artistic in every point, from the dwarf evergreens in front to the Russian olives in the rear of the garden. Margaret had overseen every detail to the last door knob. Dr. Baker was a specialist now. “Which side of the heart is your particular line?” Abbie asked him in mock seriousness. “Dear, dear, you doctors have got our anatomy so divided up and pigeon-holed that nobody knows where to go if he just happens to feel bad all over. You’re not as smart as our old Dr. Hornby. When he first came to Nebraska, he practiced medicine and surgery, fitted glasses and pulled teeth, was a notary public and sold sewing-machines.”

Margaret Deal Baker was fifty-four now, gray-haired, calm-eyed, level-headed, one of the substantial women of the city, her name a part of every artistic and civic endeavor. “ ‘Poise’ is Aunt Margaret’s middle name,” Katherine Deal, who was sixteen and given to expressing herself freely, would say. Democratic to the finger-tips, Margaret Baker, with her lovely home and her prominent position, refused to forget her humble beginnings. “When I was a girl . . .” she would say, and go off into a hearty peal of laughter over the memory of some funny episode out on the prairie when the state was new.

“Yes, I go to the beauty parlor every week,” she would say frankly to a group of well-groomed women. “I have a shampoo and hot-oil massage and wave. And when I was a girl, I was thankful to wash my hair myself once in a while with water from a rain-barrel with drowned gnats in it.”

Grace, lacking humor, was sometimes disturbed by her sister’s attitude. “There’s no use parading the fact that you once lived on beans and cornmeal,” she would say.

“But plenty of use in parading the fact that it was your ancestor who hung the light in old North tower,” Margaret would get back, with her mother’s twinkle in her gray eyes. The Revolutionary ancestors on her father’s side were a source of great pride and solace to Grace Deal.