In an overwhelming return of affection for the children, she picked little John up and covered him with kisses, her tears on his cheeks. She drew Margaret to her and cuddled her, too. Margaret’s little hand had a dingy rag around it to cover a cut, and in an ecstasy of mother-emotion, Abbie kissed the little hand, kissed the plump baby neck between the soft brown ringlets and the colorless calico dress. She went to the door and called, “Mack, come in.”

“What do you want, Mother?”

“Nothing, Mack, . . . nothing but to kiss you, darling. Oh, little son, I love you so. Kiss Mother, Mack.”

Mack, who was seven now and a little superior to the demonstration of women folks, stood the ordeal with fortitude and then pulled quickly away. “I’m helping Father sort things, . . . all the nails for him, . . . the little ones, . . . and the horseshoe ones, . . . and . . .”

“That’s it. That’s a good boy. Always help Father, Mack. He’s the best father in the world. You’ll never forget it, will you, darling?”

She did not want Will to know what Mary had written, so she read the letter aloud to him, blithely skipping the tart reference to Ed Matthews.

During that summer the whole family went in the wagon along the creek to scour the thickets for wild grapes and wild plums. Abbie rode three miles on horseback to a Mrs. Tomlinson’s to get some late pieplant which had miraculously escaped the scourge of the robber insects. And when Will came in one day with two huge beets which he had found when taking down a pile of boards, Abbie sent word to Henry Lutz’s to come over and the two families feasted on potatoes, corn bread and sliced boiled beets.

Every one was in want. In the early fall people began going past the house. “Going home,” they all reported. Many times parties of them stayed all night. They had their own quilts and would arrange their beds on the mainroom floor. They were beaten, they said. One could stand a few disappointments and failures, but when everything turned against one, there was no use trying to fight.

“The land hasn’t turned against us,” Will would argue stubbornly. “It’s the finest, blackest loam on the face of the earth. The folks that will just stick it out. . . . You’ll see the climate change, . . . more rains and not so much wind . . . when the trees grow. We’ve got to keep at the trees. Some day this is going to be the richest state in the union . . . the most productive. I’ll bet anything next year . . .”

Always “next year”! It was a mirage, thought Abbie, an apparition that vanished when one came to it. Six times now they had said, “Next year, the crops will be fine.”

And so she could not throw off the blue mood that had descended upon her, a horde of worries that had come upon her even as the horde of grasshoppers had come upon the land. The thought that there was nothing to do with; that they could scarcely keep body and soul together; that she probably would never be able now to do anything with her voice; that another child was coming,—they all harassed and tormented her. All fall there was in her mind a tired disinterest over things. In spite of what he said, that surface courage which he pretended had returned to him, Abbie detected that Will, too, was morose. To her keen eye he seemed dull and stoical, underneath an assumption of cheerfulness.