“No,” said Abbie aloud at the soddie window. “No, he couldn’t sell it.”

For some time she stood there, watching the half-intoxicated man go east across the prairie.

CHAPTER XVII

The snow began in October that year and did not leave until the last of March. Wherever there were fences, the drifts piled high and obliterated them, so that one would not have known any had been built,—Nature’s little joke, as though she were laughing at the settlers for their pains.

The children’s attendance at school was broken constantly by severe snowstorms, so that Abbie again did much of the teaching herself. She often searched her mind for new ideas, trying to think what more she could do for the children. Time was slipping away and conditions were no better. Even if she must face the hard fact that she could never do anything more for herself, the children must have some of the best things of life. Will was working day and night, making an old man of himself before his time. She must do more for the children some way. She must not let them grow up without a taste for good things. They ought to know more about music and have more reading material, and because they were not getting them, in some way she must instill in them a desire to have them. They must never be satisfied with things as they were. Even if she and Will were to live in a soddie all their lives, cut off from those things, the children must want to have them. If the desire were deep enough, they would find a way to seek them out as they grew older.

She began getting down the Shakespeare plays for a while each evening, and requiring Mack and Margaret to learn a passage or two. Over and over she made them repeat:

“The quality of mercy is not strained

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath.”

Or, perhaps:

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.”

Mack protested. “Aw, shucks, I don’t see any sense to them.”

“It’s for your own good, Mack,” she would say. “Some day when you’re older, the meaning will all come to you. And you’ll be glad you’ve learned so much of them.”

But Mack was more interested in his old brass horn. There was a six-piece band over at Cedartown now, and that spring one often heard the far-away blare of the three brass instruments, the toot of the fife and the rumble of the two snare drums. The organization was preparing for the first Fourth of July celebration in the community and patriotic airs were as much in evidence as the spring winds. Mack, herding hogs, would sit at the western border of his father’s land and windily blow out the same tune which the band was practicing. As he was usually two notes behind the others, his part in the proceedings sounded like an echo. It began to bother the legitimate performers, so that, more from sheer self-defense than enthusiastic desire, they invited him to join them. Mack’s round freckled face beamed at the invitation as one receiving a congressional medal.