“Why didn’t you tell us? Maybe we could have done something.”

Tom leaped up, violent and cringing. “Goddam it! What was there to tell? That he was dying of sorrow? That the marrow had melted out of his bones? What was there to tell? You weren’t here. I had to look at it and see his eyes die down—goddam it.” Tom went out of the room and they heard his clodhopper feet knocking on the flinty ground outside.

They were ashamed. Will Martin said, “I’ll go out and bring him back.”

“Don’t do it,” George said quickly, and the blood kin nodded. “Don’t do it. Let him alone. We know him from the insides of ourselves.”

In a little while Tom came back. “I want to apologize,” he said. “I’m very sorry. Maybe I’m a little drunk. Father calls it ‘jolly’ when I do it. One night I rode home”—it was a confession—“and I came staggering across the yard and I fell into the rosebush and crawled up the stairs on my hands and knees and I was sick on the floor beside my bed. In the morning I tried to tell him I was sorry, and do you know what he said? ‘Why, Tom, you were just jolly.’ ‘Jolly,’ if I did it. A drunken man didn’t crawl home. Just jolly.”

George stopped the crazy flow of talk. “We want to apologize to you, Tom,” he said. “Why, we sounded as though we were blaming you and we didn’t mean to. Or maybe we did mean to. And we’re sorry.”

Will Martin said realistically, “It’s too hard a life here. Why don’t we get him to sell out and move to town? He could have a long and happy life. Mollie and I would like them to come and live with us.”

“I don’t think he’d do it,” said Will. “He’s stubborn as a mule and proud as a horse. He’s got a pride like brass.”

Olive’s husband, Ernest, said, “Well, there’d be no harm in asking him. We would like to have him—or both of them—with us.”

Then they were silent again, for the idea of not having the ranch, the dry, stony desert of heartbreaking hillside and unprofitable hollow, was shocking to them.

Will Hamilton from instinct and training in business had become a fine reader of the less profound impulses of men and women. He said, “If we ask him to close up shop it will be like asking him to close his life, and he won’t do it.”

“You’re right, Will,” George agreed. “He would think it was like quitting. He’d feel it was a cowardice. No, he will never sell out, and if he did I don’t think he would live a week.”

Will said, “There’s another way. Maybe he could come for a visit. Tom can run the ranch. It’s time Father and Mother saw something of the world. All kinds of things are happening. It would freshen him, and then he could come back and go to work again. And after a while maybe he wouldn’t have to. He says himself that thing about time doing the job dynamite can’t touch.”