Dessie brushed the hair out of her eyes. “I wonder if you really think he’s that stupid,” she said.

And Will said out of his experience, “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. We can try it anyway. What do you all think?”

There was a nodding of heads in the kitchen, and only Tom sat rocklike and brooding.

“Tom, wouldn’t you be willing to take over the ranch?” George asked.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Tom. “It’s no trouble to run the ranch because the ranch doesn’t run—never has.”

“Then why don’t you agree?”

“I’d find a reluctance to insult my father,” Tom said. “He’d know.”

“But where’s the harm in suggesting it?”

Tom rubbed his ears until he forced the blood out of them and for a moment they were white. “I don’t forbid you,” he said. “But I can’t do it.”

George said, “We could write it in a letter—a kind of invitation, full of jokes. And when he got tired of one of us, why, he could go to another. There’s years of visiting among the lot of us.” And that was how they left it.

[3]

Tom brought Olive’s letter from King City, and because he knew what it contained he waited until he caught Samuel alone before he gave it to him. Samuel was working in the forge and his hands were black. He took the envelope by a tiny corner and put it on the anvil, and then he scrubbed his hands in the half-barrel of black water into which he plunged hot iron. He slit the letter open with the point of a horseshoe nail and went into the sunlight to read it. Tom had the wheels off the buckboard and was buttering the axles with yellow axle grease. He watched his father from the corners of his eyes.

Samuel finished the letter and folded it and put it back in its envelope. He sat down on the bench in front of the shop and stared into space. Then he opened the letter and read it again and folded it again and put it in his blue shirt pocket. Then Tom saw him stand up and walk slowly up the eastern hill, kicking at the flints on the ground.

There had been a little rain and a fuzz of miserly grass had started up. Halfway up the hill Samuel squatted down and took up a handful of the harsh gravelly earth in his palm and spread it with his forefinger, flint and sandstone and bits of shining mica and a frail rootlet and a veined stone. He let it slip from his hand and brushed his palms. He picked a spear of grass and set it between his teeth and stared up the hill to the sky. A gray nervous cloud was scurrying eastward, searching for trees on which to rain.

Samuel stood up and sauntered down the hill. He looked into the tool shed and patted the four-by-four supports. He paused near Tom and spun one of the free-running wheels of the buckboard, and he inspected Tom as though he saw him for the first time. “Why, you’re a grown-up man,” he said.