Liza rubbed her nose and floured it with her finger. “Is it very costly?” she asked anxiously.

“Costly? Ollie has bought the tickets. They’re a present.”

“We can’t go,” said Liza. “Who’d run the ranch?”

“Tom would—what running there is to do in the winter.”

“He’d be lonely.”

“George would maybe come out and stay a while to go quail hunting. See what’s in the letter, Liza.”

“What are those?”

“Two tickets to Salinas on the train. Ollie says she doesn’t want to give us a single escape.”

“You can just turn them in and send her back the money.”

“No, I can’t. Why, Liza—Mother—now don’t. Here—here’s a handkerchief.”

“That’s a dish towel,” said Liza.

“Sit here, Mother. There! I guess the shock of taking a rest kind of threw you. Here! I know it’s a dish towel. They say that Billy Sunday drives the Devil all over the stage.”

“That’s a blasphemy,” said Liza.

“But I’d like to see it, wouldn’t you? What did you say? Hold up your head. I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

“I said yes,” said Liza.

Tom was making a drawing when Samuel came in to him. Tom looked at his father with veiled eyes, trying to read the effect of Olive’s letter.

Samuel looked at the drawing. “What is it?”

“I’m trying to work out a gate-opener so a man won’t have to get out of his rig. Here’s the pull-rod to open the latch.”

“What’s going to open it?”

“I figured a strong spring.”

Samuel studied the drawing. “Then what’s going to close it?”

“This bar here. It would slip to this spring with the tension the other way.”

“I see,” said Samuel. “It might work too, if the gate was truly hung. And it would only take twice as much time to make and keep up as twenty years of getting out of the rig and opening the gate.”

Tom protested, “Sometimes with a skittish horse—”

“I know,” said his father. “But the main reason is that it’s fun.”

Tom grinned. “Caught me,” he said.

“Tom, do you think you could look after the ranch if your mother and I took a little trip?”

“Why, sure,” said Tom. “Where do you plan to go?”

“Ollie wants us to stay with her for a while in Salinas.”

“Why, that would be fine,” said Tom. “Is Mother agreeable?”

“She is, always forgetting the expense.”

“That’s fine,” said Tom. “How long do you plan to be gone?”

Samuel’s jeweled, sardonic eyes dwelt on Tom’s face until Tom said, “What’s the matter, Father?”

“It’s the little tone, son—so little that I could barely hear it. But it was there. Tom, my son, if you have a secret with your brothers and sisters, I don’t mind. I think that’s good.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Tom.

“You may thank God you didn’t want to be an actor, Tom, because you would have been a very bad one. You worked it out at Thanksgiving, I guess, when you were all together. And it’s working smooth as butter. I see Will’s hand in this. Don’t tell me if you don’t want to.”