Finis said, “Me and Luke, we been huntin’ for a milk cow that strayed off. She was a-springin’ heavy with calf. We figure she’s had it somewheres by now and is a-hidin’ it out. Big brindle cow, she is. We was wonderin’ if by chance you’ve seen her?”

It was Andrew’s opinion, which he kept to himself, that the cow’s rightful owner had come along and found her and had taken her home. That is, if there had been a cow in the first place. It was strongly probable that the Blackwoods had been hog hunting in the woods and had decided to come over for a free meal. That was ironic because it was probably Andrew’s hogs they were hunting. His pig crop always weaned smaller than it should. He had long suspected that a percentage of his hogs ended up in the Blackwoods’ smokehouse.

He said, “I haven’t seen any such cow. We was just finishin’ up our dinner. Long’s you’re here, you’d just as well come on in and have what’s left.” It was hardly a gracious invitation, but it was the best he felt like giving them.

Even as Finis was saying, “We ain’t come to impose,” he was dismounting. Luke followed his lead. They tied their horses to a post in the sun. Andrew would have tied them in the shade of a tree just a few steps farther away, but the Blackwoods had their own ways, and he felt no compulsion to try to educate them to higher standards.

Petra was painfully civil to the two brothers while they finished everything she had cooked and looked around for more. She asked, “How is Nelly?”

“Fatter’n a hog,” Finis said, wiping the last piece of bread through a plateful of molasses. “I declare, I never did see anybody who loved to eat like she does.” He gave Petra a condescending look that said he had as soon not talk with her at all. She was Mexican.

Petra seemed to understand the look, and Andrew suspected she continued the conversation just to aggravate Finis. That was not difficult to do. She asked, “And the three children, how do they do?”

“Noisy, hungry all the time.” Nelly had been shelling out children at the rate of one a year, a trait admirable in cows but not always so desirable in women. Fathering babies was the only kind of planting in which Finis found any pleasure. Hard work around the Blackwood farm was left mostly to younger brother Isaac, the only one of the three Andrew considered worth the powder it would take to dispatch them to a better world. Even Isaac would bear watching, for he was a Blackwood.

Finis and Luke finished, not so much that they had eaten all they wanted but that they had eaten all there was. The two children held their distance. The little girl was always timid around strangers. The boy Ben was more sociable, but he distrusted these dirty-bearded, unkempt neighbors from across the river. Andrew took that as a sign of his son’s good judgment.