Ellen told Nellie that she was going away with Jasper when all the crops were housed, and Nellie and Henry were both well pleased. Nellie said that Ellen must save all the feathers from the geese and add to these all the plucked feathers laid away, for every girl should bring to her marriage a soft bed to lie in. When Tarbell stopped at the toll house door Ellen would seldom go outside. Instead she would busy herself in the yard, and she would neither eat his fringe-papered taffy drops nor read the declarations printed within the wrapper. In the evening Jasper would come and Ellen would sit with him on the steps before the door. She would hear his high whistled phrase, a bit of some old song imperfectly remembered, penetrating every room of the cabin, and she would finish her task in gladness, knowing that he waited on the step before the door or on the stile under the ash tree. He would tell her of how things lay between him and Albert, of his fears and precautions. The autumn was approaching darkly in the house under the great poplars, old Mrs Wingate tearing her rags and muttering her evil sayings. Jasper continued to bring Ellen each bit of cash he was paid as he had done since he had first made her his banker in the spring, and she hid the money deep in the locked chest, near two hundred dollars now. One dusk she brought it out for him to count and the sum pleased him very much, but he told her to put it back and he would be bringing more when the hogs were sold, and the whole sum would buy them their start in some better country, some fertile, well-watered land. He showed her his scars and told her how he had got each one, by what fights or accidents, and she drove her mind back into his experiences to try to merge with his sorrows and his pleasures and to share each one and to hold all in her thoughts. Or she would sit quietly on the step beside him, reposing in the quiet of his embrace, and they would speak to each other softly.

He had built a pen for the swine, far back among the hills where a little spring trickled out of the stones and made a damp place below in the soil. He had cut posts from the cedar glades and had hewed out knotty rails, enclosing a space about twenty feet wide which bent and turned with the flow of the hills. Over one end of the enclosure he had built a high platform and onto this he often loaded a great pile of fodder which was thus kept high, away from the hogs but always ready at feeding times. After he had brought the swine to the pen – eleven great shoats ready for fattening – he went down to the ravine twice each day to throw down fodder from the platform, but he was careful to make no paths as he went. The hogs churned the moistened soil into a cool wallow and there they lay all day, or they aroused themselves to crunch the corn he threw to them or returned to suck the wasted grains out of the mud. He told no one but Ellen where he had built the secret sty and how much labour had gone into hewing the rails and setting the platform.