He would take Hen to fish with him in the creek although Hen was but little over two years old and had to be carried. ‘The sign, she’s right in the foot, Hen, and the fish is bound to bite, so come along.’ He would take Hen as if he were a half-grown boy or a man, giving him a fish pole of his own, finding a delight in his companionship. The lawyer was paid now and Joe Phillips no longer stood on Jasper’s note for any thing. Jasper stood clear in the sight of the law, but one or two remembered, perhaps, that he had been tried on a felonious charge, or one or two, here and there, in the St Lucy country, still thought him guilty and Henry overheard him spoken of by some careless tongue as ‘the man who burned down Wingate’s barn’. Ellen had brought her cow from St Lucy, Henry having driven it slowly across the country in mid-winter, and by spring it had given them a heifer calf which, at weaning time, Ellen sold to the trader for twenty dollars, the last of the money needed to pay the lawyer’s charge. The cow and a few hens were Ellen’s property, and Joe Phillips gave her grape cuttings to plant and a little cherry tree. Nannie could walk now, and Hen could climb in the low trees of the plum thicket. The land about became more actual, hills and lowlands, trees and streams and hollows, yellow soil and dark, rocky roads and bushy paths. East to the crossroads and there was the little farm where Mrs Sadley lived, three miles to go. North, and there was the farmhouse, big and white, where Joe Phillips and his wife and his two boys stayed. Beyond came the road going outward toward the schoolhouse and the cabin of Bill Shuck and Marthy and their two or three children. The land was real and their wants were real, bread and meat and clothing, sleep and firewood, the cow to milk and the chickens to tend. The wages Jasper had were scarcely enough, but real, money to earn and to spend, over and over. It came upon her one day when Nannie was two years old that the land was more real, more hard and actual, stone for stone and soil for soil, more than it had been when she first came there. Somewhere back a way it had become so, and some where likewise money had become money, twenty-five cents to make a quarter, and all buying little enough.

Twenty-five cents to make a quarter or ten cents to make a dime, and either buying little enough, and she slipped the coins through her fingers as they lay on the shelf. Jasper was clear of the law, but one or two had frankly thought him guilty, Henry had confided to her.

She would sometimes glance at his great face as he came into the doorway and a quick thought would arise, and a question. Or she would see him lift some great weight, as a butchered hog, throwing it into a wagon, his sinews taut and his legs strong arched and grained, or see him stand relaxed after the feat, lighting his pipe to ease himself.