He said that he would go to another place, to a place where he could grow tobacco on a sharing plan, which was not the way Phillips used. He told Phillips that he would go and another man was hired in his place, but in the end he was forced to take work where he received mere hire, for there was a small crop to be grown that year and places of any sort were hard to find. Ellen pictured a place vaguely set among trees, the consummation of some deeply-lying dream, a house looking toward some wide valley. Jasper was free of the law now and it was time they began to be, to realise, to find the truth of their old wish in a physical fact, to find it set at their hand. Good land lying out smooth, a little clump of woodland, just enough to shade the cows at noon, a house fixed, the roof mended, a porch to sit on when the labour was done; these were her promise. When Jasper said that they would leave Phillips her mind leaped to the better land they would find, their farm sometime, perhaps, but at any rate some place nearer their need and wish. She made many vague pictures of a house on a green hill, a well with a bright new pump, the handle easy to lift, the water coolly flowing. Some vague better haunted her through the eagerness of her going preparations, and her fervour to be gone built cunningly about her imagined new abode.

They came to the place at mid-afternoon. The house was built starkly on the top of a stony hill in a waste place that would not serve for farming. The farmer, Byron Goddard, motioned them toward the cabin with a careless gesture, gave a few confused orders to Jasper, and rode away through the farm swiftly on his great horse. There were two rooms to the cabin. A few thin cedar trees grew on the hillside below the door. Ellen carried the water from a spring in the valley below and often the way seemed so steep to climb that she would spare the water grudgingly and wash Hen and Nannie in the same pan. The stony earth in the garden behind the house yielded little in return for her work there. From the hilltop she could see the green fields of the farm roll away toward the creek and she envied them their growth and hated them that her own patch burnt in the sun. She wanted to ask Goddard for a bit of the valley, a mere strip at the foot of the hill, to use for a garden, but Jasper forbade her to do this. ‘You stay up here on this-here hill,’ he said, ‘where we belong now.’ The contention became a permanent one and she was forbidden over and over. ‘Byron Goddard, he’s got no time for you, now,’ Jasper said. ‘He’d ride right over you, Ellie, and never see. Byron Goddard, he’s not Joe Phillips. Ask no favours, we will.’