After the first broods were turned away the hens would often wander off to stolen nests for their second settings. Ellen would search for these among the high weeds at the back of the garden or in the old abandoned barn where a quantity of mouldering straw sometimes concealed sly nests. Hens would brood there even though the rats would devour their young as soon as they were out of the nest. If she went near the barn at nightfall Ellen would hear the bats slipping through the air and often she had heard the whippoorwills cry out their songs from the yawning rafters, songs more mournful than all sorrow, as of beings blighted by all loss, repeating with monotonous cry a loss incurred over and over as often as some mocking or futile hand restored, of the endless futility of nests and litters fathered and mothered to be the prey of some other as futile kind. Ellen would go half fearfully into the barn when the sun was bright on the south front. Once in the mid-summer as she came softly out of the old corn room, she met Amanda Cain suddenly in the wide corridor, walking quickly from some inner place. Her hair lay over her forehead in large tumbled curls and was gathered high on her head in a knot, and her mouth twisted from moment to moment in a proud smile, the corners of her mouth, unlike each other, bent, one downward, and then her thin lips shut together closely into a fine thin line. Her bright dress flared quickly in the sunny doorway above the dry dusty floor, and then out into the shade of the locust thicket. A little later Ellen heard her over beyond the fence in the other farm calling pee-o-wee-wee-wee, at first low and broken and then high and insistent. Standing in the barn door, looking down into the half obscurity of the thicket, for a moment Ellen felt the feeling of the other farm and what it would be to be a part of the land beyond the fence. She would be ‘that girl that works on Wakefield’s place’, and ‘that white girl over at Wakefield’s’. Her coarse blue cotton dress hung skimply against her body, a strong body, sturdier than Amanda Cain’s, round breasted and strong shouldered. She saw herself as a creature in a coarse dress and broken shoes that went up and down the farm lifting heavy clods and cutting wood. Amanda Cain’s dress was bright and fine every day and her slippers had bows on the instep.

She went cautiously into the inner parts of the barn, searching again for hens, ‘that girl on Wakefield’s place’. She saw her strong hand feel into the dark straw, reaching for eggs. Once when she had come here in the early evening, a bright moon shining, come to look for her straying calf, she had seen Scott MacMurtrie going into the doorway and later she had heard low words from within, Amanda Cain’s voice, ‘You took your time to come. You must ’a’ come around by town.’ Now she went slowly from manger to manger, gathering an egg or two, looking half fearfully, for once a snake had fallen from some timber above and had writhed away through the dust at her feet. At the rear of the hallway that gave into the stalls an old feeding frame was raised a few feet from the ground and in this was strewn a bed of straw, hollowed in the middle like a great nest, and drawing toward it cautiously and peering in she knew that it was Amanda Cain’s bed, for the sash from Amanda Cain’s bright dress was strewn across the straw.