“I never told nobody about what I did back then,” he had said to Eleanor, and he had taken her to the clapboard to show her his scratched-in initials, and there, as she watched, he had cut her initials in the board beside his own. E M for Eleanor Miller.

“Now all we got to do is start looking for gold, and make sure nobody else gets near the place,” Boyd had declared in the happy manner that was part of him before the war. The happy manner had made her laugh with glee.

Gold, Eleanor thought. Gold.

She wondered how her husband had not known it was only a made-up story. Too good a dream, perhaps. Too good to laugh off.

She did not know why she remembered the story. It had come to her unexpectedly out of the dark pitch of night surrounding her home, the night she gazed into from the porch swing where she been sitting for more than an hour, taking a rest from the daily struggle to get Beatrice bathed and in bed.

And maybe that was what she was doing, she thought. Keeping watch without consciously knowing it. Making sure no one got near, as Boyd had warned. As it was, she seemed to be losing the place little by little. First, the dogs, both killed by some hunter or some drunk playing at hunting, and then the selling of the younger, working mule and the calf, and then the cow’s death.

But the watch she kept was not for an imaginary stockpile of paving-stone gold. The gold her husband had dreamed about was joke gold. Not even fool’s gold. If there was gold on old Joe Manning’s farm, no one had ever found it. Enough rock to build a highway to the moon and back, but no gold. It was little wonder that Isaac Manning had sold the land to Boyd, she thought. Rock farms were useless. Isaac Manning was the one who had cashed in on the deal. Isaac Manning had moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and was turning his seed money from the sale of the land into a fortune by operating a printing business specializing in catalogues. He had got his gold out of the place, all right. Ink and paper gold.

The watch she was keeping was not for gold. It was for someone to show up with money in hand and a wish to own a rock farm.

Once, she had believed she could sell it to the man named Garland Hood, who had wanted the place and had visited often to talk to Boyd about price. Had even written a few letters addressed to Boyd, marked Confidential. “More haggling,” Boyd had called the letters, and he had made a show of burning each of them in the fireplace. Yet, she had found a telephone number for Garland Hood among Boyd’s belongings, and had called it. The woman who answered the call had told her that Garland Hood had been killed in a car accident only a few months after Boyd had taken his life.