Just outside of Cliff, New Mexico, they rented a cabin, too small for all of them. Jeff got on at the sawmill. It was hard work, but he liked it well enough. He had no known skill with the saw or any other dangerous equipment, and after he saw the second man carried from the mill with one less hand, he was content with his job of unloading logs from the wagons that came to the mill. The pay was not good, but his expenses were low. Their cabin cost a dollar a week, and there was plenty of game in the hills. Granny Jane was herself a decent hunter, nearly as good as Jeff. So though the rate of his prosperity had slowed, he continued to prosper, putting money into the bank every week.

In the winter of 1894, Mattie gave birth to a fourth child, though the third child, Tom, was still on the tit. This one, a girl, pleased her most. They named her Ola May, and while Jeff had wanted another son to increase the labor force, the entire family began to dote on the little girl. Even Sebe, who had given himself over to his dying, would ask Mattie to bring Ola to his bed, and he would hold her next to him, and the oldest of the family and the youngest slept away the afternoons. It was, Mattie thought, a blessing that Sebe spent his last few days cradling and loving a child rather than staring off into space trying to project his own bitterness onto the universe. When Mattie went to get Ola for her feeding one winter afternoon, the little girl was sleeping, cradled in the arms of her dead grandfather.

Mattie channeled her grief for her father into the care of her daughter, the quietest, happiest baby she had ever seen. Even by the time Ola May was old enough to crawl, she spent most of her time on Mattie's hip, and Mattie had learned to do just about everything one-handed. Mattie's life had moved from the last bit of Morgan to full Power like the silent, slow turn of a page.

Ola brought a certain softening to everyone else. The boys—Charlie, six, John, five, and Tom, two—played with and protected their baby sister as though she were as precious as the adults made her out to be. Jeff went for her first thing when he came home from the mill each evening, reeking of pine pitch. And Granny, who had maintained that they were doing the little girl a disservice by making her too precious, too delicate, found another side of herself—one she thought had disappeared some years ago—welling up again, and she began silently sewing dresses for the girl.