Cliff was prospering as growth settled on New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. The sawmill added shifts, and Jeff took one of the new ones and added more money to his bankroll. But even extra shifts were not enough to keep up the new demand for lumber, a strong, cheap material. Workers were arriving in Cliff on nearly a daily basis, and new cabins quickly covered the hillsides.

A man from Nebraska named Ed Reed bought a small tract of land next to the Powers. He would work on his cabin in the afternoons and early evenings after his shift at the mill, eating supper most times with the Powers and sleeping in his unfinished cabin. As the demand for ponderosa pine lumber grew, so did the price of it. Trying to keep his costs in line with what he was earning, Reed found alternate materials for his cabin. For a ridgepole he felled a nice, straight alder nearly a foot in diameter. He nailed heavier than normal pine rafters to it, using the culls from the mill that were too warped, cupped, curved, or knotty to be worth shipping out.

He used the knowledge he had picked up in Nebraska and nailed thin sticks to the rafters, covered those with brush, and then covered the whole thing with sod. He had the only sod-roofed house in New Mexico.

“It's the finest material available,” Reed explained. “It don't leak in the rain, holds the heat outside in summer and inside in winter, and can even be planted in the spring, so that a man can gather his supper simply by leaning a ladder against the roof of his house.”

“How much does that damned thing weigh?” Jeff asked.

“Hell, I don't know. I don't have no plans to pick it up.”

The boys were fascinated with the sod roof of the cabin and took to playing on it while Reed was at work. There were good rains that spring, and the roof had already greened and then turned colorful with delphiniums and, in the shade, red columbines. Mattie loved looking at it from her window, as their cabin sat some feet higher on the ridge. Granny thought the whole thing foolish and thought sleeping under flowers fit only for the addled and the dead.

“Mr. Reed,” Mattie called from the empty doorway of Reed's cabin. “Mr. Reed, you have visitors, regretting any inconvenience to you.”

They heard Reed coming through the woods before they saw him. He was a slight man, though wiry, strong in the shoulders and arms as farmers must be. He was wearing only a pair of overalls and an old pair of busted brogans that Mattie thought had surely been his church shoes at one time.