f the thicket to the ploughed
field where his father stood.

"Oh, there you be!" said Caleb. Barney grunted something
inarticulate, and took up his hoe again. Caleb stood watching him,
his eyes irresolute under anxiously frowning brows. "Barney," he
said, at length.

"Well, what do you want?"

"I've jest heard--" the old man began; then he stopped with a jump.

"I don't want to hear what you've heard. Keep it to yourself if
you've heard anything!" Barney shouted.

"I didn't know as you knew," Caleb stammered, apologetically. "I
didn't know as you'd heard, Barney."

Caleb went to the edge of the field, and sat down on a great stone
under a wild-cherry tree. He was not feeling very well; his head was
dizzy, and his wife had given him a bowl of thoroughwort and ordered
him not to work.

Caleb pushed his hat back and passed his hand across his forehead. It
was hot, and his face was flushed. He watched his son following up
his work with dogged energy as if it were an enemy, and his mind
seemed to turn stupid in the face of speculation, like a boy's over a
problem in arithmetic.

There was no human being so strange and mysterious, such an unknown
quantity, to Caleb Thayer as his own son. He had not one trait of
character in common with him--at least, not one so translated into
his own vernacular that he could comprehend it. It was to Caleb as if
he looked in a glass expecting to see his own face, and saw therein
the face of a stranger.

The wind was quite cool, and blew full on Caleb as he sat there.
Barney kept glancing at him. At length he spoke. "You'll get cold if
you sit there in that wind, father," he sang out, and there was a
rude kindliness in his tone.

Caleb jumped up with alacrity. "I dunno but I shall. I guess you're
right. I wa'n't goin' to set here but a minute," he answered,
eagerly. Then he went over to Barney again, and stood near watching
him. Barney's hoe clinked on a stone, and he stooped and picked it
out of the loam, and threw it away. "There's a good many stone in
this field," said the old man.

"There's some."

"It was a heap of work clearin' of it in the first place. You wa'n't
more'n two year old when I cleared it. My brother Simeon helped me.
It was five year before he got the fever an' died." Caleb looked at
his son with anxious pleading which was out of proportion to his
words, and seemed to apply to something behind them in his own mind.

Barney worked on silently.

"I don't