Sally. My, yes, reckon that was why I
loved her so. Such a little, little thing!"

"And I'm so big--'reckon' that's why you love me so, huh?"

"Reckon," he said. They sat on for a moment silent, looking out of the
window. There was a lost cardinal whisking among the satin leaves of the
pet magnolia, gazing wistfully at an old nest that swung in the branches
like the ragged ghost of a summer's completeness and happiness. The nest
seemed to arouse memories and hopes in the cardinal's breast. He had to
flirt about it nervously for some minutes before he could satisfy
himself that his housekeeping notions were unseasonable. Finally he
perched himself on an humble syringa bush and stared at the nest, quiet,
depressed.

"Are you betting on the magnolia tree with anybody this winter?" she
asked, her eyes, too, on the high nest.

"No one left to bet with, Pet. Everybody knows now that it can live
through the worst that can come to it. Let's see, it's twenty years
since I planted it there, and I've won twenty jack-knives betting that
it would live, twenty different winters. Twenty years! Sally, that's a
good while, my honey. Why, twenty years ago you didn't come knee-high to
a puddle-duck. We had just moved down here from St. Louis, your mother
and I, twenty years ago."

As he talked, the moment shaped itself for Madeira as a little
negligible interim, wedged in between the restless night, with its
defined purposes, and the next hour, when he should have consummated at
least one of the night's purposes.

"That mother of yours was a lovely little thing, Sally."

The girl was sure of it. She had felt the loveliness of her mother all
her life. Once she had gone to her mother's old Kentucky home, and
though her mother's people were all dead long ago, the great Kentucky
house was still there, and, standing before it, she had been almost able
to see the aura of influence that it had been in the moulding of the
loveliness of her mother, the southern girl, lifting from it to ensphere
her, the western girl.

"I know she was lovely," said Sally.

"Oh my, yes,--just about at her loveliest twenty years ago. But as for
twenty years, Sally, why, I can go a lot farther back than that. I can
go back forty years, close to my beginning. This is all sort of
different from my beginning, Sally." Out beyond the window, into the
September sunshine, rolled the fat corn lands, hundreds upon hundreds of
acres, the wheat flats, the miles of ca