thing. Ambrosch didn't get any other hand
to help him. Poor Marek had got violent and been sent away to an
institution a good while back. We never even saw any of Tony's pretty
dresses. She didn't take them out of her trunks. She was quiet and
steady. Folks respected her industry and tried to treat her as if
nothing had happened. They talked, to be sure; but not like they would
if she'd put on airs. She was so crushed and quiet that nobody seemed to
want to humble her. She never went anywhere. All that summer she never
once came to see me. At first I was hurt, but I got to feel that it was
because this house reminded her of too much. I went over there when I
could, but the times when she was in from the fields were the times when
I was busiest here. She talked about the grain and the weather as if
she'd never had another interest, and if I went over at night she always
looked dead weary. She was afflicted with toothache; one tooth after
another ulcerated, and she went about with her face swollen half the
time. She wouldn't go to Black Hawk to a dentist for fear of meeting
people she knew. Ambrosch had got over his good spell long ago, and was
always surly. Once I told him he ought not to let Antonia work so hard
and pull herself down. He said, "If you put that in her head, you better
stay home." And after that I did.

'Antonia worked on through harvest and threshing, though she was too
modest to go out threshing for the neighbours, like when she was young
and free. I didn't see much of her until late that fall when she begun
to herd Ambrosch's cattle in the open ground north of here, up toward
the big dog-town. Sometimes she used to bring them over the west hill,
there, and I would run to meet her and walk north a piece with her. She
had thirty cattle in her bunch; it had been dry, and the pasture was
short, or she wouldn't have brought them so far.

'It was a fine open fall, and she liked to be alone. While the steers
grazed, she used to sit on them grassy banks along the draws and sun
herself for hours. Sometimes I slipped up to visit with her, when she
hadn't gone too far.

'"It does seem like I ought to make lace, or knit like Lena used to,"
she said one day, "but if I start to work, I look around and forget
to go on. It seems such a little while ago when Jim Burden and I was
playing all over this country. Up here I can pick out the very places
where my father used to stand. Sometimes I feel like I'm not going to