began to look about, he saw Antonia, and she was exactly the kind of girl
he had always been hunting for. They were married at once, though he had
to borrow money from his cousin to buy the wedding-ring.

"It was a pretty hard job, breaking up this place and making the first
crops grow," he said, pushing back his hat and scratching his grizzled
hair. "Sometimes I git awful sore on this place and want to quit, but my
wife she always say we better stick it out. The babies come along pretty
fast, so it look like it be hard to move, anyhow. I guess she was right,
all right. We got this place clear now. We pay only twenty dollars an acre
then, and I been offered a hundred. We bought another quarter ten years
ago, and we got it most paid for. We got plenty boys; we can work a lot of
land. Yes, she is a good wife for a poor man. She ain't always so strict
with me, neither. Sometimes maybe I drink a little too much beer in town,
and when I come home she don't say nothing. She don't ask me no questions.
We always get along fine, her and me, like at first. The children don't
make trouble between us, like sometimes happens." He lit another pipe and
pulled on it contentedly.

I found Cuzak a most companionable fellow. He asked me a great many
questions about my trip through Bohemia, about Vienna and the Ringstrasse
and the theaters.

"Gee! I like to go back there once, when the boys is big enough to farm
the place. Sometimes when I read the papers from the old country, I pretty
near run away," he confessed with a little laugh. "I never did think how I
would be a settled man like this."

He was still, as Antonia said, a city man. He liked theaters and lighted
streets and music and a game of dominoes after the day's work was over.
His sociability was stronger than his acquisitive instinct. He liked to
live day by day and night by night, sharing in the excitement of the
crowd.--Yet his wife had managed to hold him here on a farm, in one of the
loneliest countries in the world.

I could see the little chap, sitting here every evening by the windmill,
nursing his pipe and listening to the silence; the wheeze of the pump, the
grunting of the pigs, an occasional squawking when the hens were disturbed
by a rat. It did rather seem to me that Cuzak had been made the instrument
of Antonia's special mission. This was a fine life, certainly, but it was
n't the kind of life he had wanted to live. I wondered whether the life
that was right