Mother that she had become Mrs. Smith, and
before her slightly dazed mind could grasp it all she was in at a
kitchen table near the stove, and eating doughnuts, salt pork, beans,
apple pie, and vast cups of coffee. Not but that Father himself was also
laying in the food with a lustiness that justified his lumberjack's
blue-flannel shirt. From time to time he dutifully mentioned his
project of cutting wood, but the woman was more interested in him as a
symbol.

In a dim, quite unanalytic way Father perceived that, to this woman,
this drab prisoner of kitchen and woodshed, it was wonderful to meet a
man and woman who had actually started for--anywhere.

She sighed and with a look of remembering old dreams she declared: "I
wish my old man and I could do that. Gawd! I wouldn't care how cold we
got. Just get away for a month! Then I'd be willing to come back here
and go on cooking up messes. He goes into town almost every day in
winter--he's there now--but I stay here and just work."

Father understood that it would have desecrated her vision of the heroic
had he played the mouth-organ for pay; perceived that she didn't even
want him to chop wood. Mother and he were, to this woman, a proof that
freedom and love and distant skies did actually exist, and that people,
just folks, not rich, could go and find them.

When she had warmed Mother's feet and given them her wistful good
wishes, the woman let them go, and the Smiths recently Applebys, went
comfortably and plumply two more miles on their way to Japan.

Father's conscience was troubling him, not because he had taken food
from the woman--she had bestowed it with the friendly and unpatronizing
graciousness of poor women--but because he had been too cowardly to play
the mouth-organ. When Mother had begun to walk wearily and Father had
convinced himself that he wouldn't be afraid to play, next chance he
had, they approached a crude road-house, merely a roadside saloon, with
carriage-sheds, a beer sign, and one lone rusty iron outdoor table to
give an air of _al fresco_.

"I'm going over there and play," said Father.

"I won't have you hanging around saloons," snapped Mother.

"Now, Mother, I reckon I wouldn't more than drink a couple of horses'
necks or something wild like that."

"Yes, and that's just the way temptation gets you," said Mother,
"drinking horses' necks and all them brandy drinks. I wish I'd never
tasted that nasty cocktail you made me take last year