erated
the roguishness. By the time the life of ease claimed him, even the
ghost of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished.

The Westerveld ancestry was as Dutch as the name. It had been hundreds
of years since the first Westervelds came to America, and they had
married and intermarried until the original Holland strain had almost
entirely disappeared. They had drifted to southern Illinois by one of
those slow processes of migration and had settled in Calhoun County,
then almost a wilderness, but magnificent with its rolling hills,
majestic rivers, and gold-and-purple distances. But to the practical
Westerveld mind, hills and rivers and purple haze existed only in their
relation to crops and weather. Ben, though, had a way of turning his
face up to the sky sometimes, and it was not to scan the heavens for
clouds. You saw him leaning on the plow handle to watch the whirring
flight of a partridge across the meadow. He liked farming. Even the
drudgery of it never made him grumble. He was a natural farmer as men
are natural mechanics or musicians or salesmen. Things grew for him.
He seemed instinctively to know facts about the kin ship of soil and
seed that other men had to learn from books or experience. It grew to
be a saying in that section that "Ben Westerveld could grow a crop on
rock."

At picnics and neighborhood frolics Ben could throw farther and run
faster and pull harder than any of the other farmer boys who took part
in the rough games. And he could pick up a girl with one hand and hold
her at arm's length while she shrieked with pretended fear and real
ecstasy. The girls all liked Ben. There was that almost primitive
strength which appealed to the untamed in them as his gentleness
appealed to their softer side. He liked the girls, too, and could have
had his pick of them. He teased them all, took them buggy riding,
beaued them about to neighbor-hood parties. But by the time he was
twenty-five the thing had narrowed down to the Byers girl on the farm
adjoining Westerveld's. There was what the neighbors called an
understanding, though perhaps he had never actually asked the Byers
girl to marry him. You saw him going down the road toward the Byers
place four nights out of the seven. He had a quick, light step at
variance with his sturdy build, and very different from the heavy,
slouching gait of the work-weary farmer. He had a habit of carrying in
his hand a little twig or switch cut from a