. Little things like that were the ones that cut him most.
She slunk home by the back way, and again almost cried when she told her
mother about it.

Mrs. Kronborg was frying doughnuts for her husband's supper. She laughed
as she dropped a new lot into the hot grease. "It's wonderful, the way
some people are made," she declared. "But I wouldn't let that upset me
if I was you. Think what it would be to live with it all the time. You
look in the black pocketbook inside my handbag and take a dime and go
downtown and get an ice-cream soda. That'll make you feel better. Thor
can have a little of the ice-cream if you feed it to him with a spoon.
He likes it, don't you, son?" She stooped to wipe his chin. Thor was
only six months old and inarticulate, but it was quite true that he
liked ice-cream.

VI

Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked like a Noah's ark town
set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and
cottonwoods. A few people were trying to make soft maples grow in their
turfed lawns, but the fashion of planting incongruous trees from the
North Atlantic States had not become general then, and the frail,
brightly painted desert town was shaded by the light-reflecting,
wind-loving trees of the desert, whose roots are always seeking water
and whose leaves are always talking about it, making the sound of rain.
The long porous roots of the cottonwood are irrepressible. They break
into the wells as rats do into granaries, and thieve the water.

The long street which connected Moonstone with the depot settlement
traversed in its course a considerable stretch of rough open country,
staked out in lots but not built up at all, a weedy hiatus between the
town and the railroad. When you set out along this street to go to the
station, you noticed that the houses became smaller and farther apart,
until they ceased altogether, and the board sidewalk continued its
uneven course through sunflower patches, until you reached the solitary,
new brick Catholic Church. The church stood there because the land was
given to the parish by the man who owned the adjoining waste lots, in
the hope of making them more salable--"Farrier's Addition," this patch
of prairie was called in the clerk's office. An eighth of a mile beyond
the church was a washout, a deep sand-gully, where the board sidewalk
became a bridge for perhaps fifty feet. Just beyond the gully was old
Uncle Billy Beemer's grove,--twelve town lo