that there
was no sign of cooking. Nellie was huddled against her mother, who sat,
idle, with little Benny in her arms. The tragic yearning her whole body
expressed, as she held the baby close, arrested the boy's attention,
filled him with clamoring uneasiness. His father came to help him
unhitch.

"What's the matter with Benny?"

Wade looked at Martin queerly. "He's dead. Died this mornin' and your
ma's been holding him just like that. I want you should ride over to
Peter's and see if you can fetch his woman."

"No!" came from Mrs. Wade, brokenly, "I don't want no one. Just let me
alone."

The shattering anguish in his mother's voice startled Martin, stirred
within him tumultuous, veiled sensations. He was unaccustomed to seeing
her show suffering, and it embarrassed him. Restless and uncomfortable,
he was glad when his father called him to help decide where to dig the
grave, and fell the timber from which to make a rough box. From time to
time, through the long night, he could not avoid observing his mother.
In the white moonlight, she and Benny looked as if they had been carved
from stone. Dawn was breaking over them when Wade, surrendering to a
surge of pity, put his arms around her with awkward gentleness. "Ma, we
got to bury 'im."

A low, half-suppressed sob broke from Mrs. Wade's tight lips as she
clasped the tiny figure and pressed her cheek against the little head.

"I can't give him up," she moaned, "I can't! It wasn't so hard with the
others. Their sickness was the hand of God, but Benny just ain't had
enough to eat. Seems like it'll kill me."

With deepened discomfort, Martin hurried to the creek to water the
horses. It was good, he felt, to have chores to do. This knowledge shot
through him with the same thrill of discovery that a man enjoys when he
first finds what an escape from the solidity of fact lies in liquor. If
one worked hard and fast one could forget. That was what work did. It
made one forget--that moan, that note of agony in his mother's voice,
that hurt look in her eyes, that bronze group in the moonlight. By the
time he had finished his chores, his mother was getting breakfast as
usual. With unspeakable relief, Martin noticed that though pain haunted
her face, she was not crying.

"I heard while I was over in Missouri, yesterday," he ventured, "of a
one-room house down in the Indian Territory. The fellow who built it's
give up and gone back East. Maybe we could fix a sledge and haul