the expert quite airily. But I
noticed that his eye held an especially abstracted and preoccupied
expression.

"Just how is it done?" I innocently inquired.

"Well, that all depends," he sapiently observed. Then, apparently
nettled by my obviously superior smile, he straightened up and said:
"I want you to leave this entirely to me. It's my problem, and you've
no right to be worried over it. It'll take study, of course, and it'll
take time. Rome wasn't built in a day. But before I leave you, madam,
your tower will be up."

"I hope you're not giving yourself a life sentence," I remarked as I
turned and left him.

I knew that he was looking after me as I went, but I gave no outer sign
of that inner knowledge. I was equally conscious of his movements,
through the shack window, when he possessed himself of a hay-fork and
with more than one backward look over his shoulder circled out to where
his car still stood. He tooled it still closer up beside the hay-stack,
which he mounted, and then calmly and cold-bloodedly buried under a
huge mound of sun-cured prairie-grass that relic of a past crime which
he seemed only too willing to obliterate.

But he was callous, I could see, for once that telltale car was out of
sight, he appeared much more interested in the water-blisters on his
hands than the stain on his character. I could even see him inspect
his fingers, from time to time, as he tried to round off the top of
his very badly made stack, and test the joints by opening and closing
them, as though not quite sure they were still in working order. And
when the stack-making was finished and he returned to the windmill,
circling about the fallen tower and examining its mechanism and
stepping off its dimensions, I noticed that he kept feeling the small
of his back and glancing toward the stack in what seemed an attitude
of resentment.

When Whinnie came in with one of the teams, after his day a-field, I
noticed that Peter approached him blithely and attempted to draw him
into secret consultation. But Whinnie, as far as I could see, had no
palate for converse with suspicious-looking strangers. He walked
several times, in fact, about that mysterious new hay-stack, and moved
shackward more dour and silent than ever. So that evening the worthy
Peter was a bit silent and self-contained, retiring early, though I
strongly suspected, and still suspect, that he'd locked himself in the
bunk-house to remove unobserved all the labels