goin'."

The boy nodded. He composed his face and answered steadily: "I guess you
can depend on me."

But outside by the barn fence he set down his milk-pail a few minutes
later and in the coming night his face twitched and blackened.

"So after all," Ham told himself bitterly, "I've got to stay."

He reached out mechanically and began loosing the top bar from its
sockets, while he called in the cows to be milked. So many times had he
taken down and put up that panel of bars that his hands knew from habit
every roughness and knot in every rail.

"Mornin' an' evenin' for three hundred and sixty-five days a year;" the
boy said to himself in a low and very bitter voice. "That makes seven
hundred and thirty times a year I do this same, identical thing. I ain't
nothin' more than servant to a couple of cows." He stood and watched the
two heifers trot through the opening to the water-trough by the pump.
"By the time I'm thirty-five," he continued, "I'll do it fourteen
thousand and six hundred times more--When Napoleon was thirty-five--"
But there he broke off with an inarticulate sound in his browned young
throat that was very like a groan.




CHAPTER II