across the draw, the smoke was curling. The cattle lowed and
bellowed. In the sky the pale half-moon was slowly silvering.
Alexandra and Carl walked together down the potato rows. "I have
to keep telling myself what is going to happen," she said softly.
"Since you have been here, ten years now, I have never really been
lonely. But I can remember what it was like before. Now I shall
have nobody but Emil. But he is my boy, and he is tender-hearted."

That night, when the boys were called to supper, they sat down
moodily. They had worn their coats to town, but they ate in their
striped shirts and suspenders. They were grown men now, and, as
Alexandra said, for the last few years they had been growing more
and more like themselves. Lou was still the slighter of the two,
the quicker and more intelligent, but apt to go off at half-cock.
He had a lively blue eye, a thin, fair skin (always burned red to
the neckband of his shirt in summer), stiff, yellow hair that would
not lie down on his head, and a bristly little yellow mustache,
of which he was very proud. Oscar could not grow a mustache; his
pale face was as bare as an egg, and his white eyebrows gave it an
empty look. He was a man of powerful body and unusual endurance;
the sort of man you could attach to a corn-sheller as you would
an engine. He would turn it all day, without hurrying, without
slowing down. But he was as indolent of mind as he was unsparing
of his body. His love of routine amounted to a vice. He worked
like an insect, always doing the same thing over in the same way,
regardless of whether it was best or no. He felt that there was
a sovereign virtue in mere bodily toil, and he rather liked to
do things in the hardest way. If a field had once been in corn,
he couldn't bear to put it into wheat. He liked to begin his
corn-planting at the same time every year, whether the season were