“He had caught his foot in a briar and had fallen into a thicket which, a moment later, with a crackle and roar leaped into flame.
“His cap had slipped over his face, thank heaven, and so his truly beautiful eyes and features were spared, but his body was badly burned when the fire had swept over him.
“The wind had veered very suddenly and turned the flame back upon the charred land and so, there being nothing left to burn, it was extinguished.
“It was at that moment that Daddy Eastland returned. He lifted my unconscious brother out of the black, burnt thicket and carried him to the shack.
“‘Boy! Boy!’ he said, and I never will forget the sob there was in his voice. ‘Why did you say ye’d take care of the old place with your life? ’Twasn’t worth one hair on yer head.’
“But Dean was not dead. Slowly, so slowly he came back to life, but his left arm was burned to the bone and his side beneath it. Then, because of the pain, his muscles tightened and he could not move his arm.
“We were so far from town that perhaps he did not have just the right care. Once a month a quack physician made the rounds of those remote farms.
“However, he did the best that he could, and a year later Dean was able to walk about. How like our mother he was, so brave and cheerful!
“‘I am glad that it is my left arm that will not move, Sister,’ he often said. ‘I have a use for my right arm.’
“Our foster-father, noting how it pleased the lad, invented tasks around the farm that a one-armed boy could do to help, but when he was fourteen years of age I discovered what he had meant when he said that he had a use for his right arm. He had a little den of his own in the loft of the old barn with a big opening that overlooked meadow lands, a winding silver ribbon of a river and distant hills, and there he spent hours every day writing.