The house they built four-square with sharp gables patterned after the home they had lost. There were no dormers in the attic, but two windows peeped out of the gable beside the stone chimney and gave light and air to the boys' room in the loft. A shed extension in the rear was large enough for both kitchen and dining room.
The home stood close beside the creek, and the murmur of its waters made music for a busy mother's heart.
There was no porch over the front door. But her boys had built a lattice work that held a labyrinth of morning glories in the summer. She had found the gorgeous wild flowers blooming on the prairies and made a hedge of them for the walks. They were sending their shoots up through the soil now to meet the sun of spring. The warm rays had already begun to clothe the prairie world with beauty and fragrance.
The mother never tired of taking her girls on the hill beyond the creek and watching the men at work on the wide sweeping plains that melted into the skyline miles beyond. Something in its vast silence, in its message of the infinite, soothed her spirit. All her life in the East she had been fighting against losing odds. These wide breathing plains had stricken the shackles from her soul.
She was free.
Sometimes she felt like shouting it into the sky. Sometimes she knelt among the trees and thanked God for His mercy in giving her the new lease of life.
The new lease on life had depth and meaning because she lived and breathed in her children. Her man had a man's chance at last. Her boys had a chance.
The one thing that gave her joy day and night was the consciousness of living among the men and women of her own race. There was not a negro in the county, bond or free, and she fervently prayed that there never would be. Now that they were free from the sickening dread of such competition in life, she had no hatred of the race. As a free white woman, the mother of free white men and women, all she asked was freedom from the touch of an inferior. She had always felt instinctively that this physical contact was poison. She breathed deeply for the first time.
There was just one cloud on the horizon which threatened her peace and future. Her husband, after the fashion of his kind, in the old world and the new, had always held political opinions and had dared to express them without fear or favor. In Virginia his vote was sought by the leaders of the county. He had been poor but he had influence because he dared to think for himself.
He was a Southern born white man, and he held the convictions of his birthright. He had never stopped to analyze these faiths. He believed in them as he believed in God. They were things not to be questioned.