He’d about broken even, so far, during the last twenty years. All these years he’d marked time, doggedly, plugging away. Because, after all, there had been nothing else to do. He could not stop. To sell meant merely to begin again somewhere else, plug away, break about even year after year, die plugging. That was what general farming meant in White Hills when there were wages to pay. He could have made money with sons to help him.... Life was a tread-mill. What his cattle took from the land they gave back; nothing more. He was tired of the tread-mill. A squirrel in a cage travelled no further and got as far....
Odell drove his spading fork into the ground, sifted out fragments of horse-radish roots, kicked them under the fence into the dusty road beyond.
Dr. Wand’s roadster stood out there by the front gate. Behind it waited Dr. Benson’s driver in the new limousine car. Odell had not felt he could afford any kind of car,—not even a tractor. These danged doctors....
As he stood with one foot resting on his spading fork, gazing gloomily at the two cars, Dr. Benson, fat, ruddy and seventy, came out of the house with his satchel.
He nodded to Odell:
“Dr. Wand wants you,” he said. “She’s conscious.”
After the portly physician had driven away down the dusty road, Odell went into the house and ascended the stairs to the common bed-room from which now, in all probability, he was to be excluded for a while.
Dr. Wand, beside the bed, very tired, motioned Odell to draw nearer. It was the ghost of his wife he saw lying there.
“Well,” he grunted with an effort, “you don’t feel very spry, I guess. You look kinda peekid, Fan.”
All the stored resentment of twenty barren years glittered in his wife’s sunken eyes. She knew his desire for sons. She knew what he now thought of her.