Millia walked between them in cool evenings, and let her skirts flip the tiny stalks gently. They grew tall, and she could nudge them in friendly greeting as she passed down and up between them.
Of course all this success came only out of the hardest possible wrestling with nature. There went before it weeks of mighty work with drag and pick, wresting out rocks and uprooting stumps and weeds. Only Grandfather Thacher's grim persistence, descended like a mantle on Nathan's aching young shoulders, carried those hard days. The neighbors helped at odd times, and Nathan repaid them in rainy intervals. So at last the two big fields were smooth and ready for the ploughing, that left them seamed with long ridges wavering gently away into perspective. How good the upturned earth had smelled to Millia! She stood outside and drew in long satisfying whiffs of it.
It was so good to see the old place thriving at last—to smell it and watch it and be proud of it. Millia forgot all about the gold-mine some days.
Nathan never did. He repaired the fences to keep intruders out. He drew out loads upon loads of dressing for his land from stores of hitherto wasted fertility beneath the old barns. He nurtured and tended and worked unstintingly, but always with the glitter of the gold grains in his rocks before his eyes. Nathan never forgot. He studied books on mining in the evening until his tired head nodded over the blurring letters. Once, when the corn was all planted, and there was a little interval of rest, he went to a city, a day's trip distant, and had his little samples of glistening rock assayed. It was when he came home from that journey that Millia thought she could detect a little look of disappointment in his face, and perhaps a faint crestfallen note in his voice. But she forgot about it soon, because they were so busy weeding the corn rows.
One evening, when the green stalks towered more than elbow-high around them, Thanny and Milly walked through the rows, talking to each other across them. They both looked happy. Milly's small thin face had rounded out a little, and turned to a golden brown. She walked with little quick jubilant steps. The old farm looked so beautiful to-night! What would father say?
Suddenly she began to laugh. In front of her dangled her scarecrow—the work of her own hands—mincing and bowing to her ludicrously. A slight breeze stirred his hempen hair and swayed his coat skirts. It was Thanny's coat and Thanny's hat and Thanny's trousers and boots. He was an unwieldy, unflattering travesty of Thanny, with, oddly enough, his stooped shoulders, and old air of depression and gloom. Had Thanny bequeathed them to Milly's scarecrow, for once and all?
For to-night Thanny's shoulders were not stooped, and his whole expression was cheery and manly.
He stopped too and laughed.
"My goodness me! Thanny, ain't he a beauty?" giggled Milly, delightedly.
"Milly," Thanny said, "that's me. I've been watching myself this long time—stooped over and hangdog and down in the mouth. I've been seeing myself the way you and other folks used to see me, and—well, it was kind of a bitter pill, but I took it, and I guess it's done me good. I guess so."