failed, one was swamped under hopeless obligations. Already Ed looked dejected when she told him of any household need, so that she had reduced her requests to the lowest possible limit.

At thought of the future, she was sick with apprehension. Her under-nourished body felt a physical fear of what lay before her, and her spirit cowered at the idea of their cruel poverty.

"I would n't ask pappy for nothin' for myself," she muttered. "I'd starve an' freeze an' go naked, as I 've pretty near done a'ready, before I'd call on

him, after what he said. But baby 's got to have some clothes, an' Ed needs proper food to do his work on-an' there ain't no other way as I can see." And so presently she wrote:

DEAR PAPPY:

I've been meaning to write you for a long time, but I have n't had much news to tell you. I think about you lots, and I wish I could see you. I love you just like I used to, Pappy, and more, because I reckon I 've got more sense now than when I treated you like I did.

He

"Ed 's mighty good to me, Pappy. ain't never spoke a cross word to me yet, and he does the best he can. But he 's had a run of bad luck lately; it looks like. The drought killed our truck garden, and we are out of money. Won't you let us have enough to make out on till our cotton 's sold? We need money for groceries, and I want some for something special besides. There ain't nobody else to give it to me, Pappy, but you. I'll tell you later what I'm going to do with part of it.

When Ed gets on better, I'm coming home to see you. You'll let me, won't you? Your girl,

BESSIE.

"I

"If the baby 's a boy, I'll name him for his grandpa," she said, with an oldtime lift of her head, and a sparkle coming into her amber-colored eyes. know pappy aint held spite against me for eight months, but he 's been waiting for me to write. Pappy was always bitter proud when he got his back up about anything."

She estimated that she could get an answer to her letter by Friday, and she could scarcely control her impatience during the intervening time. Now that the struggle involved in making her decision was over, she realized as she had rot before what wretchedness she had endured-needlessly, as she now told herself. Why had n't she written long before?

On Friday morning she threw her apron over her head and ran down the road to wait for the rural postman, glad that Ed was working in the far end of the field, so that he could not see her. She would tell him about it in good time, and she pictured the relief that would come to his sober young face.

The sun beat fiercely down upon her as she waited. Far down the road came a whirl of yellow-gray dust that might conceal the carrier and his cart. Why did n't he hurry and bring her letter from pappy? As she stood there, her memory drew pictures of her father, a man passionate in his love for her, passionate in his angers. She could see his big frame stoop as he folded her in his arms, his brown eyes alight with devotion. Other people feared the frown he wore, but for her his mouth

and eyes had always smiled till that last day. She was beginning to realize what a parent's love for a child is, and she groped toward understanding of how her unconsidered action had wounded him. Was n't his fury merely from thwarted hopes for her, from jealousy of a husband who could not make her life what his father heart had dreamed of for her?

She leaned tremulously against the barbed-wire fence, her gaze sweeping the little farm in its pitiful details, the small house forlorn of paint, the few chickens scratching drearily about the steps, the bare yard, the cotton-field where Ed was toiling away. She closed her eyes for an instant to vision another farm in the Brazos "bottom," a rich, well cared-for place, with its white house and cluster of outbuildings set among hackberry - trees. She saw a graying, middle-aged man going about his chores, milking in the cow-pen with no daughter to companion him with her chatter, sitting alone on the porch at evening, always solitary, missing his girl every hour.

"A girl don't never have but one pappy!" she murmured.

The carrier halted his fat, wheezy horse and leaned from his cart. "Well, I got a letter for you this morning," he said sociably.

Trembling, she took the envelop addressed in the sprawling hand she well knew. She felt unable for the moment to open it, for her heart seemed determined to bound out of her body; but her eyes caressed the name his hand had penned. How strange it must have felt for pappy to write that new name, Mrs. Ed Hickson! She held the letter in her hand and watched the postman jog along the road till his cart was again obscured in the cloud of dust.

Her quivering fingers tore off the end of the envelop, and drew out a folded sheet from which fluttered a blue slip of paper, a postal order for fifty dollars.

"O Pappy!" she cried ecstatically.

And so he loved her, as always! And so, as always, he delighted to give her without demur what she asked!

She held the letter against her leaping heart before she read it.

And so you think you can come it over me so easy, do you? Treat me like dirt, send me nary a word for eight months, and never give me a thought till you need money. Well, you can't! That fine husband of yours can support his wife. The only use you can put my money to is to buy yourself decent clothes to leave him in. I hope you 're ready to do that.

If you 're willing to cut loose from him, you come on home, and I'll do for you same as ever. I want you back, as you might know. But I want my girl back, not Ed Hickson's wife! Unless you 've changed mightily, I know you 'll act honest in this. JEFF HOLCOMB.

When she had read the letter twice over, and realized that it said what it did, a faintness swept over her, and she clutched the barbed-wire fence for support, as the cotton rows overran one another and blurred before her anguished eyes. Pappy!

Staggeringly she crept back into the house, to fall on the bed and lie there, shaken by tearless shudders, till it was time to get Ed's noonday dinner ready. She must n't let Ed know!

The next morning she gathered together the coarse sacks in which flour and corn-meal and sugar had come, and boiled them for a long time on the stove, and then hung them in the sun to bleach. She had never been taught to sew, and when she set about her task, without any patterns to guide her, her unaccustomed fingers were very clumsy. wept as the rough cloth scratched her hands, and she thought how harsh it would be for tender baby skin. How had life so incomprehensibly trapped her at eighteen?

She

At first she was fearful lest Ed might notice that something troubled her, and then she felt hurt that he did not. She told herself that he was only a boy, and that he could n't realize what she was going through, and that he had his own worries. The drought was beginning seriously to menace the cotton, and his gaze was ever on the field, as if by taking thought he might call down the saving rain. The graceful, upstanding plants were still green, and opening great white blossoms like hibiscus or mallows. Bess had always loved the

cotton blooms, but now she felt terror at thinking how her fate hung on them. The flowers that lasted such a brief time, changing from milky pearl as they first opened to a soft rose, and then to lavender as they died, were lovely things, if only they did n't have such tyrannic power over man!

"The cotton 's stood up pretty well so far, but the drought 's beginning to hurt it," Ed commented forebodingly one day. He had laid down a "pallet," a quilt spread out on the porch floor, so that he might rest during the worst of the noonday heat.

A lizard darted across the porch, panting with heat, its bright, beady eyes winking ironically at him. A scissor-tail balanced himself on the barbedwire fence, and from somewhere a jay sent his jeering cry.

"A farmer shore has a tough time of it," Ed went on moodily. "No matter how hard he works, the weather can always beat him if it takes a mind. Looks like the weather 's got a spite against us sometimes."

"It's awful' hard on folks as well as crops," Bessie answered apathetically.

She felt withered from the heat, which daily grew worse, and weak from lack of food. She so dreaded to harass Ed by requests for supplies that she stinted herself in order to give him what he needed, and she was hungry all the time. And their little house in the open field, unshaded by trees, was like an oven, especially when the fire was made in the wood-stove for the cooking.

Ed worked doggedly in the field as the drought grew more intolerable, pitting his puny strength against an unseen force that menaced and derided him. From her window Bess could watch him toiling at his task, his patient figure comical in its grotesque garb, tragic in the intensity of its struggle against a cruel force of nature. The cotton-plants were stunted in their growth and had lost their bright, erect dignity and their shimmer of refreshing green. Their leaves hung limp, covered with a gray dust from the road.

"We won't make nothing if this here drought don't break," Ed declared in desperation one day as he pushed his plate from him at the table.

Bessie lifted a drawn and haggard face.

"I think I'll die if this keeps up much longer!"

"You got it easier 'n I have." His tone sounded harsh. "You can lie round the house, but I got to work in this sun that 's hot enough to frizzle the insides of a horned frog!"

Her eyes filled with tears.

"You ought n't to speak cross to me, though!"

"Lord alive! don't you realize what a feller 's up against when he 's got to bake his brains in this murderin' heat?" he cried savagely. "An' he don't know whether all his hard knocks is goin' for nothin', after all! A farmer's life is a dog's life, let me tell you, if he 's farmin' on shares. This here drought is gettin' on my nerves."

He rose abruptly from the table, rasping his chair against the floor in a way to set her own nerves quivering.

"You don't never think of my feelings!" she cried impetuously. "This sort o' life is mighty hard for me, that ain't never been used to it. I did n't expect―"

"Then you ought n't to married a poor man," he jeered.

"I wish I had n't," she flung at him, and then shrank back, appalled at the sight of his face. He looked as if some one had stabbed him in the back.

In an instant they were in each others' arms.

"Oh, we don't mean what we 're saying!" she cried desperately. "It 's this heat that upsets us so. Nothing matters, so long as we 're got each other."

She felt his body tremble as he held her close, and saw the tears run down his cheeks.

"Yes, this drought tears us all to pieces," he muttered. "We got to stand up against it the best we can, or it'll get us."

Day after day the sky was cloudless and intensely blue. Day after day the sun strode nakedly across the heavens, and sank in many-colored fire in the west at evening. Sometimes the air was still, so that they panted for breath, but more often the hot winds blew across the field, sprinkling over every

thing fine gray dust like ashes of despair. The baked earth cracked in deep fissures like gaping, bloodless wounds.

One day from curiosity Bess broke an egg on the top of a stone in the sun by her kitchen door, and watched the white cook as in a frying-pan.

"Hot enough to fry an egg in the sun!" she cried shrilly, though there was no one to hear her. Afterward she scraped up the egg and ate it, reproaching herself for her wastefulness. Their supplies were running tragically low, and both she and Ed were weakened from lack of food, since Ed hated risking refusal for further credit at the store.

Ed would gaze at his cotton-field with a look of desperation in his eyes, and then scan the blue emptiness of sky in search of a cloud, as a shipwrecked mariner on a lonely sea might look for a sail.

"It's enough to drive a feller mad to have to work ag'in' the odds like this," he growled morosely one day. "Looks like the elements was shakin' us like a terrier shakes a rat, an' laughin' at us all the time."

"Don't you reckon it 'll rain soon?" Bess asked in a parched voice, fanning herself with her apron.

"Don't seem like it 'll ever rain again; looks like it 's forgot how. I'd ruther be that there yellow dog than a tenant farmer!"

He flung his hand out toward an old hound that had stolen in from the road and lay looking forlornly at them, his tongue hanging far out of his mouth, his bony sides quivering. He seemed mutely to entreat some reason for this suffering he had to endure. The halfdozen chickens, huddled in the shade of the house, drooped miserably, their wings spread fan-wise in the effort to cool their bodies.

Bess lay wilted on the bed much of the time now, though the bed itself was uncomfortably hot to the touch. She conjured up images of the cool, shaded rooms in her father's house, of the protecting trees, of the creek that ran back of the house, but chiefly of the plentiful things to eat. Home! If only she could open the refrigerator there and eat her fill for once, and drink deep drafts of

ice-cold milk! She and Ed never had any ice or milk, or, in fact, anything that they could possibly do without. Day by day there was less to eat; the cupboard was almost empty, and the fevered chickens were dying of starvation and heat.

There is something about intense heat that devitalizes body and spirit far more than bitter cold can do. One perishes inwardly under it, one surrenders hope, and yet has not strength enough for active despair.

"Maybe pappy would have wrote different, if he had known I was hungry," Bess whispered to herself one day. She talked more to herself when Ed was in the field than she did to him when he was present, for she could not share her poignant thoughts with him, lest she add to his suffering and anxiety. "Shorely pappy would have wrote different, if he had known about the baby!"

She sat huddled on the edge of the bed for a long time, and then she crept over to the door, to stand leaning against it, looking up at the sky. The sun, high in the afternoon heavens, shook insolent spears of light at her, and the fleckless blue was a mirror of despair.

Presently she walked to the dresser, where under a concealing sheet of newspaper her father's letter lay. The cracked mirror gave her back a face she scarcely recognized, it was so drawn, discolored, ravaged by anxiety, and thin from hunger.

She held the blue slip in her shaking fingers for a long moment.

"If I could only cash this and get enough to eat for the baby's sake!"

Her fingers closed over it with resolve, her body thrilling at the thought of food; she would call Ed quickly and send him for supplies.

Then the memory of those last terrible moments with her father in the cow-pen swept over her. She heard again his searing words: "I don't want ever to see you or hear from you again! And don't you come crawling to me when he starves you, as he 'll sure' do!" She heard her sobbing vow, "I won't!"

Could she take his help now, like a shamed and beaten thing begging for food? If he knew her plight, would n't his hatred and contempt for Ed be ten

fold worse than before? How could she put such humiliation upon Ed, poor Ed, who worked so hard and did his pitiful best for her?

If she used this money now, pappy would think Ed responsible for it, would misjudge him further. He was a hard man, but he had always been rigidly honest, and she was his daughter. She saw again the words of his letter, "Unless you 've changed mightily, I know you'll act honest in this."

She had changed mightily,-Oh, Pappy, yes!-but she would act honest. Her weak, relaxing fingers put the blue slip back in its hiding-place, and she turned away.

But the thought of the baby was with her all the time now, a sense of her responsibility pressing down upon her heart like clods upon a coffin. She and Ed would scan the sky countless times a day, to find nothing more hopeful than vaporous wisps of cloud that vanished tantalizingly the while they gazed, or else a blue dome of nothingness.

One night while Ed slept restlessly beside her she lay and gazed at the pallid and starveling new moon that looked at her from between the branches of a tree whose leaves had fallen in midsummer. She shook as she muttered, "It's the worst kind o' luck to see the new moon for the first time through brush." She thought of a sermon she had once heard an evangelist preach from the text, "I will arise and go to my father." She pictured herself as returning to the old home, and thrilled at thought of pappy's fierce, undemonstrative affection that would receive her back if she met his requirements and came to stay. She could see pappy sitting on the porch at evening, no longer lonely, with a little child in his arms.

But what of Ed? She thought of the boyish face now seamed with lines no young face ought to have to wear, of the sweet temper sharpened by suspense and want, of the pleasant, drawling voice that now was harsh. Tragedy looked at her out of the gray eyes that had wooed her with smiles a year ago. How could she desert him now when they loved each other through it all? She and Ed were married, and pappy nor nobody else had a right to try to