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electric fence instead of having to break his back repairing and tightening the wartime four-strand nonelectric fences. The piglets looked promising; he anticipated an orgy of spareribs in the fall and all the ham, bacon, and sausage he could eat through the winter. His two dozen bantams were gorging themselves on the bugs of spring and laying like mad; it meant all the eggs he wanted and plenty left over for the Eastern Milkshed Administration pickup. His vegetable garden was spaded and ready for seeding; his long years of weed chopping seemed to have suddenly paid off. There wasn’t a sign of plantain, burdock, or ironweed anywhere on his place.
    At ten-thirty the EMA truck ground to a stop at his roadside platform and even McGinty, the driver, was cheery with spring. He loaded the cans and handed Justin his monthly envelope—and stood by, grinning, waiting for Justin to open it. Justin understood the gag when a few of the new phony bills fluttered from the statement. He counted up ninety-three dollars in Bill Haywood ones, John Reed fives, and Lincoln Steffens tens. He didn’t give McGinty the satisfaction of seeing him blow his top. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t particularly upset. If everybody agreed that this stuff was money, then it was money. He murmured: “Paying in cash now? I guess that means I sign a receipt.”
    McGinty, bitterly disappointed, produced a receipt book and a stub of pencil. “You should of heard old lady Wehrwein,” he said reminiscently. Justin checked the statement (Apr 1-Apr 15 a/c Justin WH, Norton Twp Chiunga Cy, 31 cwt at $3.00, $93.00) and signed. McGinty’s truck rumbled on.
    It was a miserably small two-week net for eight good Holsteins, but they were near the end of their lactation period; soon he’d have to arrange for freshening them again.
    He was planting onion sets and radish seed in his vegetable garden when Rawson came down the road—the legless veteran whom he had met on the day of defeat. Rawson turned up at the estate sale and he found out that he had indeed got work at the Shiptons’ farm, but for how long was anybody’s guess, with the Shiptons’ three boys and two girls due for demobilization.
    Rawson seemed to be in a hell of a hurry to get to him. Justin straightened up and met him at the road. “What’s up?”
    “Plenty, Billy. Couple of Red Army boys over at the Shiptons’. One’s a farm expert, the other’s an interpreter. They’re going over the place with a fine-tooth comb. Boils down to this: the Shiptons have to turn out 25 per cent more milk, 10 per cent more grain, and God knows what else. The old lady told me to pass the word around. Fake your books, hide one of your cows—whatever you can think of. Push me off, will you? I’ve got some more ground to cover.”
    “Thanks,” Justin said thoughtfully, and pushed. The little cart went spinning down the road, Rawson pumping away. He called it “my muscle-mobile.”
    Justin mechanically went back to his onion sets and radish seed, but the savor had gone out of the spring morning. He couldn’t think of one right, definite thing to do. He didn’t come from twenty generations of farmers consummately skilled at looking poor when they were rich. He didn’t know the thousand dodges farmers everywhere always used, almost instinctively, to cheat the tax man of his due for the tsar, the commissar, the emperor, the shereef, the zamindar, La République, the American Way of Life. Billy Justin, like a fool, kept books—and only one set of them. He was a sitting duck.
    The jeep with the red star arrived in midafternoon while he was mending fence in the pasture with a sledge, block and tackle, nippers and pliers. In spite of his heavy gloves he had got a few rips from the rusted, snarled old wire. He was feeling savage. He heard them honk for him, deliberately finished driving a cedar post, and then slowly strolled toward the road.
    Two privates were in the front seat, chauffeur and armed guard, two