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just to work to keep myself up so's I can work some more. There ought to be more to livin' than that."
   "I never figured you for lazy."
   "Maybe I'm not. There just ain't enough range in Missouri."
   Summers nodded.
   "It's in the air, Dick, like the fever hangs over a swarnp. Brownie wants to go and so do I, and Rebecca's willin'. What the hell? I don't care much to ask myself why. I'll just go."
   Summers made as if to get up. "Got to milk the cow."
   "You milk the cow! Set down!" Evans' voice went out in a bawl. "Brownie! Hey, you Brownie!"
   Summers could see a figure coming from the direction of the cabin. Brownie lagged up, a boy still mostly arms and legs and neck, who probably thought he was a man but wouldn't sniell like one yet.
   "What's it, Pa?"
   "We forgot about the cow. Your mother and them other women did. Get yourself a bucket and go hunt tip Dick's cow and milk her."
   The boy scuffed the ground with his toe.
   "Let 'im be," Summers said. "Hell, a man don't like to do women's work."
   "This ain't like ordinary, Brownie," Evans said. "There ain't anyone going to make light of it at a time of death. You go on."
   The boy said, "All right," in the sudden, coarse voice of the calf turning bull. The unexpected sound of it seemed to rattle him. He wheeled around and made for the cabin.
   "How old's he?" Summers asked.
   "Long seventeen."
   "Don't hardly seem that old."
   "He's been slow growing up, like weedy young'uns are. Mostly stalk so far, but he's comin' along."
   "Good boy."
   Summers could tell Evans was pleased.
   Evans said, "It's partly for his sake I'm goin'. I'd like for him to know something besides root, hog, or die."
   They drank again.
   Afterwards Evans asked, "Is it such a hell-buster of a trip, Dick?"
   "Easy, by foot or horse, I don't know as to wagons. I used to think a wagon couldn't travel beyond the Green much, but some have."
   "I oughtn't to plague you, askin' questions," Evans said, shifting his position on the ground. "Anything I can do for you?"
   "Reckon not."
   Peopple wouldn't let a man with a grief do anything for himself. They brought him meat and bread and cake -more'n he could eat in a week even if he took to fancy fixin's -and they tidied up his place and built a walnut box and dug a grave and the women laid the body out. And all of them stayed around -the men smoking and chewing and talking pigs and crops, and the women talking women's talk -until the body was under ground and the earth thrown on top. And then they might build a grave house so's to close the body away from weather and varmints.
        "Tadlock's a good-enough man," Evans said. "Got more learning than most. Spills over with feelin' for America. He sure-God wants to be captain of the company."
   "Where'd you say he's from?"
   "Illinois. Illinois-river country, but I don't figure him for a farmer. Officeholder, more likely. I seen him in town this morning. Told him not to come out, but it could be he will. He's a mule-headed man."
   Summers didn't let himself answer, not being sure what to make of Tadlock. Right off, though, he didn't take to him.
   After a silence Evans asked, "You want to take a look?" He bent his head toward the cabin. "The women want you should have a look."
   Summers said, "Sure enough," but he didn't get up. He didn't want to get up just yet.
   He felt sad and, in a way, at home with sadness. It was only the young who took on over death and disappointment, maybe because they expected more than God Almighty would ever give. In time a man took losses as they came, a man going on to fifty did, anyway, remembering old goodbyes.
   That was how he was saying goodbye to his woman. She hadn't been a well woman, not ever since he'd known her, but yellow and drawn out by fever and sick to death once before, when she'd slipped the young one he had planted in her. But