It is a long lane that has no turning, either for cattle or for men. When Fanny died Odell was forty. Two months later he married the strapping daughter of Ed Lister. And came to the turn in the long, long lane he had travelled for twenty years. For, as Whitewater Queen was a breeder of heifer-calves, Mazie Lister proved to be a breeder of men. Every year, for the first four years, she gave Odell a son. There was no fuss made about these events. Mazie Lister was the kind of girl who could eat cabbage for breakfast, wad it down with pie, drive it deeper with a quart of buttermilk. Once, to prove she could do it, she ate a whole roast sucking pig, five boiled potatoes, six ears of corn, a dish of cranberry sauce, and an entire apple pie; and washed it down with three quarts of new cider. Her feed never fattened her; it seemed to make her skin pinker, teeth whiter, long, slanting black eyes more brilliant. No cares worried her. She laughed a great deal. She was busy from dawn to dark. Unfatigued but sleepy, she yawned frightfully toward nine o’clock. It was her time to roost. Mazie’s instincts concerning progeny were simple. She nursed each arrival as long as necessary, then weaned it. Then the youngster had to learn to shift for himself--wash and dress, turn up at meal hours, turn in with the chickens, rise with the crows. It was a little different, however, with Eris, whom Mazie had inherited. Eris, of course, was bottle-fed. Whitewater Queen’s heifer-calf, White Princess, had no better care. Whatever was advisable was completely and thoroughly done in both cases. White Princess grew to beautiful Guernsey symmetry, with every promise of conformation to classic type; and was duly registered. Little Eris, small boned, with delicately fashioned limbs, looked out on the world from a pair of crystal-blue, baby eyes, which ultimately became a deep, limpid grey. Unlike White Princess, Eris did not promise to conform to the Odell type. There seemed to be little of that breed about her. Fanny had been bony and shiny-skinned, with a high-bridged, pinkish nose, watery eyes--a wisp of a woman with a rodent’s teeth and every articulation apparent as a ridge under a dry, tightly stretched epidermis. Odell, with his even, white teeth, coarse, highly-coloured skin and brown eyes, was a compact, stocky, heavy-handed, broad-footed product of Scotch-Irish pioneer stock. But Fanny’s grandmother, a Louisiana Creole, had run away from school to go on the stage, and had married a handsome but dissolute Southern planter who died of drink. Sundays Fanny used to wear her grandmother’s portrait painted in miniature on ivory, as a breast-pin. “Hand-painted,” she used to explain. And always added: “Creoles are all white.” Which was true. But, when quarrelling with his wife, Odell pretended to believe otherwise. * * * * *