The men strolled back, Paul's face flushed. He gestured impetuously from the elevation to the citied valley below. "A magnificent chance, Nathaniel. Your mountain grips me." "It'll take a long time, remember. Don't go off half-cocked." "The thing's here before my eyes!" "Adamsville won't really touch the mountain for ten years. It's good ... fine residence property, but.... That's the Crenshaw land, just beyond. They have four eighties; they run all the way to this road." The heads bent over the map again. "We've simply got to take it all," Paul reiterated. Guild's familiar cautions and objections came forth again. "Not that I wouldn't like to, but...." "That's all you can see in it, then?" Paul asked finally. "Frankly, it's all I can put in anything now." "I'm going into it hard. How will this do? We'll take half of this eighty together, and the nearest Crenshaw one. I'll buy the rest of this and the Crenshaw land, and the Logan place on the south.... I can raise it somehow. Pratt will help me.... It will be first mortgage." With this settled, they circled down to the gap, and back by dummy to the Great Southern Hotel. On the way down to the dummy station, Paul picked a dogwood blossom. It was still fresh in his lapel when he and his son arrived at the pillared home in Jackson. Pelham's flowers of the morning had withered; his moist clenched fingers had reluctantly abandoned most of them on the seat of the tardy Dixie Flier. But the limp remains in his grimy handkerchief he carried into his mother's room, and left on her dresser. The boy was asleep when she found them. After pausing above a half-emptied scuttle, she arranged them in a small green vase, and replaced them in the bedroom. All night their quiet odor upset the ordered room with a word of wilder life. III Paul Judson came back from that trip on fire with the mountain. On the creased blue-print he traced for Mary the outlines of the sections and quarter-sections, wooing her interest, a thing he had long ceased to do. His pencil shaded the curving paths to the crest, and aimlessly roughed in a design for a house; this he eyed from several angles. "Guild agrees that this would be the best location for a home." Her mind pieced out the half-uttered wish. "Not for us, Paul!" "Mm ... maybe." "But--to leave Jackson!" He grew argumentative, with an expansive selflessness. "It's only fair to the children to give them the wider chance. There are nice people in Adamsville ... big people."