The creek at Busseyville, meandering through its wide valley, looked so inviting that Stud drove his car in among the willows, kicked through a meadow of deep grass and dusty milkweed bloom on which the big, brown butterflies were gathered, and came at last to the deep hole at the bend where he had often gone swimming as a boy. There was not a farm woman in sight, so Stud stripped, took a running dive, and sported in the cool, clear water. How fine it felt! He blew and bubbled, tried to swim to the bottom of the twelve foot hole and pick up pebbles, opened his eyes under the water and grabbed for the silver minnows with his big hands. Out again with the wind and sun upon his body! Into his clothes and back to the car where he sampled a pair of chicken sandwiches and drank noisily from the artesian well beside the road. Another ten miles of hard driving over wagon roads which followed the ridge to the west of the lake, then into Fort Atkinson and on up the Rock River Valley. On either side spread the fertile black acres which had brought thousands of eager immigrants from across the sea. The sons and grandsons of the pioneers were thrashing grain and sweating in the fields. Stud marveled when he thought how rapidly he was traversing these miles which would have taken days by ox-cart. Not a blowout, as yet, and not a broken spring. No trouble with the magneto, carburettor, or the engine. Until he was twenty miles from home Stud would not let himself think what it was which had brought him on this wild goose chase. It sobered him when he remembered. From the moment on that June night when Sarah had asked if Early Ann might be his daughter the simple mind of Stud Brailsford had been troubled and perplexed. He wanted to ask the girl outright what she knew about her mother but was embarrassed before her. He tried to recall each of the girls with whom he had had secret pleasure before he married Sarah. Suddenly it dawned upon him that Early Ann Sherman was undoubtedly the daughter of Tess Bedermier,--Tess, the girl with whom he had once gone swimming naked in Lake Koshkonong in the days when to even speak of a girl's legs was to risk an eternity in hell. It was a Sunday evening at that. He was supposed to be driving her to the evening services at the Methodist Episcopal church in Brailsford Junction. Tess, the lovely and lost, the foolhardy and independent, the talk of the Ladies' Aid and the scandal of the countryside. She had been Doc Crandall's stylish hired girl during the last two years of the veterinarian's life. Of an age with Temperance and Sarah, Tess had been the most run-after girl in town during the years of 1890 and '91. Stud had not told Sarah of his discovery, nor why, when looking into Early Ann's face, he was suddenly shocked (seeing the living, breathing image of Tess). But could she be his daughter? Maybe she was older than she would admit. If she were twenty-one, for instance....