"Well, I'm going," said Early Ann, "and that's that. But, Mrs. Brailsford, you mustn't worry for a minute. I grew up as wild as a chipmunk and I guess I can take care of myself." "But why do you want to go?" Stud asked the bright-eyed girl, whose ripe young breasts under her middy rose and fell with her breathing, and whose well-turned ankles under her sailor skirt were a treat to the eye. "I've been wanting all my life to see Chicago," Early Ann said. "I never seen a tall building, or rich ladies riding in limousines, or the silver dollars in the Palmer House floor. I never seen Irene Castle dance, or heard Grand Opera, or had people wait on me like they do in a hotel." "Yes, Early Ann, I know, I know," said Sarah, earnestly. "You got a right to have one good time like that in your life. Everybody has got a right to be happy just once." "But I won't budge out of this house if you ain't well enough yet," said Early Ann. "You've only been up and around for six days, Mrs. Brailsford." "No, no, Early Ann. You mustn't stay on my account. I'm fit as a fiddle. It's only for your own good I want you to stay." "Then I'm going tomorrow on the ten o'clock train," said Early Ann. She began to pack in the parlor while the family showered advice and ran errands. Sarah kissed her goodby tearfully. Gus was suspiciously misty-eyed as he carried her telescope suitcase out to the Ford, and Stud drove her recklessly to the station where he insisted on paying for her round-trip ticket and for a chair on the parlor car--a luxury he had never allowed himself. "You hang on to your money, young lady," he said. "And don't make up to any city fellows." He stood watching the train until it had passed out of sight around the curve, then leaping into his Ford roared back to the farm where he began two weeks of mad labor. He worked on the fences, set posts, strung shining lines of new barbed wire, pruned several trees and filled a small ravine with boulders. He trapped a weasel that had been getting his chickens, put barrels around his young fruit trees to save them from the rabbits. He sent for a new stump-puller, seductively described in the mail order catalogue, hoping to clean out the brush lot in the slack months which were ahead. One morning he noticed that the barns needed painting. He called in Mack Curren, who had finally given up hope of being a great portrait painter. Mack and his crew gave the buildings a new red coat visible for miles. "Might as well be fancy and add white trimmings," Stud told the willing Mr. Curren. Stud himself was hard at work on the new silo. He drove himself happily these days, and he drove Gus who was not so happy concerning his employer's sudden desire to move the world, to paint the farm from end to end, and to add a wing to the milk house.