He whistled happily as he rolled up his sleeves, showing huge brown arms with bulging biceps, tied on a leather apron, and lifting the heavy hammer gave the anvil a couple of preparatory whangs, bell-like strokes which rang out across the valley of the stream all the way to Cottonwood Hill and back again. "Blamed if I don't like shoeing a horse," he told the sorrel. "Nothing like it to set a fellow up in the morning." Stud had a weakness for his blacksmith shop and the adjoining mill which had once ground all the grist and cut all the lumber for the entire countryside. The old stone building was in ruins now, the mill-wheel fallen, and the dam washed away, moss and vines covered the rotting roof; but Stud would not tear it down. He liked to come down here on a wet day and tinker around in the pile of wheels and machine parts which littered the floor. At a bench in one corner he kept his paraphernalia for stuffing birds, in another his saws and planes and chisels, his brace and bits and other woodworking equipment. He liked to make things, and fix things, and whang away at his anvil. "Have to fix that bellows with a new cowskin," he announced to no one in particular. "Must have been made before the Civil War by my Granddaddy--and what a great old fellow he was!" Stud fished the glowing crescent of iron out of the coals and set to work with his hammer. "Tailor made shoes for a pretty lady," he told the anxious mare. "Can't go barefoot like a blamed little foal." So he had heard his father talk to sleek and shining mares in this same blacksmith shop, and so his father's father had doubtless talked to _his_ horses on this very spot. Stud had a sneaking fondness for horses and ancestors. Particularly the big men who had come swinging into Wisconsin in the eighteen-forties to open up this country as if by miracle. He had heard his father tell of the stormy voyage from England in a sailing ship, the long journey up the canal and through the Great Lakes, the landing at Milwaukee where the candle-lit taverns were over-run with settlers, frontier merchants, gamblers, whores, and itinerant ministers of the gospel who shared the unpartitioned floors, and waded democratically through the deep mud in the tavern yard where scores of oxen were tethered beside their clumsy carts. Stud himself remembered the last of these "toad-crushers" with wheels cut from cross-sections of huge oak trees. Loaded with lead and pulled by as many as eight yoke of oxen, these carts drew the metal mined in Galena and Exeter across the wilds of intervening Wisconsin to the lake port of Milwaukee. The drivers were a wild and frisky crew, Stud had been told. It shocked and titillated his righteous old Daddy (who had watched the ox teams from this very window) knowing how the drivers whored and played at cards in Milwaukee and the thriving town of Galena.