Isom was as thick-skinned as he was sapless. Believing that his penurious code was just, and his frugality the first virtue of his life, he was not ashamed of his table, and the outcast scraps upon it. But he looked at his young wife with a sharp drawing down of his spiked brows as he lingered there a moment, his cracked brown hands on the edge of the table, which he had clutched as he pushed his chair back. He seemed about to speak a rebuke for her extravagance of desire. The frown on his face foreshadowed it, but presently it lifted, and he nodded shrewdly after Joe. "Give him a couple of eggs mornings after this," said he, "they've fell off to next to nothing in price, anyhow. And eat one yourself once in a while, Ollie. I ain't one of these men that believe a woman don't need the same fare as a man, once on a while, anyhow." His generous outburst did not appear to move his wife's gratitude. She did not thank him by word or sign. Isom drank another glass of water, rubbed his mustache and beard back from his lips in quick, grinding twists of his doubled hand. "The pie-plant's comin' out fast," said he, "and I suppose we might as well eat it--nothing else but humans will eat it--for there's no sale for it over in town. Seems like everybody's got a patch of it nowadays. "Well, it's fillin', as the old woman said when she swallowed her thimble, and that boy Joe he's going to be a drain on me to feed, I can see that now. I'll have to fill him up on something or other, and I guess pie-plant's about as good as anything. It's cheap." "Yes, but it takes sugar," ventured Ollie, rolling some crumbs between her fingers. "You can use them molasses in the blue barrel," instructed Isom. "It's about gone," said she. "Well, put some water in the barrel and slosh it around--it'll come out sweet enough for a mess or two." Isom got up from the table as he gave these economic directions, and stood a moment looking down at his wife. "Don't you worry over feedin' that feller, Ollie," he advised. "I'll manage that. I aim to keep him stout--I never saw a stouter feller for his age than Joe--for I'm goin' to git a pile of work out of him the next two years. I saw you lookin' him over this morning," said he, approvingly, as he might have sanctioned her criticism of a new horse, "and I could see you was lightin' on his points. Don't you think he's all I said he was?" "Yes," she answered, a look of abstraction in her eyes, her fingers busy with the crumbs on the cloth, "all you said of him--_and more_!" CHAPTER III THE SPARK IN THE CLOD It did not cost Isom so many pangs to minister to the gross appetite of his bound boy as the spring weeks marched into summer, for gooseberries followed rhubarb, then came green peas and potatoes from the garden that Ollie had planted and tilled under her husband's orders.