"No, he doesn't take hold right. Why, even when I was his age I could tell a stray in the bunch as far as I could see it, and he don't know the milk cow when she gets outside of the barn. I tell his mother I'm goin' to work him over again with a trace strap----" The sensitive boy could bear no more. He gave one regretful glance at his heaping plate, a shamed look at Mrs. Mosher, then sprang to his feet and faced his father. "I won't learn cattle, and _you_ can't make me!" he cried, with blazing eyes. "And you _won't_ work me over with a trace strap! You've licked me all I'll stand. I'll go away! I'll _run_ away, and I won't come home till I'm white as a darned sheep!" "Bruce!" His father reached for his collar, but the boy was gone. His chair tipped over, and his precious rock dropped from his shirt front and bounced on the floor. It _was_ a precious rock, too, a fragment of meteorite, one which fell perhaps in the shower of meteoric stones in Iowa in '79. "He's the touchiest child I ever saw," said Burt apologetically, "and stubborn as a mule; but you'd better set his plate away. I guess the gentleman will return, since he's twenty-five miles from home." The farmer's wife called after the boy from the doorway, but he did not stop. Hatless, with his head thrown back and his fists clenched tight against his sides, he ran with all his might, his bare feet kicking up the soft, deep dust. There was something pathetic to her in the lonely little figure vanishing down the long, straight road. She wished it had not happened. "It isn't right to tease a child," she said, going back to her seat. "Well, there's no sense in his acting like that," Burt answered. "I've tried to thrash some of that stubbornness out of him, but his will is hard to break." "I don't believe in so much whipping," the woman defended. "Traits that children are punished for sometimes are the makin' of them when they're grown. I think that's why grandparents are usually easier with their grandchildren than they were with their own--because they've lived long enough to see the faults they whipped their children for grow into virtues. Bruce's stubbornness may be perseverance when he's a man, and to my way of thinking too much pride is far better than too little." "Pride or no pride, he'll do as I say," Burt answered, with an obstinacy of tone which made the farmer's wife comment mentally that it was not difficult to see from whom the boy had inherited _that_ trait.