So the cousin took it and being a righteous honest man he changed it into silver, good and sound in every piece, and when he was back at her door again he struck each piece upon another to show how sound all were. The mother was grateful to him and she said, although half unwillingly too, except she did not wish to be thought small in mind, “Take a piece of it for your trouble, cousin, and for your help in harvest, for well I know you need it and your wife swelling with another child.” But though he stared hard at the silver and sucked his breath in without knowing he did and blinked his eyes once or twice with longing he would not take it and he said quickly before his longing grew too much for him, because indeed he was a good and honest man, “No, cousin’s wife, for you are a lone woman and I am able to work yet.” “Well, if you need to borrow then,” she said and quickly took the silver out of sight, for well she knew no man can look at silver long, however good he is, and not grow weak with longing. In that night while the children and the old woman slept the mother rose and lit the candle and dug a hole with her hoe into the hard earth of the floor and there she hid the ten pieces of silver, but first she wrapped them in a bit of rag to keep the earth from them. The buffalo turned and stared with its great dull eyes, and the fowls woke under the bed and looked out at her with this eye and then with that and clucked faintly, astonished at this strange thing in the night. But the woman filled the hole and walked a while on it to make it beaten smooth and like the rest. Then she laid herself down again in the darkness. It was the strangest thing, but as she lay there awake and yet half dreaming, almost she forgot it was her own silver she had buried and silver she gained from the harvest she had cut herself, bending her back in weariness to every handful of the grain. Yes, she forgot this, and it seemed to her almost that the man had truly sent it to her, and that it was a something over and beyond her own, and she murmured to her heart, “It is in place of the silver bits he took and spent for that blue gown, and better, for it is more,” and she forgave him for that thing he had done, and so she fell into sleep.