"Would you say so?" he debated, his voice quiet, but the spark shining deep in his hazel eye. "Well now, I'd have said--if you'd axed me--that I've had my own way most generally without resorting to such. I'm ruther expectin' to have my own way from this time out, and take no curious methods of gettin' it." "Well, what are you going to do about selling the land?" she persisted. Lance lifted the baby's fat hand and pretended to pick the banjo strings with the pointed, inadequate fingers, to the young man's serious enjoyment. Callista waited for what she considered a reasonable time, and then prompted. "Lance. Lance, did you hear me?" "Oh, yes, I heared you well enough," Lance told her composedly. "I was just a-studyin' on the matter." Again silence, punctuated by the aimless twanging of the banjo strings, the little sounds from the summer world without, the quick, light tapping of Callista's feet and the little whisper of her skirts as she moved about her task. "Well--have you studied?" she inquired abruptly at length. "Uh-huh," agreed Lance negligently, curling himself down on the doorstone a little further, [271] "an' I'm studyin' yet. Ye see that there feller they sent out for an agent met me on the big road one day about a month ago and bantered me to trade. I told him I'd let him know, time I got back." "And you never named it to me!" Callista said sharply, pausing, dish in hand by the table side, and staring at her husband with reprehending eyes. "You never said a word to me about it; and you went off on that foolish camping trip! For the good gracious, I don't know what men are made of!" "Some are made of one thing, and some of another," allowed Lance easily, leaning his head back against the door jamb and half closing his eyes. "Before we went away," repeated Callista reproachfully. "Maybe you've lost your chance." The spur to Lance Cleaverage, the goad, was ever the hint to go slower; applied recklessly, it was quite sufficient to make him dig heels and toes into the track and refuse to go at all. At Callista's suggestion that he had missed his chance, he balked entirely. "Well, I don't know as I want to sell," he reiterated. "That's what I told the man--and that's the truth." "Of course you want to sell," asserted Callista in exasperation, "and you want to sell terrible bad--we all do. Nobody in the Turkey Tracks [272] has got any money. We just live from hand to mouth, and dig what we get out of the ground mighty hard. Oh, I wish't I was a man. I'd go straight down to the Settlement and sell this land before I came back." A faint color showed itself in her husband's brown cheeks. His lips parted slightly and remained so for a moment before he spoke. "Not unless the man you was chanced to be me, you wouldn't sell my land," he said at length, speaking softly, almost dreamily.