Hesitantly Adna Cory said: "You've spoke, times, of inviting Mr. Kenny here. I'd be pleased of course. In the spring, perhaps, before such time as you'll be too busied with the plowing and all?" Joseph Cory sighed. Ben's parents often left much unsaid, the silences a communication not always excluding himself and Reuben. Neither now mentioned the smallness of the house, the cramping difficulties of living on a raw frontier. Even by frontier standards the house was meager--two rooms downstairs and the lean-to where old Jesse Plum dwelt in frowsty security; upstairs the garret and that was all. Ben knew his mother's family was or had been wealthy; so was Grandmother Cory in Springfield. But Joseph Cory was proud, with a sharp-cornered aversion to owing anyone anything. The land spread generously fruitful here at the edge of wilderness; good times ought to bloom in this village if ever an end came to the alarms and imperatives of war. Under that stress it suffered the bleakness of a place often forgotten, where a handful of garrison soldiers tried to hold themselves ready for disaster, nourishing scant patience for Deerfield and not loved there. They cleaned their dark tools and cursed the weather, the Indians, the French, the pay or lack of it, above all their own foolishness in joining the militia. Ben's mother and father were surely wondering in silence how the house could provide for such a guest as John Kenny, Grandmother Cory's elder brother, a fabulous merchant-importer, owner of ships and warehouses of the fat Boston trade. To Ben, Uncle John was a figure of learning, wealth and magnificence moving seven or eight feet tall in a haze of legend, mythical as Dudley or the Mathers or Queen Anne. Ben had heard his father call Uncle John slight and frail--a stiff breeze would blow him away; Ben's mind noted the information, his heart not accepting it at all. Joseph Cory said at last: "Well, Adna, he's sixty-seven. I suppose he seldom leaves Roxbury, especially now when all's uncertain. I hear the Boston road is fair as far as Hadley, but they mean for good riders, young men. Up from Hadley 'tis what you remember, love, muddy as dammit even when the spring's past. And he's not in the best health--says so here, further on." Ben noticed Reuben's face drooping in resignation. Ru would know, as Ben did, that even if Uncle John were invited he probably could not come. The untamed roads were lonely; an old man on horseback could die swiftly from an arrow or bullet out of the brush.... Ben supposed he ought to take up a candle and persuade Reuben to bed. At fourteen Ben was expected to assume many of a man's responsibilities, not least of them the jumpy task of riding herd on his brother, who would be twelve in May.