begged not to be made lie down, came perilously near to death.
Selina’s heart was an engine pumping terror, hate, agony through her veins. Hate for her husband who had done this to the boy.
“You did it! You did it! He’s a baby and you made him work like a man. If anything happens to him! If anything happens to him!”
“Well, I didn’t think the kid would go for to do it. I didn’t ask him to pick and then go berrying. He said could he and I said yes. If I had said no it would have been wrong, too, maybe.”
“You're all alike. Look at Roelf Pool! They tried to make a farmer of him, too. And ruined him.”
“What's the matter with farming? What's the matter with a farmer? You said farm work was grand work, once.”
“Oh, I did. It is. It could be. It Oh, what's the use of talking like that now! Look at him! Don’t, Sobig! Don’t, baby. How hot his head is! Listen! Is that Jan with the doctor? No. No, it isn’t. Mustard plasters. Are you sure that’s the right thing?”
It was before the day of the omnipresent farmhouse telephone and the farmhouse Ford. Jan’s trip to High Prairie village for the doctor and back to the farm meant a delay of hours. But within two days the boy was again about, rather pale, but otherwise seeming none the worse for his experience.
That was Pervus. Thrifty, like his kind, but un-
