There had been a little rain and a fuzz of miserly grass had started up. Halfway up the hill Samuel squatted down and took up a handful of the harsh gravelly earth in his palm and spread it with his forefinger, flint and sandstone and bits of shining mica and a frail rootlet and a veined stone. He let it slip from his hand and brushed his palms. He picked a spear of grass and set it between his teeth and stared up the hill to the sky. A gray nervous cloud was scurrying eastward, searching for trees on which to rain.

Samuel stood up and sauntered down the hill. He looked into the tool shed and patted the four-by-four supports. He paused near Tom and spun one of the free-running wheels of the buckboard, and he inspected Tom as though he saw him for the first time. “Why, you’re a grown-up man,” he said.

“Didn’t you know?”

“I guess I did—I guess I did,” said Samuel and sauntered on. There was the sardonic look on his face his family knew so well—the joke on himself that made him laugh inwardly. He walked by the sad little garden and all around the house—not a new house any more. Even the last added lean-to bedrooms were old and weathered and the putty around the windowpanes had shrunk away from the glass. At the porch he turned and surveyed the whole home cup of the ranch before he went inside.

Liza was rolling out pie crust on the floury board. She was so expert with the rolling pin that the dough seemed alive. It flattened out and then pulled back a little from tension in itself. Liza lifted the pale sheet of it and laid it over one of the pie tins and trimmed the edges with a knife. The prepared berries lay deep in red juice in a bowl.

Samuel sat down in a kitchen chair and crossed his legs and looked at her. His eyes were smiling.

“Can’t you find something to do this time of day?” she asked.

“Oh, I guess I could, Mother, if I wanted to.”

“Well, don’t sit there and make me nervous. The paper’s in the other room if you’re feeling day-lazy.”

“I’ve read it,” said Samuel.

“All of it?”

“All I want to.”

“Samuel, what’s the matter with you? You’re up to something. I can see it in your face. Now tell it, and let me get on with my pies.”

He swung his leg and smiled at her. “Such a little bit of a wife,” he said. “Three of her is hardly a bite.”

“Samuel, now you stop this. I don’t mind a joke in the evening sometimes, but it’s not eleven o’clock. Now you go along.”

Samuel said, “Liza, do you know the meaning of the English word ‘vacation’?”

“Now don’t you make jokes in the morning.”

“Do you, Liza?”

“Of course I do. Don’t play me for a fool.”

“What does it mean?”

“Going away for a rest to the sea and the beach. Now, Samuel, get out with your fooling.”

“I wonder how you know the word.”

“Will you tell me what you’re after? Why shouldn’t I know?”

“Did you ever have one, Liza?”

“Why, I—” She stopped.

“In fifty years, did you ever have a vacation, you little, silly, half-pint, smidgin of a wife?”

“Samuel, please go out of my kitchen,” she said apprehensively.

He took the letter from his pocket and unfolded it. “It’s from Ollie,” he said. “She wants us to come and visit in Salinas. They’ve fixed over the upstairs rooms. She wants us to get to know the children. She’s got us tickets for the Chautauqua season. Billy Sunday’s going to wrestle with the Devil and Bryan is going to make his Cross of Gold speech. I’d like to hear that. It’s an old fool of a speech but they say he gives it in a way to break your heart.”

Liza rubbed her nose and floured it with her finger. “Is it very costly?” she asked anxiously.

“Costly? Ollie has bought the tickets. They’re a present.”

“We can’t go,” said Liza. “Who’d run the ranch?”

“Tom would—what running there is to do in the winter.”

“He’d be lonely.”

“George would maybe come out and stay a while to go quail hunting. See what’s in the letter, Liza.”

“What are those?”

“Two tickets to Salinas on the train. Ollie says she doesn’t want to give us a single escape.”

“You can just turn them in and send her back the money.”

“No, I can’t. Why, Liza—Mother—now don’t. Here—here’s a handkerchief.”

“That’s a dish towel,” said Liza.

“Sit here, Mother. There! I guess the shock of taking a rest kind of threw you. Here! I know it’s a dish towel. They say that Billy Sunday drives the Devil all over the stage.”

“That’s a blasphemy,” said Liza.

“But I’d like to see it, wouldn’t you? What did you say? Hold up your head. I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

“I said yes,” said Liza.

Tom was making a drawing when Samuel came in to him. Tom looked at his father with veiled eyes, trying to read the effect of Olive’s letter.

Samuel looked at the drawing. “What is it?”

“I’m trying to work out a gate-opener so a man won’t have to get out of his rig. Here’s the pull-rod to open the latch.”

“What’s going to open it?”