Over Paradise Ridge

"I will, Sam, I will have that garden," I said, with the same angry determination in my voice I had used when I had clung to him and kicked and fought to go to places with him when he didn't want me, and when my skirts were several inches above my bare knees and his feet were scratched and innocent of shoes.

"Betty," said Sam, as he shook me away from him and then took my shoulders under their thin covering of chiffon in his plow-calloused, big, warm hands, "forget it! There are lots of dream gardens out in the world you can play in when you have time away from the bright lights. Everybody grows 'em without a lick of work. I have to work mine or starve. Good night!" Then with a rough of my hair down across my eyes he was out in the moonlit road, running away from me to his hollow log in a way he had never done before, no matter how I had tagged him.

I ran as far as the gate to watch him out of sight, and then I put my head down against the tall old post that had been one of Sam's perches when he wanted to climb away from me in former years, and sobbed and sobbed. I had never expected Sam to cast me off.

Girls' hearts are covered all over with little thin crystallizations of affection, and men ought to be very careful not to smash any of them with their superior strength. Sam had hurt me so that I didn't even dare think about it. I knew he was poor, and I hadn't expected him to plow and plant things for me while I went about in a picture-hat snipping them with garden scissors. I had asked him to let me set onions and weed beans and drop peas and corn for him and share his poverty and hard work as a true friend, and he had shut his cedar-pole gate in my face and heart. And I didn't understand why. I tried to think it was his affection for Peter that made him thus rudely switch my mind from him and his garden to Peter and his need of me, which Sam may have thought was greater than the need of his onions and turnip salad; but I don't see how Sam could have construed cruelty to me as generosity to Peter.

"Please God," I prayed out into the everlasting hills toward which Sam was running away from me and from which I had heard intoned "cometh help," "give me dirt to work in somewhere except in just a yard if I can't have Sam's. Help me to get somebody to help me to raise things for people to eat and milk, as well as to inspire a play. I'll do both things, but I must have earth with rotted leaves in it. Amen."