Over Paradise Ridge

Then Sam made me tell daddy. Daddy said: "Now I suppose I will be allowed to purchase a mule and cow or an electric reaper for that farm when I think it necessary?" And as he spoke he looked Sam straight in the face, with belligerency making the corners of his white mustache stand straight up.

"Make it a big steam-silo, first, Dad Hayes," answered Sam, laughing and red up to the edges of his hair--and daddy got an arm around us both for a good hug.

But the letter to Peter was another thing, and I didn't wait for Sam to tell me to write it. I smudged and snubbed and scratched over it all day and flung myself weeping into Sam's arms that night with it in my hand.

"Why, I wrote to Peter that night--the night I--took you over, Bettykin. And here's the answer that came an hour ago by wire. Take your hair out of my eyes and let me read it to you."

I snuggled two inches lower against Sam, and this is what he read: My life for your life, yours for mine, and joy to us both. PETE.

I got a letter from Peter the next day, and it said such wonderful things about Sam that I pasted it in Grandmother Nelson's book with the Commissioner's report. I had to cut out a whole page about Julia's beauty and the way New York was crazy about her. Peter is the most wonderful man in the world in some ways, and I believe that, as he deserves all kinds of happiness, he'll get it; maybe a nice, big, pink happiness in a blue chiffon and gold dress that will rock his nerves through a long career of play-writing. I told Sam my hopes.

He ruffled my hair with his big hand, and my lips with his, as he smoldered out toward Old Harpeth. In his eyes was the gridiron land look that started the flow of sap along the twigs of my heart just a few months ago. Then he said: "A man must plow his field of life deep, Betty, but if a woman didn't trudge 'longside with her hoe and seed-basket, what would the harvest be?"