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 carried around before it set. His hair had a mean sandy tint, about the color of a Duroc hog.

"We've traipsed up and down between Kansas and Texas five times the last eight or nine years," Mrs. Brassfield went on with her argument against roving, "Shad always lookin' for some place where he could git along with less work than he could in the last one. I buried all of my children, one after another, on that long road between this state and Texas. I feel sometimes like I've left a grave ever' hundred miles between here and Waco, Mr. Dunham."

"It wasn't movin' that was to blame, Mollie," Brassfield said, a note of gentleness and kindness in his tone that lifted him considerably in Dunham's regard. "You know they tuck the aiger in Arkansaw—it's the worst place for aiger in the world—I wouldn't live in that state if they 'lected me gov'ner and crowned me with a solid gold crown."

Out of Brassfield's shingled baldness his big eyebrows stood on his face with a surprising, almost startling, effect. He worked them when he talked, especially when he denounced, his pale eyes weak and purposeless, his half-whiskers giving a sternness to the lower part of his features which there was nothing in his gizzard to sustain.

"If I had me forty acres of this river land," he said, "and a couple of good teams, I'd show these stockmen corn and oats'll grow here as good as they'll grow anywhere. I'm goin' to get the gover'ment after—"

"If I had five acres back in Henry County, Missouri, and a cow and some hens, I'd be happy, and you could