As soon as Michael was out of the pigpen, the dog abandoned the fight and leaped out of the pen. A moment later he was next to Michael, who was clinging to his mother, sobbing with fright.
"They were going to kill me," he cried. "They were going to trample me!" The dog, as if trying to comfort the terrified child, licked at his face, his tail wagging. Suddenly one of Michael's arms left his mother to curl around the dog's neck, hugging him close.
Janet stared down at the animal. "Where'd he come from?" she asked. "Whose is he?"
Amos frowned, sure he'd never seen the dog before. If he had, he'd have remembered it. It stood two and a half feet high at the shoulder, with a broad, deep chest and heavily muscled legs. Its coat, coal black without so much as a trace of white markings, was thick, and its eyes, alert and intelligent, seemed to fix on him with a mixture of equal parts of suspicion and hostility. "Don't know," he admitted.
Michael, who had been more frightened than hurt by the pigs, hugged the dog closer. "I bet he followed me home last night," he said. Then he gazed up at his mother. "He saved my life, Mom. Can I keep him? Please?"
Janet felt dazed by what had happened, but when she had assured herself that Michael was, indeed, unhurt, she turned her attention to the dog. The animal seemed to regard her with quizzical eyes, as if awaiting her decision. "I don't know," she said at last. "He must belong to someone," she went on, though she had already seen that the dog wore no collar.
"But what if he doesn't?" Michael asked. "What if he's only a stray? Then can I keep him?"
"We'll see," Janet temporized. "Right now, though, I want you to go in and get yourself cleaned up."
Michael was about to argue, but when he saw the look in his grandfather's eyes, he changed his mind. "All right," he agreed. He started toward the house, and the big dog followed close at his heels. When Michael disappeared into the kitchen, the dog sat by the back porch.
"What do you think?" Janet asked Amos.
Amos shrugged. "I don't know. Never seen him before. But if he's still around when we get back tonight, I don't suppose there's any harm in keeping him."
A moment later, Amos wasn't so sure. As he passed the dog on his way into the house, it lifted its big head and laid back its ears. A snarl rumbled up from the depths of its throat.
Janet and Michael stared in awe at the little farm, barely able to recognize it even though it was not yet noon and the work had been under way for only three hours. Already the weeds had been cleared from the front yard; people swarmed over the house with scrapers, removing the last traces of paint from the weathered siding, and in the backyard, yet another crew was busy piling brush and weeds onto a smoldering bonfire. Still more people were at work on the barn.
The driveway, barely passable yesterday, had been scraped, and now a backhoe was working, digging drainage trenches along the shoulders of the road. Buck Shields, manipulating its controls with expert ease, brought the machine to a halt and jumped to the ground. "Want to try it?" he asked Michael. Michael immediately climbed up the caterpillar tread of the hoe and perched on its steel seat.
"What do I do?"
"Hold on," his uncle replied, climbing up to stand behind Michael, his work-coarsened hands covering Michael's own softer ones. "It's real easy. This lever brings the hoe up and puts it down, and this one moves it back and forth. See?" He demonstrated the hoe's operation, and another foot was added to the drainage ditch. "We can do about three or four feet at a time, then we have to move the whole thing forward. Try it."
Michael moved one of the levers, and the hoe plunged deep into the earth. "Easy," Buck cautioned. "We want a trench, not a pit." He eased the lever back, and the hoe responded. "Now try moving the dirt to the side, and dumping it." Michael hesitated, chose a lever, and pulled. The claw of the hoe dropped downward and the earth was deposited back into the trench.
"I'm messing it up," Michael said by way of apologizing.
"Maybe we better start you out with the tractor and work up to this. Why don't you see if you can lend a hand out back?"
Michael scrambled down and disappeared around the corner of the house, while Janet walked slowly along next to Anna as she wheeled her chair up the drive. At the foot of the porch steps, the old woman came to a halt and stared silently up at the house.
"You must have a lot of memories of this place," Janet said at last. Anna's eyes flickered, then met Janet's.
"I do," she replied. "But that's all past now, isn't it? For you, maybe this house will be a good one."
Janet frowned thoughtfully. "I don't believe in good houses and bad houses. It seems to me a house is happy if the people who live in it are happy."
"I hope you're right." Sighing, Anna approached the porch steps, then came to another halt. This time, when she looked up it was to Janet, not to the house. "There's some people who can manage stairs in these things, but I'm not one of them."
"I put a ramp for you on the top of my list," Janet told her as she began working the wheelchair up the four steps to the porch, "but I don't know when we'll be able to get it built."
"I'll mention it to Amos," Anna replied. Then, as Janet pushed her through the front door, she seemed to shrink into the chair. Her eyes scanned the foyer and the stairs, then shifted to stare almost fearfully at the closed door to the small room in which she'd delivered her last child.
"If you don't want to be here, I'll understand," Janet said, putting a reassuring hand on the old woman's shoulder.
"No. No, it'll be all right. It's just that it's been so many years." A wry smile twisted her mouth, a smile that Janet had a feeling was forced. "I'm afraid we may not have done you a favor with this place. I had no idea how bad it had gotten."
"But it's not bad," Janet protested. "It's going to be wonderful. Come on. Let's go on a tour, and I'll tell you everything I'm going to do."
They went from room to room, Anna falling silent as Janet explained her plans for each area. At last they came back to the foot of the stairs. Anna gazed thoughtfully up toward the second floor. "Which rooms are you going to use?" she asked at last.
"I'm taking the big one in front. Michael wants the little one."
"The little one?" Anna frowned. "Why the little one?"
"He likes the view. You can see Mr. Findley's place from there."
Anna's expression darkened. "That place," she said. "Ben Findley should be ashamed of himself, the way he's let it go. I swear, I don't know why that man stays around here. If it wasn't for Charles Potter, he wouldn't have a friend in Prairie Bend."
"But doesn't he have family?"
Anna's eyes clouded, and a sigh escaped her lips. "Ben? Not anymore. He had a wife once-Jenny Potter. For a while they had a good marriage, but then-" She fell silent for a moment, then smiled wanly. "Things happen, I guess. Anyway, Jenny left, and ever since, Ben's just gotten stranger and stranger."
"But surely he must have some friends."
Anna shook her head. "He doesn't seem to want friends anymore. In fact, I've often wondered why he stays here at all. His life must be so lonely…" Her eyes drifted toward the staircase. After a moment, she turned back to Janet. Suddenly, she nodded her head. "Of course Michael would want the little room." A look that might have been sadness, or something else, shadowed her face. Then she said, "It was his father's."