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Show 147 "After all, we're growing up now. We ought to repent. " I left, feeling exalted at the good influence I had on my friends. Mama was so pleased to have me come and ask that she loaded me up with a cake she had made that evening, plenty of cream and butter for the biscuits, and everything else she thought a gang of ten or twelve could eat. When I got back the boys had the chickens and were playing ball with the unlaid eggs. They seemed to be all laying hens, but I thought nothing of it until next morning. Mama was mad as hops, because, while I was inside getting the rest of the dinner, the boys were outside raiding her coop of her best laying hens. Paul still inquires after my sore arm when I see him, and thanks me politely for the wonderful chicken dinner we had that night. Paul was right; we were growing up. The home town boys were too much like my brothers. Ershel had come to town. This was Ershel Holmes, son of Papa's share-crop farmer in Kanosh, and I had seen him before, the time Macel and Eldon and I went to Kanosh after wheat and apples, but I was a little,^flat-chested girl then, invisible to a big boy like him. He was older than Eldon and on that occasion girls came around, trying to get his attention all the time we were there. Now he was working for Papa, in Papa's mind another field hand, but in his ownmind a glorious, full-blooded cowboy, a Zane Grey character, a straight-shooting dead-eye dick. In a community where the uniform of a cowboy was a pair of levis, a shirt, work-shoes, a felt hat too old for Sunday wear, a pair of delapidated chaps and any old spurs which |