So the cousin took it and being a righteous honest man he changed it into silver, good and sound in every piece, and when he was back at her door again he struck each piece upon another to show how sound all were. The mother was grateful to him and she said, although half unwillingly too, except she did not wish to be thought small in mind, “Take a piece of it for your trouble, cousin, and for your help in harvest, for well I know you need it and your wife swelling with another child.”
But though he stared hard at the silver and sucked his breath in without knowing he did and blinked his eyes once or twice with longing he would not take it and he said quickly before his longing grew too much for him, because indeed he was a good and honest man, “No, cousin’s wife, for you are a lone woman and I am able to work yet.”
“Well, if you need to borrow then,” she said and quickly took the silver out of sight, for well she knew no man can look at silver long, however good he is, and not grow weak with longing.
In that night while the children and the old woman slept the mother rose and lit the candle and dug a hole with her hoe into the hard earth of the floor and there she hid the ten pieces of silver, but first she wrapped them in a bit of rag to keep the earth from them. The buffalo turned and stared with its great dull eyes, and the fowls woke under the bed and looked out at her with this eye and then with that and clucked faintly, astonished at this strange thing in the night. But the woman filled the hole and walked a while on it to make it beaten smooth and like the rest. Then she laid herself down again in the darkness.
It was the strangest thing, but as she lay there awake and yet half dreaming, almost she forgot it was her own silver she had buried and silver she gained from the harvest she had cut herself, bending her back in weariness to every handful of the grain. Yes, she forgot this, and it seemed to her almost that the man had truly sent it to her, and that it was a something over and beyond her own, and she murmured to her heart, “It is in place of the silver bits he took and spent for that blue gown, and better, for it is more,” and she forgave him for that thing he had done, and so she fell into sleep.
Thereafter when one asked to see the paper bit she answered tranquilly, “I have changed it for common silver and spent it,” and when the gossip heard it she cried out, her loose mouth ajar, “But have you spent it all?” the mother answered easily and she smiled, “Aye, I have spent it all for this and that, and a new pot or two and cloth and this and that, and why not when there is more to come?” And she went in the house and fetched out the new garments she had made for the man to wear if he came home and she said, “Here is some of the cloth such as I bought with it,” and they all stared at it and pinched the stuff and cried out that it was a very good strong cloth and the gossip said unwillingly, “You are a very good woman, I can swear, to spend the money, even to a share, upon clothes for him, and not all for yourself, or for the children.”
Then the mother answered steadfastly, “But we are well content with each other, my man and I, and I did spend some upon myself, for I gave some to a silversmith and bade him fashion me some earrings and a ring for my hand, for my man did ever say he wanted me to have them when we had something over and to spare.”
The old woman had listened to this all and now she cried out, “I swear my son is just such a man as she says, and he is to buy me my third shroud and of the best town stuff. A very good son, neighbors, and I wish as good a one to each of you, and especially to you, cousin’s wife, for I see your belly swollen as a ripe melon!”
Then the goodwives laughed and went away again, one by one, for it was evening time. But when they were gone the mother groaned within herself at such a great tale as she had told, and she reproached herself and said in her own heart, “Now why need I have told such a vast tale, and could not be content with what was told already? Where shall I find money for those trinkets? Yet must I somehow do it to save myself
