poorly under new conditions: the conditions
were bad enough, certainly!

I remember how horrified we were at the
sour, ashy-gray bread she gave her family to
eat. She mixed her dough, we discovered, in
an old tin peck-measure that Krajiek had used
about the barn. When she took the paste out
to bake it, she left smears of dough sticking to
the sides of the measure, put the measure on
the shelf behind the stove, and let this residue
ferment. The next time she made bread, she
scraped this sour stuff down into the fresh
dough to serve as yeast.

During those first months the Shimerdas
never went to town. Krajiek encouraged them
in the belief that in Black Hawk they would
somehow be mysteriously separated from their
money. They hated Krajiek, but they clung to
him because he was the only human being
with whom they could talk or from whom they
could get information. He slept with the old
man and the two boys in the dugout barn,
along with the oxen. They kept him in their
hole and fed him for the same reason that the
prairie-dogs and the brown owls housed the
rattlesnakes -- because they did not know
how to get rid of him.

[[35]]

p034 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p035w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p036

v?