What made Rack's practice a little different was the geese he kept. They had free rein in the millhouse, the yard, the millrace, and - some folks said - Rack's own house at night. Rack called them his daughters, though this was a perverse kind of thing to say, seeing as how only a few laying geese and a gander or two ever lasted out the winter. What Arthur Stuart saw at once, and Alvin finally noticed when he got over his love scene with the machinery, was how those geese were fed. It was expected that a few kernels of corn would drop; couldn't be helped. But Rack always took the sack and held it, not by the top, but by the shank of the sack, so kernels of corn dribbled out the whole way to the millstone. The geese were on that corn like - well, like geese on corn. And then he'd take big sloppy handfuls of corn to throw on to the millstone. A powerful lot of kernels hit the side of the stone instead of the top, and of course they dropped and ended up in the straw on the floor, where the geese would have them up in a second.

'Sometimes as much as a quarter of the corn,' Alvin told Arthur Stuart.

'You counted the kernels? Or are you weighing corn in your head now?' asked Arthur.

'I can tell. Never less than a tenth.'

`I reckon he figures he ain't stealing, it's the geese doing it,' said Arthur Stuart.

`Miller's supposed to keep his tithe of the ground corn, not double or triple it or more in gooseflesh.'

'I don't reckon it'll do much good for me to point out to you that this ain't none of our business,' said Arthur Stuart.

'I'm the adult here, not you,' said Alvin.

'You keep saying that, but the things you do, I keep wondering,' said Arthur Stuart. 'I'm not the one gallivanting all over creation while my pregnant wife is resting up to have the baby back in Hatrack River. I'm not the one keeps getting himself throwed in jail or guns pointed at him.'