Cal and Will contract for beans

The country slides toward war: Wilson is re-elected on a promise to stay out of it, British purchasing agents rove the country buying food and metals, and prices rise. Cal offers to help Aron through college if he will sit his examinations a year early and get out of Salinas, and asks him not to tell their father — a subtlety Aron finds silly. On his way out to look over the ranch Cal is told by Lee, unprompted, that there is five thousand dollars if he ever needs it. Then he walks into Will Hamilton's glass office and asks straight out how to make twenty or thirty thousand dollars, and why: to give his father back what he lost. Will, remembering a lifetime of holding on to the rim of a brilliant family with nothing but bookkeeping, recognises the son he never had. He asks whether Adam is fonder of Aron and whether Cal is buying love, and Cal answers yes to both. They shake hands on the scheme: guarantee the farmers five cents a pound for beans in a three-cent market, and sell at ten.

Will gets his one chapter of interior life, and it explains the family from outside: the brother who kept the books and believed he was despised for the only thing he could do. That is why he takes Cal seriously. The deal is honest by the trade's standards and rests entirely on a war other people are dreading, which is the flaw Cal never examines.