Though they had been present at the very start, they had fallen behind the rest of the state, for they had not yet experienced the anger and bitter resentment which they read about in the papers, had not tried to stop the Negroes from leaving, as had other white men in other towns, feeling it was their right and duty to tear suitcases from any black hands which held them; or thrown any punches. They had been spared the disheartening discovery that such gestures were futile or had been barred from such demonstrations of righteous anger—Mister Harper had made them see that the Negroes could not be stopped; Harry Leland had gone so far as to express the idea that the Negroes had the right to leave—and so, now, late Saturday afternoon, as the sun swooped behind the flat-faced, unpainted buildings across the Highway, they turned back to Mister Harper and tried for the thousandth time in three days to discover how it ever began in the first place. They could not know it all, but what they did know might give them some part of an answer and they wondered if what Mister Harper said about “blood” could possibly be true.

Mister Harper usually appeared on the porch at eight in the morning, where for twenty years he had held court in a wheel chair as old and awkward as a throne. He was a retired army man, who had gone North to West Point, having been nominated to the Academy by the General himself, Dewey Willson. At West Point, Mister Harper had learned to wage the wars he would never have the opportunity to fight: he was too young for the War Between the States, did not arrive in Cuba until long after the Spanish-American War had ended, and was too old for World War I, which had taken his son from him. War had given him nothing, but had deprived him of everything, and so, thirty years before, he decided life was not worth meeting on foot, since it always knocked you down, and seated himself in a wheel chair to view the world from the porch, explaining its chaotic pattern to the men who clustered around him each day.

In all those thirty years, when the world could see it, he had climbed from the wheel chair only once—on Thursday, to go to Tucker Caliban’s farm. Now he was again rooted as firmly as though he had never left it, his limp white hair, parted in the middle and long, falling almost like a woman’s on either side of his face. His hands were folded over a small but protruding stomach.