Easily bored when Roscoe, preoccupied with other projects, forgot to press him, Alonzo envied his older brother’s living in town and dealing in business affairs. Looking around for diversion, he found little. There were no free Negroes he might meet even as near-equals. No female he had seen, slave or free, tempted him to marry and begin the production of a family of his own. Educated enough to read and write and figure sums, but not enough to find interest and solace in books and ideas, he fretted in idleness, and his attention drifted inevitably to Oaks and Beulah Land, whose big fields bordered his own lesser ones, making him feel insignificant, reminding him that he did not own even this little patch but was merely his father’s steward.

Bruce Davis was stiffly courteous when they met, as they sometimes did, each riding a horse over his land and not too careful to keep to his own boundary lines. Farmers weren’t. They felt themselves free to ride anywhere they pleased, particularly when there was no fence to make them pause; and they even ventured where they had to open and close a gate, no one minding as long as gates that were unlatched were latched again. Sometimes Alonzo confronted the Davis children, but not often, for they had been warned by their father not to go onto Elk land.

More often, however, Alonzo in his walking or riding met someone from Beulah Land, usually Leon or Floyd, or both together. At such meetings Floyd and Leon were cool and polite, exchanging only the most meager courtesies. Now and then Alonzo encountered the child Rachel, pretty and proud on the roan mare she had been given to ride on her eighth birthday a year and a half ago. Sounding friendly enough, Rachel would call out a quick greeting and quickly be gone. She too had evidently been warned to have nothing to do with those on the farm between Oaks and Beulah Land.

The occasional meetings Alonzo came to remember and think about later were those with Sarah Kendrick. When they met on foot or horse, she looked at him and greeted him firmly and directly, with no evasion, no shifting of eyes or unnatural pitching of voice.

“How do you do, Mr. Elk?” she would enquire in a way that was not a question.

And he would in unconscious imitation, answer just as formally, “How do you do?”