Another person had no direct knowledge of what had occurred, but he made a surmise based on accident. April, the mule Roscoe most often rode on his rounds of the fields, had gone lame one afternoon in the highest acres where cotton grew and where Roscoe had gone to judge the readiness of the cotton there for picking. He remembered that the horn on her hind hoofs had been growing longer and more ragged and that he had been intending to trim them but had not. They had doubtless become tender. Since he had taken on more of the management of the actual farm work, he had, naturally, given up most of his blacksmithing. The assistant he had trained, a feckless young man named Ebenezer, had strength enough and more for the work, but he had no initiative and little judgment one could rely on. Roscoe had made a mistake in bothering with him at all, but sometimes a man was clumsy at a job and suddenly became skillful when he got the hang of it. Not Ebenezer. Roscoe would have to train someone else. Ezra, of course, was getting too old and was too much a personage on the place to be asked to resume the work. But thinking of him, he suddenly thought: Why not Ezra’s son?

As soon as the thought came, he knew it was logical and right. The boy was young, but he was quick and intelligent. He had hung around and helped with some of the blacksmith jobs as long as his father worked in the shed. And the last few days he had shown himself willing to work on a steady basis without running off to be playmate for Leon. He would set Floyd to work in his father’s old place. No one could object to such a logical arrangement. Ezra would naturally wish to train the boy, which would leave Roscoe free for his other tasks. It was a fruitful idea.

Roscoe would not have admitted to fondness for anyone or anything, but because April had served him dependably, he did have a certain consideration for the beast, so he now dismounted, not wanting her to bear his weight on her tender hoofs and led her down the gently sloping fields toward the main cluster of work buildings and barns behind the big house. He walked her through one of the corn fields that had given most of its yield early. The fodder was ready to pull; he would set men to it soon. The only ears of corn remaining were stray ones that had been overlooked and had grown to such grossness and hardness in the shucks they were good for nothing but feeding hogs in winter or, shelled off the cob, might do to fatten turkeys. Perhaps some of it might even be used to make lye hominy, a staple in the winter diet of the slaves.