He let go of Sam’s hand and clapped him on the back hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Others filed out fast behind them. Sam stood under a locust tree, reading his article. People walked by and stared. Gray Ellen read it over his shoulder.

“The race-baiter Manly is back in business,” read the lead. “The infamous author of the scandalous editorial defaming Southern Womanhood has set up shop in Free Love Hall, under the auspices of the Black Ministerial Union, and will continue inciting the Negroes to riot and mayhem. In the high-handed style to which his readers have become accustomed, the notorious advocate of rape and miscegenation was holding forth and granting interviews to the press and his disciples. ‘The man who defames me shall be paid in full,’ he vowed, waving his black fist, symbol of the movement to subvert constitutional Anglo-Saxon rule.”

“Sam, how could you!” Gray Ellen said.

“Gray, you think I wrote this?”

“You said you wrote an article—”

“My God, the style is all puffed up, it’s full of catch phrases.”

“Manly didn’t swear to get Clawson?”

“No, no. He owes the man some money or something. I didn’t even write it in the piece—I just told Clawson that Manly’d make good on the debt, whatever it is. Manly asked me to.”

She read the rest of it. “It gets worse,” she said, her voice quiet and husky. “The article advises him to get out of town before—let me read it—‘before the God-fearing white citizens of this town make an example out of him.’ Good Lord, tell me they’re not going to lynch him, Sam!”

He took her arm, and they started walking. “Nobody’s going to lynch anybody. It’s just hot air. These small-town newspapers, they get into rivalries to boost circulation. Haven’t you ever read Mark Twain? He writes about this kind of stunt all the time.”

“Well, you’re all mixed up in it. I don’t like that.”

“I’ll have a talk with Clawson first thing Monday. Nobody’s going to butcher my copy like that. Not even the boss.”

They put it out of their minds and passed a long, lazy day together. Borrowing the horse and buggy Cousin Hugh had made available at the livery stable downtown, they rode off down the Shell Road to see the beach. The breeze off the ocean cooled them, and they marveled at the different colors of the sky and sea away from the city—as if someone had taken a sepia photograph and painted in the colors brighter than real life.

At the wooden causeway, they looked out on low, marshy islands cut by finger channels. Beyond those lay the ocean. They crossed the causeway, overwhelmed by the soft breeze, the plovers and wheeling gulls. It was exactly what Gray Ellen needed today—to ride, to feel the air moving against her cheeks, to get away from the noise of other people. She didn’t like living in a hotel, even a residential hotel. She wanted a little house on a quiet street, with a grocery on the corner and neighbors who sat on their porches in the evening trading stories about the day. She wanted a clean sky drifting over her backyard, and chips of starlight flickering on the leaves of her own spreading oak in the evening.