The booths were all putting out their lights as the people poured through the gate towards town. Sandy hobbled down the road beside his father, his sore heel, which had been forgotten all evening, paining him terribly until Jimboy picked him up and carried him on his shoulder. Automobiles and buggies whirled past them in clouds of gritty dust, and young boys calling vulgar words hurried after tittering girls. When Sandy and his father reached home, Aunt Hager and Annjee had not yet returned from the revival. Jimboy said he thought maybe they had stopped at Mrs. Lane’s to sit up all night with the sick woman, so Sandy spread his pallet on the floor at the foot of his grandmother’s bed and went to sleep. He did not hear his Aunt Harriett when she came home, but late in the night he woke up with his heel throbbing painfully, his throat dry, and his skin burning, and when he tried to bend his leg, it hurt him so that he began to cry.

Harriett, awakened by his moans, called drowsily: “What’s the matter, honey?”

“My foot,” said Sandy tearfully.

So his young aunt got out of bed, lit the lamp, and helped him to the kitchen, where she heated a kettle of water, bathed his heel, and covered the nail-wound with vaseline. Then she bound it with a fresh white rag.

“Now that ought to feel better,” she said as she led him back to his pallet, and soon they were both asleep again.

The next morning when Hager came from the sickbed of her friend, she sent to the butcher-shop for a bacon rind, cut from it a piece of fat meat, and bound it to Sandy’s heel as a cure.

“Don’t want you havin’ de blood-pisen here,” she said. “An’ don’t you run round an’ play on that heel. Set out on de porch an’ study yo’ reader, ’cause school’ll be startin’ next month.” Then she began Mrs. Reinhart’s ironing.

The next day, Saturday, the last day of the carnival, Jimboy carried the Reinharts’ clothes home for Hager, since Sandy was crippled and Jimmy Lane’s mother was down in bed. But after delivering the clothes Jimboy did not come home for supper. When Annjee and Hager wanted to leave for the revival in the early evening, they asked Harriett if she would stay home with the little boy, for Sandy’s heel had swollen purple where the rusty nail had penetrated and he could hardly walk at all.

“You been gone ever’ night this week,” Hager said to the girl. “An’ you ain’t been anear de holy tents where de Lawd’s word is preached; so you ought to be willin’ to stay home one night with a po’ little sick boy.”

“Yes’m,” Harriett muttered in a noncommittal tone. But shortly after her mother and Annjee had gone, she said to her nephew: “You aren’t afraid to stay home by yourself, are you?”

And Sandy answered: “Course not, Aunt Harrie.”