“Wake up, son!” Someone was shaking him. “You’ll catch your death o’ cold sleeping on the wet steps like this. We’re going home now. Don’t want me to have to carry a big man like you, do you, boy? . . . Wake up, Sandy!” His mother stooped to lift his long little body from the wide steps. She held him against her soft heavy breasts and let his head rest on one of her shoulders while his feet, in their muddy rubbers, hung down against her dress.

“Where you been, mama?” the boy asked drowsily, tightening his arms about her neck. “I been waiting for you.”

“Oh, I been home a long time, worried to death about you and ma till I heard from Madam Carter that you-all was down here nursing the sick. I stopped at your Aunt Tempy’s house when I seen the storm coming.”

“I was afraid you got blowed away, mama,” murmured Sandy sleepily. “Let’s go home, mama. I’m glad you ain’t got blowed away.”

On the porch Aunt Hager was talking to a pale white man and two thin white women standing at the door of the lighted hallway. “Just let Mis’ Agnes sleep,” she was saying. “She’ll be all right now, an’ I’ll come back in de mawnin’ to see ’bout her.... Good-night, you-all.”

The old colored woman joined her daughter and they started home, walking through the streets filled with debris and puddles of muddy water reflecting the moon.

“You’re certainly heavy, boy,” remarked Sandy’s mother to the child she held, but he didn’t answer.

“I’m right glad you come for me, Annjee,” Hager said. “I wonder is yo’ sister all right out yonder at de country club.... An’ I was so worried ’bout you I didn’t know what to do—skeared you might a got caught in this twister, ’cause it were cert’ly awful!”

“I was at Tempy’s!” Annjee replied. “And I was nearly crazy, but I just left everything in the hands o’ God. That’s all.” In silence they walked on, a piece; then hesitantly, to her mother: “There wasn’t any mail for me today, was there, ma?”

“Not a speck!” the old woman replied shortly. “Mail-man passed on by.”

For a few minutes there was silence again as they walked. Then, “It’s goin’ on three weeks he’s been gone, and he ain’t written a line,” the younger woman complained, shifting the child to her right arm. “Seems like Jimboy would let a body know where he is, ma, wouldn’t it?”

“Huh! That ain’t nothin’! He’s been gone before this an’ he ain’t wrote, ain’t he? Here you is worryin’ ’bout a letter from that good-for-nothing husband o’ your’n—an’ there’s ma house settin’ up without a porch to its name! . . . Ain’t you seed what de devil’s done done on earth this evenin’, chile? . . . An’ yet de first thing you ask me ’bout is de mail-man! . . . Lawd! Lawd! . . . You an’ that Jimboy!”