‘I got in a dispute with old Reed over the pay and up and quit that place. That was when I was twenty. Next year looked like there wasn’t work enough at home for me and Pap both, and I left home and went over on the ridge for a spell. I got in a fight with Hank Beaver over a girl. She liked me best and was all set to marry but I couldn’t marry no girl yet and she took Hank after all, and I went off to work up around Mayses Creek, and there was a girl up there too. Then Mammy died, and then Pappy, and I went back home to get what little was a-comen to me after the stock was sold, but it was a little trifle. By that time I didn’t care so much about girls. Then I bought a monument stone for Mammy and Pappy. I recollect it took all that next year to pay off that.’

At the memory of his mother he remembered Ellen again and drew her closer, looking at her through the dim light or brushing his hand over her hair. The story waited long while he searched again for her beauty and approved her with his broken endearments and his caressing hands. After a long interval his voice spoke again in questioning. He had been in jail; did she know that he had been in jail? Could she like a man who had been in the dirty lock-up and would she draw away from his arms? ‘I got in a fight with Ofatt’s boy over a trifle – a grown man, he was, and his own master. I got in this-here fight with Dave Ofatt over some trifle, and Ofatt, the old man, made a remark to me in town one day, a remark I wouldn’t countenance and I hauled off and knocked him over right on the street of the town, and for that I got locked up overnight and tried next day in the court. On account of Ofatt being prominent, the Judge, he fined me twenty dollars and ten days in jail. I borrowed the money to pay the fine offen Tobe Baily and worked, after I got outen jail, for Litsey a spell, long enough to pay Tobe back, I recollect. It was then I got to feelen my strength and I got set up over my powers to lift and pull. Ne’er other man at the blacksmith shop could lift equal to me, not even old Nathan though he was a strong man in his arms and neck.’

He recounted tales of his power and his excellence at contests that were tried at the shop and his great strength in the harvest field, no other man quite his equal or mate, taking shock for shock at the cutting. His large hand closed and unclosed, feeling again its strength, and his arm muscles flexed in memory of their first hardy-brawn. Or he took up his story of wandering again, carelessly now, between interests in the pipe, lazily told between caresses.