‘I’ll find a place and I’ll come back,’ he said, shuffling uneasily in the dust. ‘You’ll know when I come.’

‘I’ll know, oh yes, I’ll know,’ she said.

‘You’ll know when I come.’ He walked nearer and laid his hand on the trunk of the tree, uncertainly, leaning a moment on his out-stretched hand. ‘I better go now,’ he said. ‘I’ll go.’ Then he went away across the field, his footsteps growing heavier as he stumbled into the lower ground beyond the barn and becoming a hollow thin tap as he went along the edge of the tobacco field.

The people who went along the road would stop at the toll house door to ask questions or to talk of the fire, and the peddler, when his day came, stopped to bargain slowly with Nellie, lenient in his trade. They would ask if it were true that Kent had run off, as was reported over the country, and was it true that he had been in a fight with Albert Wingate. He would never be seen again, hair nor hide, was the peddler’s prediction. Albert Wingate was of no account on his side, but Kent had been in trouble before. The bright sun shone through the clear October air, the hills brightly green, the leaves beginning to burn to yellow and red. Regina said that there were bushels of hickory nuts on the roadside trees, away beyond Stigall’s lane, and that they would go to gather their baskets full some day if Ellen was of a mind to have a share and would come too, but on the day set to go for the nuts Ellen forgot the plan and was not at the house when Regina stopped for her. Reminded, she changed her dress from the one she had been wearing in the farm and went absently with Regina. Kent had gone, Regina said, and it was unlikely that he would ever come back. He had best stay away, she thought, for, present, he would be in endless trouble with Albert or with some other of that set. He would stay away until everything blew over and people forgot and by that time he would be settled somewhere else. She herself never hoped to see him again. Did Ellen think he would come back? Ellen wanted to turn upon Regina with an angry cry and to tell her to shut up her idleness, that Jasper would come. The hard words hammered at her throat as she bent over the fallen nuts, but she was cautious, for her wish to save Jasper was greater than her anger. Martin Stigall stopped at the nut tree and helped break away the hulls, or he climbed the trees to knock down the nuts, helping fill both baskets. He talked with Regina about the fire and told how it happened that he had been one of the first to discover it. He said that Albert was a mean loafer and that he himself would hate to have any sort of traffic with him and that one could never do any business with him in any square way, but to burn a man’s barn down for spite was a right serious matter, even if Albert were the man. He did not know, he said, whether it had been spite-work or not, but Albert said it had and Mrs Wingate said the same. If Kent kept away it might all blow over in time, he thought, and Kent surely had sense enough to stay out of the country. He would never come back. In a case of this kind it was better, he said, to stay away from trouble.