‘The other place, Frankfort, is bigger,’ Jasper said. ‘A wall around it, they say. Striped clothes. I knowed a man got in trouble over a horse and got sent up for three year. His own horse got its foot hung in a bridge that ought to ’a’ been mended. It was the road overseer’s fault the bridge was in a bad fix, or the magistrate’s, one. Nohow his horse had to be killed. Then along came a stray that hung around a week and no owner, and he, the man that lost his horse in the bad bridge, he took the stray to pay himself back for the filly he lost. He said it was the magistrate’s fault the bridge was all busted. The court gave him three year. A wall all around, he said. Striped clothes and you sleep in a cage made outen iron. Grey clothes after a while if you behave. He said he didn’t mind so much after he got over the first, but right at first he thought he’d go outen his head, he said. I took notice that people never forgot he’d been there. Good careful man, after he got back – when I knowed the man – but I see people always remember. He said the man in the next cage to his’n killed his wife away back, fifteen or twenty year back. Was in for life. Said the man wouldn’t talk about what he done. Said he was gentle as a lamb; looked like he wouldn’t harm a flea, but it was true he’d killed her.’

The road fell away toward the left, dipping into a valley, and the wheels of the wagon made a steady iron clatter on the gravel and the stones, and she thought of herself in the vague being she had formerly held, seen going through dim settled routines, going to the field, gathering in the hens, caring if there were four eggs or six in the nests. The old being rose woodenly in the morning and went evenly about through a set day, morning and night, heat and cold, going out and coming in, but this was now seen but dimly as something surpassed and rejected, and she gathered into a great mass that looked cunningly inward and spread outward in a vast determination: she would defend Jasper from every harm. A man had killed his wife long ago, and now he seemed scarcely to remember it, as if he had never done the thing, for one went out of one life into another and the old life fell away. They moved along the road as it unwound to meet them, projecting themselves through rolling fields, and she entered the land far in advance of her recognition of its way, on the forefront of their going, but the land became real as it stretched out beside them and behind their wheels. She would defend Jasper. It was for this that she penetrated a strange land, for this her great strength arose and renewed itself at each instant.