‘Lige gave me money to get a new winter cloak,’ one said, ‘but I said to put hit in the bank. No need to waste, I say.’

‘He told me, Sam did, to get me a new hat, velvet maybe,’ another voice would murmur. ‘Said he was tired himself to see this-here old one again.’

They were young like herself. The speaker would rock herself slowly as she spoke, speaking carelessly, often smiling in a shadowed way.

‘Lige is a great hand to make,’ the first said. ‘And a great hand to spend on me. A new winter cloak he said for me to get.’

‘Abe laughed,’ one said, ‘laughed right out at my old shoes today and said, “Land sake, Irie, where’s the money I laid out for your shoes.”’

Then Ellen spoke, murmuring like the rest. She had never made so long a speech before. ‘Jasper, he said, “Ellen, why don’t you get yourself a new dress, a worsted, blue maybe? Here’s the money,” he said, “here on the shelf.” Jasper, he’s partial to blue. “Here’s the money on the shelf,” he said. “No use to stint or hoard up. And buy some pretty to trim it with, velvet maybe,” he says. “Here’s the money up here on the shelf any time you take it in head to buy.” But I’ll wait awhile, I says. And Hen, he can go barefoot a spell yet, church or not. No need to waste money on shoes for youngones in a summer time, I always say. Youngones don’t need so much. “The money is on the shelf nohow,” he says, “whenever you take it in head to want the dress.”’

CHAPTER NINE

Jasper had come back from town, where he had been to haul the tobacco crop for Goddard. He had been gone two nights, sleeping each night on a long bench in the waiting room of the warehouse. A great block of cold stood about him as he opened his overcoat and spread his hands to the fire. He had money in his pocket and he had something to tell.

‘Stand offen me a spell yet,’ he said to Nannie. ‘I’d give a gal the pneumonia or a bad cold nohow, that wanted to hug me.’

He stood up in the cabin, large and sure of himself, his shoulders drooping roundly in their accustomed stoop and his look free and high. He swaggered over the lighting of his tobacco. Ellen knew that he had something to tell although he had not yet spoken of it, for the money in his pocket would scarcely have given him such a flowering. He knew a song to sing for Joe, he said, a song he’d learned the night before from a man from Taylor. It would be a good song for Joe to know. The man from Taylor said he had not sung it, he reckoned, for fifteen years, and a song that had lain away fifteen years to sweeten was a right proper song to have. As she tended the fire gaily, lending herself to the hour, Ellen thought contemptuously of his song and his leisured way of coming to the vital matter. ‘Make Pap sing his song then,’ she said to Joe, and Jasper sang over and over, each time better pleased with himself, a bit of an incident from the life of Joe Bowers, a native of Missouri, as was revealed by the verse.