Then a girl hurried out and climbed into the buggy beside the man. There was a brief dispute and an argument with gestures, and then the girl got down from her seat and went crossly into the house.

‘No use to lock the front door,’ she called back.

‘Every last one,’ the farmer said, making his voice sharp and loud. ‘It pays not to take chances with people like that on the place.’

The girl came out of the side door, locking it after her. She hid the key under the doorstep, brushing aside the old dog to tilt the step a little. Then she drew on long gloves and climbed into the buggy again, and the farmer pulled the lines tight and drove away. They were going to church; they had little black Bibles in their hands.

Ellen pushed her brown bare feet through the tall grass and snaked her way down the fence to the front of the garden. She could see the front wall of the house now as well as the side, and the trees that had belonged to the gables when she had seen the house from the field now stood off along a fence to the rear. They no longer attached themselves to the house, but rather they grew in a row along a barnlot enclosure and held a wire fence. There was no avenue reaching up from the highroad and no shrubs grew near the stark yellow walls. The paint was hard and sharp in the sun. She remembered sweeping avenues outlined with trees, reaching back from roads she had travelled in the wagon. She remembered vines on walls and high shrubs and rose arbours, peeped at through fences or snatched in quick visions from over palings or hedges.

‘Hep Bodine’s got a poor trash sort of house,’ she said. She stuck out her tongue at the yellow wall and made three ugly faces at the bare prim lawn. She laughed a long laugh at Hep Bodine, and when she had finished she laughed another long ugly laugh at Hep Bodine’s wife. Then she turned away from their premises, singing a jargon of many phrases that were remembered for the pictures they preserved or the tones they carried.

Hounds on my track,

Chicken on my back.

Oh, Brother Andrew have you got a G fiddle string?

Oh, Brother Andrew, have you got a G string?’

She was walking down the upper pasture, bending back and stepping high, her feet cringing at the hot stones but her body setting them down without heed or mercy. She played a short while with one of the colts in the enclosure, making friends with him easily, for she knew the ways of horses. She knew why he kicked up his heels and ran a little way, and she knew what his soft muzzle meant in her hand and what his soft biting lips and his tossing forelock. She kissed his forehead with her forehead, pushing hard. She ran with him down the pasture, screaming and jeering a wild man-animal talk, forgetting her fear of fences which enclosed land. When she remembered and went back to the brush, the colt followed her there. She knew little of the cows that grazed about in the pasture, knew only horses and dogs, the animals of roads.