“Jumped backwards,” said Virgil. “Didn’t look.”

When they turned off, it was still early in the pink and green fields. The fumes of morning, sweet and bitter, sprang up where they walked. The insects ticked softly, their strength in reserve; butterflies chopped the air, going to the east, and the birds flew carelessly and sang by fits and starts, not the way they did in the evening in sustained and drowsy songs.

“It’s a pretty day for sure,” said William Wallace. “It’s a pretty day for it.”

“I don’t see a sign of her ever going along here,” said Virgil.

“Well,” said William Wallace. “She wouldn’t have dropped anything. I never saw a girl to leave less signs of where she’s been.”

“Not even a plum seed,” said Virgil, kicking the grass.

In the grove it was so quiet that once William Wallace gave a jump, as if he could almost hear a sound of himself wondering where she had gone. A descent of energy came down on him in the thick of the woods and he ran at a rabbit and caught it in his hands.

“Rabbit . . . Rabbit . . .” He acted as if he wanted to take it off to himself and hold it up and talk to it. He laid a palm against its pushing heart. “Now . . . There now . . .”

“Let her go, William Wallace, let her go.” Virgil, chewing on an elderberry whistle he had just made, stood at his shoulder: “What do you want with a live rabbit?”

William Wallace squatted down and set the rabbit on the ground but held it under his hand. It was a little, old, brown rabbit. It did not try to move. “See there?”

“Let her go.”

“She can go if she wants to, but she don’t want to.”

Gently he lifted his hand. The round eye was shining at him sideways in the green gloom.

“Anybody can freeze a rabbit, that wants to,” said Virgil. Suddenly he gave a far-reaching blast on the whistle, and the rabbit went in a streak. “Was you out catching cotton-tails, or was you out catching your wife?” he said, taking the turn to the open fields. “I come along to keep you on the track.”

“Who’ll we get, now?” They stood on top of a hill and William Wallace looked critically over the countryside. “Any of the Malones?”

“I was always scared of the Malones,” said Virgil. “Too many of them.”

“This is my day with the net, and they would have to watch out,” said William Wallace. “I reckon some Malones, and the Doyles, will be enough. The six Doyles and their dogs, and you and me, and two little nigger boys is enough, with just a few Malones.”

“That ought to be enough,” said Virgil, “no matter what.”

“I’ll bring the Malones, and you bring the Doyles,” said William Wallace, and they separated at the spring.