She loved them. It seemed the harder it was to get out here and the harder a time she found them having, the better she appreciated them. They remembered now—while the Boy Scout still drove up and down on Easter’s muddy back—how they were always getting ready for Miss Lizzie; the tents even now were straight and the ground picked up and raked for her, and the tea for supper was already made and sitting in a tub in the lake; and sure enough, the niggers’ dog had barked at the car just as always, and now here she was. She could have stopped everything; and she hadn’t stopped it. Even her opening protests seemed now like part of things—what she was supposed to say. Several of the little girls looked up at Miss Lizzie instead of at what was on the table. Her powdered lips flickered, her eye-lids hooded her gaze, but she was there.

On the table, the Boy Scout spat, and took a fresh appraisal of Easter. He reached for a hold on her hair and pulled her head back. No longer were her lips faintly parted—her mouth was open. It gaped. So did his. He dropped her, the head with its suddenness bowed again on its cheek, and he started again.

“Easter’s dead! Easter’s d—” cried Gertrude Bowles in a rowdy voice, and she was slapped rowdily across the mouth to cut off the word, by Miss Lizzie’s hand.

Jinny Love, with a persistence they had not dreamed of, deployed the towel. Could it be owing to Jinny Love’s always being on the right side that Easter mustn’t dare die and bring all this to a stop? Nina thought, It’s I that’s thinking. Easter’s not thinking at all. And while not thinking, she is not dead, but unconscious, which is even harder to be. Easter had come among them and had held herself untouchable and intact. Of course, for one little touch could smirch her, make her fall so far, so deep:—Except that by that time they were all saying the nigger deliberately poked her off in the water, meant her to drown.

“Don’t touch her,” they said tenderly to one another.

“Give up! Give up! Give up!” screamed Miss Moody—she who had rubbed them all the same, as if she rubbed chickens for the frying pan. Miss Lizzie without hesitation slapped her too.

“Don’t touch her.”

For they were crowding closer to the table all the time.

“If Easter’s dead, I get her coat for winter, all right,” said Geneva.

“Hush, orphan.”

“Is she then?”

“You shut up.” The Boy Scout looked around and panted at Geneva. “You can ast me when I ast you to ast me.”

The niggers’ dog was barking again, had been barking.

“Now who?”

“A big boy. It’s old Ran MacLain and he’s coming.”

“He would.”

He came right up, wearing a cap.

“Get away from me, Ran MacLain,” Miss Lizzie called toward him. “You and dogs and guns, keep away. We’ve already got all we can put up with out here.”