Little Lee Roy took the money speechlessly, and then fell upon his yellow crutches and hopped with miraculous rapidity away through the door. Max stared after him for a moment.

“As for you”—he brushed himself off, turned to Steve and then said, “When did you eat last?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Steve.

“Not here,” said Max. “I didn’t go to ask you a question. Just follow me. We serve eats at Max’s Place, and I want to play the juke box. You eat, and I’ll listen to the juke box.”

“Well . . .” said Steve. “But when it cools off I got to catch a ride some place.”

“Today while all you all was gone, and not a soul in de house,” said Little Lee Roy at the supper table that night, “two white mens come heah to de house. Wouldn’t come in. But talks to me about de ole times when I use to be wid de circus—”

“Hush up, Pappy,” said the children.

A Worn Path

It was December—a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

She wore a dark striped dress reaching down to her shoe tops, and an equally long apron of bleached sugar sacks, with a full pocket: all neat and tidy, but every time she took a step she might have fallen over her shoelaces, which dragged from her unlaced shoes. She looked straight ahead. Her eyes were blue with age. Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illumined by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlets, still black, and with an odor like copper.