“Well, Jim,” he said, and his voice was slow and easy and cold as ice, “seeing as how you say he was on his way to you and them sneaking cows, I don’t figure it’s my responsibility. He’s your mule, Snort is. You been wanting him for yours all his life. Now you take him.”

And he turned and walked off home and his hound behind him.

“Indeed you’ll not get out of it that-a-way, Luty Higgenbotham,” Jim hollered. “I might of knowed you’d try to get out of paying your just dues. I’ll not lift a hand to bury him.”

A desperate kind of a feeling come over me.

“But Jim!” I called. “But Luty! The creetur’s in my sweet potatoes!”

I got no answer. And now this is the rest of it.

Every day I’d beg Luty and every second day I’d have Will carry me out to beg Jim. Then my Will was obliged to drive to Georgia where his folks was sick. I ain’t never felt so alone in my life as the day he drove off. That left me with no way to get to Jim’s place. So I set in to work double on Luty.

“Jim don’t surprise me,” I said, “but you do. I should think you’d feel shame.”

There wasn’t no more shame to him than to a jack-rabbit. Then we had a long hot spell and no rain and it was hot the way it can get hot in Florida in a dry November.

“I should think you’d mind it as much as me,” I said.

“The wind’s been westerly,” he said. “I ain’t noticed a thing.” Just as stubborn as the day he walked to shore from the rowboat. “Snort went back on me at the end, so Jim says. I got no more interest.”

And there was my sweet potatoes waiting to be dug. I give up.

“I’ll pay for hauling him off and burying him, myself,” I said.

So I set hunting me a man. And merciful jay-bird, I had the luck, the pure bad luck, to run into the first of orange-picking and bean-picking. There wasn’t a darky in Oak Bluff but wasn’t picking beans or oranges. There wasn’t a man, black or white, I could get to come bury that mule. And my Will gone to Georgia.

It all happened the tenth of November. I reckon there ain’t never been no tenth of November as hot as that un. It was midday, and the dry sand was throwing out the heat like a cook-stove. I goed out into my sweet-potato patch and I buried that mule myself. I digged a hole deep and wide. Now, I weigh a sight more’n two hundred and I ain’t modest about it. But ary person who thinks digging a hole deep enough to bury a mule on a hot day in the blazing sun is fairy’s work for a woman weighs more’n two hundred, had ought to get in the same fix.