“Mornin’, Trax-honey.”

Her voice was vibrant.

“Mornin’.”

He yawned again as he dropped into his chair. He beat lightly on his down-turned plate with his knife and surveyed the table. He scowled.

“Where’s the bacon?”

“Honey, I didn’t think you’d want none with the squirrel an’ eggs an’ fish.”

“My God, I cain’t eat breakfast without bacon.”

“I’m sorry, Trax. ’Twon’t take me but a minute now.”

She was miserable because she had not fried bacon and he wanted it.

He slid eggs and meat and biscuits to his plate, poured coffee with an angry jerk so that it spilled on the table, shoveled the food in, chewing with his mouth open. When Matt put the crisp thick slices of white bacon before him, he did not touch them. He lighted a cigarette and strolled to the stoop, pushing off the cat so that he might sit down. He leaned back and absorbed the sun. This was fine.

He had deliberately allowed himself these few idle weeks. He had gone long without comfort. His body needed it. His swaggering spirit needed it. The woman’s adoration fed him. He could have had no greater sense of well-being, of affluence, if she had been a nigger servant. Now he was ready for business. His weasel mind was gnawing its hole into the world he longed for.

“Matt!”

She left her dishes and came to stand over him.

“Matt, you’re goin’ in business with me. I want you should git me three hundred dollars. I want to set up a eight-barrel still back o’ the house, down by the branch.”

Trax had crashed like a meteor into the flat-woods. It had not occurred to her that his world must follow him. That was detached from him, only a strange story that he had told. She had a sensation of dismay that any thing, any person, must intrude on her ecstasy.

She said anxiously, “I got enough to make out on, Trax. You don’t need to go startin’ up nothin’ like that.”

“All right—if you want I should put my outfit some’eres else——”

“No, no. Don’t you do that. Don’t you go ’way. I didn’t know you was studyin’ on nothin’ like that—you jest go ahead an’ put it clost as you like.”

“Down by the branch, like I said.”

He visioned the layout for her. She listened, distraught. The platform here, for the barrels of mash. There, the woodpile for the slow fire. Here again, the copper still itself. The cover was dense, utterly concealing. The location was remote.

“The idee, Matt,” he was hunched forward, glowing, “is to sell your own stuff what they call retail, see? It costs you fifty, seventy-five cents a gallon to make. You sell by the five-gallon jug for seven dollars, like they’re doin’ now, you don’t make nothin’. That’s nigger pay. But what do you git for it by the drink? A quarter. A quarter a drink an’ a dollar a pint. You let people know they kin git ’em a drink out here ary time to Trax Colton’s, you got ’em comin’ in from two-three counties for it. You git twenty gallons ahead an’ color some up, cook it a whiles underground to darken it, an’ you take it to places like Jacksonville an’ Miami—you got you real money.”