It was as though thunder and lightning threatened over the flat-woods. The darkness of impending violence filled them. She stared at him.

“ ’Course, if you don’t want to invest in my business with me, I got to be gittin’ back where I come from.”

The smoke from his cigarette drifted across her.

“No, no! It’s all right!”

His glamorousness enfolded her like the April sun.

“Honey, anything you want to do’s all right.”

Setting up the still was a week’s work. Men began to come and go. Where there had been, once in five days, the silent turpentiners, once in a while the winter hunters, there were now negroes bringing in cut wood; a local mason putting together brick and mortar; a hack carpenter building a platform with a roof; men in trucks bringing in sacks of meal and sugar, glass demijohns and oak kegs.

The storekeeper brought five hundred pounds of sugar.

“Howdy, Mis’ Colton. Reckon you never figgered you’d be ’shinin’.”

“No.”

“But you couldn’t git you no better place for it.”

Her square face brightened.

“That’s jest what Trax says.”

That night she approached him.

“Trax, all these here men knowin’ what you’re doin’—reckon it’s safe?”

“They got no reason to say nothin’. The only reason anybody’d turn anybody else up was if he’d done somethin’ to him. Then they’d git at him that-a-way. Git his still, see? Git him tore up. That way they’d git him.”

She made no further comment. Her silence made its way through the wall of his egotism.

“You don’t talk as much as you did, Matt. Else I got used to it.”

“I was alone so long, honey. Seemed like I had to git caught up.”

But the spring warmth was no longer so loosening to the tongue. The alien life the man was bringing in chilled the exuberance that had made her voluble.

“I’m fixin’ to learn you to make the whiskey, Matt.”

She stared at him.

“Less help we have, knowin’ how much I got an’ where ’tis, better it suits me, see?”

She said finally, “I kin learn.”

The work seemed strange, when all her folk had farmed and timbered. But her closest contact with Trax was over the sour, seething mash. When they walked together back of the house, down to the running branch, their bodies pushing side by side through the low palmettos, they were a unit. Except to curse her briefly when she was clumsy, he was good-natured at his work. Crouching by the fire burning under the copper drum, the slow dripping from the coils, of the distillate, the only sound except for small woods life, she felt themselves man and wife. At other times his lovely body and unlovely spirit both evaded her.