She said, “It’s mighty hard to figure. Last week Dixon was the enemy, and now it’s Pa. Ain’t none of you done a thing but what you thought was right.”

He said grimly, “If you aim to figure thataway, just as good to say the drought was wrong. Things would likely have worked out peaceable, had rain come. Just as good to say the drought was the enemy.”

Suddenly the truth stood stark and clear. Every man was at the mercy of the winds of chance. The danger was so great that it frightened her that all men did not see it and stand together. Life was the enemy.

She said, “Tom! I’m a-feered!”

He closed one hand over her fingers at his waist. “Why, sugar,” he said, “don’t do me thataway. Don’t you reckon I’ll look out for you?”

What was one man, thin and young, against the huge menace of living?

“Ain’t you got your old Tom that loves you, and you love him?”

She caught her breath. She laughed against his bony back in her relief. It was true. Her love was a lean, hard bulwark against the foe.

Gal Young Un

The house was invisible from the road which wound, almost untraveled, through the flat-woods. Once every five days a turpentine wagon creaked down the ruts, and negroes moved like shadows among the pines. A few hunters in season came upon them chipping boxes, scraping aromatic gum from red pots into encrusted buckets; inquired the way and whether quail or squirrel or turkey had been seen. Then hunters and turpentiners moved again along the road, stepping on violets and yellow pitcher-plants that rimmed the edges.

The negroes were aware of the house. It stood a few hundred yards away, hidden behind two live oaks, isolated and remote in a patch of hammock. It was a tall square two-stories. The woman who gave them water from her well when the near-by branch was dry looked to them like the house, tall and bare and lonely, weathered gray, like its unpainted cypress. She seemed forgotten.

The two white men, hunting lazily down the road, did not remember—if they had ever known—that a dwelling stood here. Flushing a covey of quail that flung themselves like feathered bronze discs at the cover of the hammock, their first shots flicked through the twin oaks. They followed their pointer dog on the trail of single birds and stopped short in amazement. Entering the north fringe of the hammock, they had come out on a sandy open yard. A woman was watching them from the back stoop of an old house.

“Shootin’ mighty close, men,” she called.

Her voice sounded unused, like a rusty iron hinge.

The older man whistled in the dog, ranging feverishly in the low palmettos. The younger swaggered to the porch. He pushed back the black slouch hat from his brazen eyes.