“You git out o’ here before I hurts her an’ you, too. You take your gal young un an’ git.”

He adjusted his mind slowly. Inconceivably, he had gone too far. Bringing the girl to the flat-woods had been dangerously brazen. It was done now. He understood that his hold on this place had become suddenly precarious. He had the car and he could move the still. Yet the layout suited his needs too exactly to be relinquished. He could not give it up. If the gray-headed woman was done with her infatuation, he was in trouble.

He said boldly, “I got no idee o’ goin’. Me an’ Elly’ll be here right on.”

She said, “I kin break ary one o’ you in two with my hands.”

“Not me, you cain’t. Leave me tell you, ol’ woman, I’m too quick for you. An’ if you hurt Elly”—his dark face nodded at her—“if you crack down on her—with them big hands o’ yourn—if you got any notion o’ knifin’ ”—he paused for emphasis—“I’ll git you sent to the chair, or up for life—an’ I’ll be here in these flat-woods—in this house—right on.”

He pushed the girl ahead of him and walked into the house, lighting a cigarette. He said over his shoulder, thickly between puffs, “An’ that’d suit me jest fine.”

She turned blindly to the wash-tub. She soaped the blue shirts without seeing them, rubbing them up and down automatically. Her life that had run like the flat-woods road, straight and untraveled, was now a maze, doubling back on itself darkly, twisted with confusion. The man stood with his neat trap at the end of every path; the girl with her yellow hair and big eyes, at the beginning.

She thought, “I got to settle it.”

Trax and Elly came and went like a pair of bright birds. The blue kid slippers, scuffed by the sand, flashed in and out of the old house. Matt watched the comings and goings heavily, standing solidly on the hand-hewn pine-board floors.

She did not go near the still. Her absence did not make the difference she had imagined. The Lantrys had the work well in hand. Trax paid their wages, and their product was satisfactory. Often she did not hear them come to their work through the pines and past the hammock. A northwest wind sometimes brought the scent of the mash to her nose. The storekeeper brought in sugar and meal by a lower trail, and she seldom saw him. Trax was selling all his liquor at a high urban price, and local patronage dwindled away. The woods were quiet day and night.