“I don’t know where he is,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s not well. He didn’t eat his dinner this noon. One of the other boys saw him going over the hill into the laurel. He was supposed to fire the boiler this afternoon. It’s not like him; he’s unusually reliable.”

I was almost relieved, for I knew I should never see him again, and it would be easier not to say good-by to him.

I said, “I wanted to talk with you about his mother—why he’s here—but I’m in more of a hurry than I expected to be. It’s out of the question for me to see her now too. But here’s some money I’d like to leave with you to buy things for him at Christmas and on his birthday. It will be better than for me to try to send him things. I could so easily duplicate—skates, for instance.”

She blinked her honest spinster’s eyes.

“There’s not much use for skates here,” she said.

Her stupidity annoyed me.

“What I mean,” I said, “is that I don’t want to duplicate things his mother sends him. I might have chosen skates if I didn’t know she had already given them to him.”

She stared at me.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “He has no mother. He has no skates.”

Cocks Must Crow

I got nothing particular against time. Time’s a natural thing. Folks is a kind of accident on the face of the earth, but time was here before us. And when we’ve done finished messing ourselves up, and when the last man turns over to die, saying, “Now how come us to make such a loblolly of living?”—why, time’ll rock right on.

It’s pure impudence to complain about much of ary thing, excusing human nature, and we all got a just complaint against that. Seems like we could of got borned without so much meanness in us. But just as sure as cooters crawls before a rain, why, we got no right to holler about such things as getting old and dying.

But now what I do hold against time is this: Time be so all-fired slick. It’s slick as a otter slide. And how come me to object to that, don’t be on account of you slip down it so fast, but you slip down without noticing what time’s a-doing to you. That’s what I object to. If time’s fixing to change you, why, it can’t be holpen. But the road’s greasy as a darky’s cook pot, and what does a feller do? He goes kiyoodling along it, and him changing, like a man getting drunk and not knowing it. And here comes a turn in the road, or a ditch you ain’t looking for. And what do you do? You think you got all your senses, and you ain’t, and you do the wrong thing and maybe knock your brains out. And if you only had some sign, something to tell you you was drunk instead of sober, something to tell you you was changed, why, you might make it.