He did not answer. When he went away, I remember that a new moon hung over the mountains, and I watched him go in silence up the hill. I expected him the next day, but he did not come. The details of packing my personal belongings, loading my car, arranging the bed over the seat, where the dog would ride, occupied me until late in the day. I closed the cabin and started the car, noticing that the sun was in the west and I should do well to be out of the mountains by nightfall. I stopped by the orphanage and left the cabin key and money for my light bill with Miss Clark.

“And will you call Jerry for me to say good-by to him?”

“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.