The dancers were in position. The fiddler struck up the favorite tune, brought to the Florida interior long since by Georgia and Carolina ancestors, “Ten-Cent Cotton.”

Old Jo cut a buck-and-wing as he swung toward his partner. He thundered out the opening phrase.

“Ten-cent cotton an’ fifty-cent meat!

How in the Hell kin a pore man eat!”

The dancers roared with laughter.

“Old Jo’s a sight. He shore kin cut the fool.”

The girl Florry looked up from her solitude on the steps at a shadow in the doorway. A young Cracker in torn blue pinchecks, as ragged almost, almost as gaunt, as she, came hesitantly out of the light and music of the room.

“I’ll set down by you, if you don’t keer,” he said. “I don’t aim to worry you none. I—I be rabbity, too.”

They smiled together a moment.

She was both alarmed and attracted, like all young woods things in their first intimate contact with man. Until this terrifying night, when old Jo had ordered her to follow him the six miles to the dance, she had seen perhaps a dozen white men. None had spoken to her except the sleepy old fellow who drove a team of buff oxen in to their clearing to load their logs; the manager of the lumber mill, splendid, scarcely to be called human, in dark store clothes and driving an automobile; and a fat range rider.

Florry and the youth sat without speech. Their thoughts moved brightly toward each other, like fireflies in the darkness. She decided, as she usually did when anything startled her, that she was not afraid. Fearlessness was her defense against the world. She was conscious neither of happiness nor of unhappiness. When any new aspect of the disagreeable presented itself, she asked herself only whether or not it was best to run from it. Against the background of old Jo and the cypress swamp, very few things seemed formidable.

Assuredly, compared with the other things she knew, this lean, tattered young man was nothing to fear. She grew accustomed to the sweaty smell of him beside her, the rise and fall of his breathing, the comfort of his silence. She placed him, the first human being to enter there, in the corner of her mind that contained things definitely pleasing. These were: grits when she was very hungry; wild game, always; Sport, the hound; all flowers; trees in bloom, particularly the sweet bay and the magnolia; facts new to her, that she could be sure she understood; the taste of running branch water, for their well was sulphurous; a lighter’d fire on a cold night; nigger babies—she had never seen a white one; and a certain sort of day, cool and blue and wind-swept; a day in fall, when the summer’s heat was done, and the red-bugs and mosquitoes gone.