It was hard for Mart to keep within boundaries at his trapping. A warm spell in February, with the sun beating down on the chilled hammock ground until it began to steam, brought out an old male rattlesnake for a few days. He caught or frightened away most of the small game in the immediate territory. One week of a diamond-back meant a deserted area. Mart looked longingly at the adjacent cultivated field, a Yankee’s forty acres. There had been watermelons and corn there through the summer, pinders and chufas through the fall. ’Coons roamed the plot, seeking expectantly the next fresh crop of vegetables.

“Hit won’t do no harm jest to work the edge, like,” he decided.

Gradually he put his traps farther and farther in, until one day the Yankee caught him at it and ordered him off.

“Them ’coons shore’ll eat up your next crop,” Mart found courage to protest.

“That’s my business. I’ll do my trapping if I want any done.”

“How about trappin’ on shares, like?”

The landowner looked distastefully at the youth’s brown, unshaven face, at his bare feet with the torn blue breeches turned up above them.

“No. Now get out and stay out.”

Mart walked into the cabin with his clear brown eyes clouded with hate. He threw his traps on the bare pine floor.

“Hit don’t hurt no man to talk polite,” he grieved. “Not a man that owns forty good turned acres, free and clare, it don’t hurt him none.”

He breathed heavily with the shock of the encounter.

“Florry,” he burst out, “the dogged biggety bastard done sended me off like I was a nigger!”

She sorrowed with him. He brooded long over it, bitterly.

Cold weather sent the rattler back to his hole and the game returned. Just before the season closed Mart filled his traps several times. Tempted, he trapped on for another ten days, but word came through nigger Will that the game warden was making the rounds. He hustled his hides to Manitopy. He oiled his traps and put them away in a lean-to back of the cabin.

They had enough money, buried in a glass fruit jar, to last them until trapping should open again the coming November. The fur dealer figured it out for Mart.

Spring was a delicious thing, invested with a new benevolence. It was unreal to have money under the porch. Unreal, to be able to idle all day. No work to do. Grits to cook once or twice a day, white bacon to crisp to otter-brown, fresh-caught fish to fry, late sour oranges to gather from the three wild trees in the hammock, so long hung as to be almost sweetened. No cypress logs, tearing at the muscles. No eddying brown water under the arm pits. No old Jo.