“No need to tell me,” he answered wearily. “I been settin’ up nussin’ them forty degrees. I fired. I figger I jest about saved my seed an’ fertilizer. I’m clearin’ more o’ the hammock. Next time I plant late, I’m goin’ to have four acres instid o’ two, all at the lower end. Then if frost ketches me, I got more’ll come thu.”

She stared at him.

“The bigger fool, you. You’d do best to leave off beans an’ work for me full time. I could mebbe pay ten dollars a week,” she said slyly.

“You mind your own business, ol’ woman. I’ll make me a crop o’ beans’ll git me shut o’ you an’ your ten dollars, an’ your six.”

She eyed him dubiously.

“What did you fire with?”

He walked away carelessly.

“A damn good wood-pile an’ a damn good woman.”

II

When a stranger—a Georgia truck driver or a platform buyer—asked Lige his business, he answered with a mustered defiance:

“I’m a bean man!”

It was true. The long hours he gave to the Widow Sellers’ rich farms had no meaning beyond their moment. In mid-afternoon he hurried off to his own field, sweaty and excited, to turn furrows, to plant, to cultivate, to hoe, to harvest.

The quick growth of the crop stirred him. One week, the sandy loam lay golden, its expanse passive for the reception of the seed. The next week, the clearing in the hammock was covered with cotyledons, pale-green and pushing, like twin sails dotting a tawny sea. In forty-eight days the first crop was ready for picking. The emerald bushes crowded one another in the straight rows. The long beans hung like pendants, butter-yellow if they were wax, jade green if Giant Stringless or Red Valentine.

The earth responded to him. When he and the soil were not interfered with, they made beans as fine as old man Tainter, who kept a wagon-load of niggers and bought fertilizer by the carload.

He was betrayed constantly by elements beyond his control. He fared no worse than the other growers, but the common misfortunes struck more implacably. Men who could borrow money for seed and fertilizer and rations, who were free to do other farming or stock raising, made out more or less comfortably until the inevitable time when a good crop sold on a high market. There was a finality about his loss of a crop.

He lost beans from cold or rain or blight three seasons in succession. The fourth season, the second autumn, he made a fair crop. The market dropped so low it scarcely paid to ship. In October he quarrelled violently with the Widow Sellers. The old woman, in a growing security that he would never shake free of her, taunted him.