Mart bought enough mosquito netting to make a little canopy for the baby’s pallet on the floor. It would cost more than he could get together to buy enough for their own bed. Cap’n sent him his wages each week by mail, and by the time he bought rations and colic medicine and snuff and tobacco, there was nothing left. He got young Boyter to write him a letter to the Yankee asking for money for a mosquito bar. The Yankee did not answer for a long time. At last he wrote, reminding Mart that he’d never had a mosquito bar in his life and if he indulged him now Mart would expect too much of him.

“First thing you know, Mart,” the Cap’n wrote, “your wife’ll be wanting running water in the tenant house.”

That day Florry saw Mart walking around and around the Yankee house.

“What you lookin’ for?” she asked.

“To see kin I git in. If I kin git in, we’ll shore sleep on the floor in there. We’d jest go in and out to sleep, like, and not do no harm.”

But he could not make an entrance without ripping off a door or a barred shutter. Florry was not willing to have him do that.

The mosquitoes were of a feverless variety, but sleeping under covers on the hottest nights to keep away from them weakened her. She had only begun to be strong again. She had recurrent fever attacks. Her milk grew scant and poor. The undersized baby had grown very little. It was blue-white in color. The unhappy small face scarcely seemed to recognize the mother. Even its cry was not a lusty one. It whimpered and fretted. In mid-August, Florry was feverish for a week. One morning the baby turned blue, then black, and merely failed to draw again the threadlike breath that all along had been its dubious hold on life.

They had half-expected it to go, but there seemed nothing to do about it. Old Martha had seen it once or twice, had exclaimed “Do, Jesus!” and made it some herb tea. She had assured them there would be no raising it. But when it was actually gone, a dull knife turned over in Florry’s vitals and for long months would not give her rest. She stroked the small cold body over and over while Mart sat in a corner, whittling a stick unhappily.

“Well,” he said at last, “mought as well go make it a grave.”

They had never given it a name. It seemed always too indefinite to need one.

“Dig it where the varmints and the hogs won’t git to root it,” Florry called.

They decided that back of the house, in the grove itself, would be safest. Mart knocked together a small pine box—it was astonishing how little room the body took—and lined a hole in the sand with bricks from the chimney of an old smoke-house. Florry washed the baby and dressed it in clean clothes. She trembled a little as Mart piled bricks on top of the box and threw in three safe feet of sand. He stood back and looked at her questioningly.