“No need to mark it,” she said faintly from pale lips. “Cap’n mought not like it and then we’d have to dig it up agin.”

She dug up some petunias from the Yankee garden and planted them above the pine box.

“They’ll seed theirselves, even after the land be ploughed,” she explained.

With the rainy season, the vegetation swelled overnight. The red-top was man-high. Dog-fennel lined the roadway like a green wall. The coffee-weed was thick in the pasture lot. Mart mowed hay and stored it in the barn. The citrus sized up rapidly. By late August the grapefruit boughs were bending to the ground. The slim branches of the orange trees were freighted with more than they could bear.

Cap’n came down early in September, just after the high winds had come and gone. Whole sections of trees lay cracked to the ground, a quarter of the crop flat and ruined. Growth conditions had made the limbs too brittle for the immense crop of fruit. He called down frenzied imprecations on Mart’s head.

“You Cracker fool,” he finished, “when you saw what was happening, why didn’t you prop the limbs?”

“I allus reckoned trees could take care of theirselves,” Mart said quietly. “I allus thought trees jest takened what come.”

He went to Florry gravely.

“Florry, I got a bait of it. I got eight dollars. Le’s us go down to the Gulf and see kin we make us a livin’ salt-water fishin’.”

She hesitated, her thought on the petunias growing purple and white.

“Hit suits me,” she said at last.

They packed their few belongings in cardboard cartons and set off on foot before dawn. The sunrise came on them as they crossed the prairie west of the lake. The waters were rosy and the white egrets circling up from the reeds were tinged with pink. The man and woman cut a little north through a stretch of flat-woods.

“Hit’s done been a sorrowful year,” Florry said. “I shore be proud to git shut of it.”

V

The wharves of the last westerly town dropped slowly behind Mart and Florry in the rowboat. They set out downstream at the full of the tide. Mart had bought a sunken boat for fifty cents, raised it and repaired it. It was too make-shift for fishing, but it would take them down the tidal river to the Gulf.

Mart rowed with jerking, powerful strokes. The current was with him, yet it was hard going until the tide should turn. Florry sat in the bow, the high afternoon sun in her face, the river dazzling, flipping its spray over her now and then. The oppression of the town, of the ever-alarming contact with folk, lifted from her. She felt light-headed. She hummed a little, “Jacob’s Ladder.”

A rush of vital force surged through the man. The escape from the town, the push of the river-current toward new ground, the sound of Florry’s small, sweet voice, stirred him. He picked up the song from her.