“Git on outen here afore Eph gits to harm you,” he told her. “Go to work for ol’ man Bradson whilst I be shut up. I’ll come for you. Git Bradson to find out how long they put me in for. When the time’s up, you be ready and we’ll git back to the hammock where we fust come, when we went off together. I been studyin’ on the way up the hill. We’ll go back to the hammock and go to trappin’ agin, come winter.”

He was gone.

When he came back on foot a month later, Florry was not at Bradson’s. He found her still in the shack above the river, with the ’coon. She was gaunter than he had ever known her.

“I didn’t aim to be with folks,” she excused herself. “I had me your gun and I felt safer-like here. I made me some box-traps and caught me rabbits, and I fished some. Eph ain’t bothered me.”

“Hit wa’n’t right,” he said slowly, “but it cain’t be he’ped now. You ready? Le’s go.”

“Mart,” she pleaded, “I don’t aim to worry you none, but I shore would be proud to carry the ’coon with us.”

The ’coon was half-grown and fat and heavy. Mart looked at it wearily. He was already tired.

“You be quare, Florry,” he said. “I hates to refuse you, but dogged if I kin see ary sense to totin’ a half-growed varmint.”

“Hit’s hard to leave somethin’ behind, ever’time we goes,” she said patiently.

As they walked off, she looked back at the ’coon, sitting reared up on the cabin door-sill. As far as she could see behind her, its quizzical masked face was visible.

VII

Dust lay yellow on the palmetto scrub. The rattler coiled in its uncooling shade was almost invisible. Florry’s bare feet padded close to him. He lifted his head, weaving it somnolently. The whirr of his rattle was faint, like a far-off cacophony of dry castor-beans. He was indifferent to her passing, sluggish, an old snake weary in the September heat.

Her lean body was sweaty with carrying a bucket of drinking water from the spring-fed branch two miles away; two miles of hammock, whose undergrowth whipped her face and whose wild bamboo vines left bleeding trails across her arms and legs. Her sun-bleached hair clung wet on her forehead.

She pushed aside the gray curtain of Spanish moss that canopied the live oak beneath which she and Mart had made their camp, waiting for November. The long gray fingers gave such privacy to the clearing that the camp would scarcely be noticed from the clay road a hundred feet away. Three walls of a pine shack were still standing under the oak. The flooring was intact. The shingle roof, drooping like an old hat where the fourth wall was gone, gave a certain shelter. It would do until trapping began. Then they could rent the old cabin in the hammock.