Ordinarily Florry pulsed with vague pleasure whenever she stepped within the cool shade of the oak, but the shade today, as for the past weeks, was a dusky delusion. It was more stifling than the open glare of the sun. After putting the bucket of water on the shady side of the camp and laying a palmetto leaf over it, she dropped down on the clean sand carpeted with oak leaves, panting like a dog. The blood beat scalding in her throat and cheeks. It had been hot and dry too long, longer than folks could bear.

The creak of a hand-pump sounded across the road like a sea-gull’s cry. If the people in the new house were natives, she could get water from their well, but they were Yankees. They made no offer and she did not ask. She was not anxious to remind them of the camp’s existence, for she was not sure whether or not they owned the land. Yankees were queer. They put up signs and warned people off.

She peered through the moss. The Yankee’s small boy and girl were rolling discarded automobile tires for hoops down the roadway. They were tanned to the golden-brown of ripe pears. They moved with a dancer’s grace, lifting their small arms free from the shoulders, like bird wings.

She watched them with a dull hunger. They were tiring in the intense heat. She saw that their faces were crimson. If they were hers, she’d make them lie down while it was so hot. The children trotted in like hot and weary puppies. The boy turned and latched the wooden gate after him.

Florry thought, “Ain’t it fine to have a gate and a house with doors.”

The only good house she had ever lived in had been old Jo’s cabin in the piney-woods. Her mother’s grandfather had built it and her mother’s father had put a new shingle roof on it. The front door was soft gray cypress. The kitchen door was pine and it had blown off the hinges the day she went away with Mart. She had been glad to go. She hadn’t minded the make-shift camps and cabins since, nor the storms that moved them on to other places. Nobody had anything to say about such things. Mart hadn’t been treated right. But you couldn’t help other folks’ meanness.

She had minded leaving old Sport behind, and the cat and the ’coon, and butchering the pig for rations. She minded the puny baby lying on a Yankee’s land, under a Yankee woman’s petunias. It came to her that if Mart had stayed on the clearing, in old Jo’s cabin that she had a right to, she would still have the hound, and it might be the baby. They had let their fear move them on.