As he turned off the road to the camp, he noticed his neighbor out working. He was painting his new house, slapping bright yellow paint on its fresh pine boarding. Sweat streamed down his face and arms. Now and then a drop spattered into his paint bucket. Mart laughed noiselessly.

“Paint! Yaller paint on fresh pine!”

Nothing was funnier than a Yankee coming down here with his money in the bank and trying to paint fresh pine. His fine paint would be flakes in the sand, this time next year. Nobody but a Yankee could help knowing that. Over his shoulder Mart saw the Yankee woman come out of the screen door with a pitcher of water. He could hear the ice in it clink against the glass. He had never wanted anything that didn’t belong to him, but he couldn’t help thinking how good it would be to have your old woman bring you ice water in the heat of the day; and when you were through your work, to sleep behind screens away from the sand flies and mosquitoes.

Florry sat up, hands on knees, as his familiar step crackled through the bone-dry underbrush. He placed the sack of groceries in a box nailed to a tree. Bull ants began at once to climb the trunk to wave their feelers about the sack of grits. He took off his hat, drew his faded blue sleeve across his damp face. He lifted the palmetto leaf over the drinking water, already lukewarm, dipped a rusty tin cup and drank again and again, his head thrown back. Drops of water fell crystal on the amber of his throat. He replaced the covering and laid the fish on it. He had cleaned them at the lake, because fish guts around the camp drew flies. He lay down with his head and shoulders against the trunk of the oak tree.

“Florry, I done played me the fool.”

“How come?”

“I done let on to Cap’n Tack I had me my trapses here. He’ll take ’em shore.”

“Cain’t you hide ’em gooder?”

“No use, now he know I got ’em.”

“He mought not study none on takin’ ’em. When kin we trap?”

“We kin crowd the trappin’ a mite. If he don’t bother me, ’bout a month from now I’ll set me a few trapses. We kin hide the skins, like, ’til I kin sell ’em.”

“A month be four weeks, eh?” she mused.

She picked up Mart’s pocket knife from the camp table and cut a straight length from the oak limb overhead. She began to cut notches, to make a calendar, so that if the moon wasn’t clear, to show them, they could tell when a month had passed.

“Sunday, Monday, Chewsday, We’n’sday, Friday, Sat-iddy——”

That was one week. She began over again.

“Sunday——”

Mart closed his eyes.

“Hit’s powerful hot,” Florry said.

“Don’t seem like I kin breathe. Don’t seem like it’s ever been so hot so long. Seems like it’s plumb wore me out.”