“Mart,” she said, “you know good I got me a right to Pappy’s cabin, yonder in the piney-woods. Would you jest stand up to him one time an’ mebbe framm him with them big hands o’ yourn, we’d be safe-like right on. I got me my rights there.”

“An’ I done had me my rights, too,” he said bitterly, “ever’ time I been moved on.” He stretched flat, an arm across his face. “Wisht that bucket o’ water was cold an’ fitten.”

“Our well water had sulphur to it, but it shore were cold an’ fine.”

“Hit ain’t a mite o’ use, Florry. I ain’t got the strength to leg it that far, jest to git th’owed out agin. Hit’s goin’ to a goat’s house for wool.”

“Be you skeert?”

“I ain’t skeert o’ your daddy.” He was sullen.

She took a deep, slow breath.

“Well, I’m a-headin’ for the cabin, come day. Reckon you’d bes’ foller jest to take keer o’ me.”

“Florry, leave me be. I cain’t hold out. I’m wore out. Damn that fire! Put it out! I kin stand the skeeters better’n a smudge tonight.”

“You got you a tech o’ fever. Hit’ll do you good to git outen the hammocks. Hit’s the last chanct, shore, Mart, headin’ for the piney-woods. We got to try it. If we cain’t stay there—” she did not finish.

“Mart——”

Her small voice was gentle.

“Mart, be you skeert o’ what-all kin happen to folkses?”

He did not answer for so long that she thought he had gone to sleep in his weariness. She leaned over him to hear what he was saying.

“I got a right to be——”

VIII

Florry thought that she had moved through such a nightmare before. The trek to Dixie County was like the hot seas of fever in which she had once swum. The air, like that of delirium, was palpable, pressing on her bony shoulders an insupportable weight. Her straight muscular calves ached as though the flat roads wound forever up-hill. Old Jo’s blows had never fallen on her head so heavily as the direct rays of the September sun. No cypress log had tugged so ponderously against her as the burden of Mart’s heavy spirit. He followed her like a hound unwilling at heel.

The thought of the clearing drew her ahead, as resistless as the sun. If she could reach it before the storms caught them up, she would willingly lie down on the cabin floor and let old Jo flail about him. She was weak with longing for the piney-woods, where the sun dropped visibly behind the tall trees, and peace lay like a cloak of pine-needles, pierced only by the rhythmic pattern of the hoot-owl’s cry.