Mrs. J. J. Rice and family usually spent ten days during the August heat at Lake Dale, and thither they had gone now, giving Annjee a forced vacation with no pay. Jimboy was not working, and so his wife found ten days of rest without income not especially agreeable. Nevertheless, she decided that she might as well enjoy the time; so she and Jimboy went to the country for a week with Cousin Jessie, who had married one of the colored farmers of the district. Besides, Annjee thought that Jimboy might help on the farm and so make a little money. Anyway, they would get plenty to eat, because Jessie kept a good table. And since Jessie had eight children of her own, they did not take Sandy with them⁠—eight were enough for a woman to be worried with at one time!

Aunt Hager had been ironing all day on the Reinharts’ clothes⁠—it was Friday. At seven o’clock Harriett came home, but she had already eaten her supper at the restaurant where she worked.

“Hello, mama! Hy, Sandy!” she said, but that was all, because she and her mother were not on the best of terms. Aunt Hager was attempting to punish her youngest daughter by not allowing her to leave the house after dark, since Harriett, on Tuesday night, had been out until one o’clock in the morning with no better excuse than a party at Maudel’s. Aunt Hager had threatened to whip her then and there that night.

“You ain’t had a switch on yo’ hide fo’ three years, but don’t think you’s gettin’ too big fo’ me not to fan yo’ behind, madam. ‘Spare de rod an’ spoil de chile,’ that’s what de Bible say, an’ Lawd knows you sho is spoiled! De idee of a young gal yo’ age stayin’ out till one o’clock in de mawnin’, an’ me not knowed where you’s at.⁠ ⁠… Don’t you talk back to me!⁠ ⁠… You rests in this house ever’ night this week an’ don’t put yo’ foot out o’ this yard after you comes from work, that’s what you do. Lawd knows I don’t know what I’s gonna do with you. I works fo’ you an’ I prays fo’ you, an’ if you don’t mind, I’s sho gonna whip you, even if you is goin’ on seventeen years old!”

Tonight as soon as she came from work Harriett went into her mother’s room and lay across the bed. It was very warm in the little four-room house, and all the windows and doors were open.

“We’s got some watermelon here, daughter,” Hager called from the kitchen. “Don’t you want a nice cool slice?”

“No,” the girl replied. She was fanning herself with a palm-leaf fan, her legs in their cheap silk stockings hanging over the side of the bed, and her heels kicking the floor. Benbow’s Band played tonight for the dance at Chaver’s Hall, and everybody was going⁠—but her. Gee, it was hard to have a Christian mother! Harriett kicked her slippers off with a bang and rolled over on her stomach, burying her powdery face in the pillows.⁠ ⁠… Somebody knocked at the back door.

A boy’s voice was speaking excitedly to Hager: “Hemorrhages⁠ ⁠… and papa can’t stop ’em⁠ ⁠… she’s coughin’ something terrible⁠ ⁠… says can’t you please come over and help him”⁠—frightened and out of breath.

“Do, Jesus!” cried Hager. “I’ll be with you right away, chile. Don’t worry.” She rushed into the bedroom to change her apron. “You, Harriett, listen; Sister Lane’s taken awful sick an’ Jimmy says she’s bleedin’ from de mouth. If I ain’t back by nine o’clock, see that that chile Sandy’s in de bed. An’ you know you ain’t to leave this yard under no circumstances.⁠ ⁠… Po’ Mis’ Lane! She sho do have it hard.” In a whisper: “I ’spects she’s got de T.B., that what I ’spects!” And the old woman hustled out to join the waiting youngster. Jimmy was leaning against the door, looking at Sandy, and neither of the boys knew what to say. Jimmy Lane wore his mother’s cast-off shoes to school, and Sandy used to tease him, but tonight he didn’t tease his friend about his shoes.

“You go to bed ’fore it gets late,” said his grandmother, starting down the alley with Jimmy.

“Yes’m,” Sandy called after her. “So long, Jim!” He stood under the apple-tree and watched them disappear.

Aunt Hager had scarcely gotten out of sight when there was a loud knock at the front door, and Sandy ran around the house to see Harriett’s boyfriend, Mingo, standing in the dusk outside the screen-door, waiting to be let in.

Mingo was a patent-leather black boy with wide, alive nostrils and a mouth that split into a lighthouse smile on the least provocation. His body was heavy and muscular, resting on bowed legs that curved backward as though the better to brace his chunky torso; and his hands were hard from mixing concrete and digging ditches for the city’s new water-mains.

“I know it’s tonight, but I can’t go,” Sandy heard his aunt say at the door. They were speaking of Benbow’s dance. “And his band don’t come here often, neither. I’m heartsick having to stay home, dog-gone it all, especially this evening!”

“Aw, come on and go anyway,” pleaded Mingo. “After I been savin’ up my dough for two weeks to take you, and got my suit cleaned and pressed and all. Heck! If you couldn’t go and knew it yesterday, why didn’t you tell me? That’s a swell way to treat a fellow!”

“Because I wanted to go,” said Harriett; “and still want to go.⁠ ⁠… Don’t make so much difference about mama, because she’s mad anyhow⁠ ⁠… but what could we do with this kid? We can’t leave him by himself.” She looked at Sandy, who was standing behind Mingo listening to everything.

“You can take me,” the child offered anxiously, his eyes dancing at the delightful prospect. “I’ll behave, Harrie, if you take me, and I won’t tell on you either.⁠ ⁠… Please lemme go, Mingo. I ain’t never seen a big dance in my life. I wanta go.”

“Should we?” asked Harriett doubtfully, looking at her boyfriend standing firmly on his curved legs.

“Sure, if we got to have him⁠ ⁠… damn ’im!” Mingo replied. “Better the kid than no dance. Go git dressed.” So Harriett made a dash for the clothes-closet, while Sandy ran to get a clean waist from one of his mother’s dresser-drawers, and Mingo helped him put it on, cussing softly to himself all the while. “But it ain’t your fault, pal, is it?” he said to the little boy.

“Sure not,” Sandy replied. “I didn’t tell Aunt Hager to make Harrie stay home. I tried to ’suade grandma to let her go,” the child lied, because he liked Mingo. “I guess she won’t care about her goin’ to just one dance.” He wanted to make everything all right so the young man wouldn’t be worried. Besides, Sandy very much wanted to go himself.

“Let’s beat it,” Harriett shrilled excitedly before her dress was fastened, anxious to be gone lest her mother come home. She was powdering her face and neck in the next room, nervous, happy, and afraid all at once. The perfume, the voice, and the pat, pat, pat of the powder-puff came out to the waiting gentleman.

“Yo’ car’s here, madam,” mocked Mingo. “Step right this way and let’s be going!”

Wonder where ma easy rider’s gone⁠—
He done left me, put ma new gold watch in pawn!

Like a blare from hell the second encore of “Easy Rider” filled every cubic inch of the little hall with hip-rocking notes. Benbow himself was leading and the crowd moved like jellyfish dancing on individual seashells, with Mingo and Harriett somewhere among the shakers. But they were not of them, since each couple shook in a world of its own, as, with a weary wail, the music abruptly ceased.

Then, after scarcely a breath of intermission, the band struck up again with a lazy one-step. A tall brown boy in a light tan suit walked his partner straight down the whole length of the floor and, when he reached the corner, turned leisurely in one spot, body riding his hips, eyes on the ceiling, and his girl shaking her full breasts against his pink silk shirt. Then they recrossed the width of the room, turned slowly, repeating themselves, and began again to walk rhythmically down the hall, while the music was like a lazy river flowing between mountains, carving a canyon coolly, calmly, and without insistence. The “Lazy River One-Step” they might have called what the band was playing as the large crowd moved with the greatest ease about the hall. To drumbeats barely audible, the tall boy in the tan suit walked his partner round and round time after time, revolving at each corner with eyes uplifted, while the piano was the water flowing, and the high, thin chords of the banjo were the mountains floating in the clouds. But in sultry tones, alone and always, the brass cornet spoke harshly about the earth.

Sandy sat against the wall in a hard wooden folding chair. There were other children scattered lonesomely about on chairs, too, watching the dancers, but he didn’t seem to know any of them. When the music stopped, all the chairs quickly filled with loud-talking women and girls in brightly colored dresses who fanned themselves with handkerchiefs and wiped their sweating brows. Sandy thought maybe he should give his seat to one of the women when he saw Maudel approaching.

“Here, honey,” she said. “Take this dime and buy yourself a bottle of something cold to drink. I know Harriett ain’t got you on her mind out there dancin’. This music is certainly righteous, chile!” She laughed as she handed Sandy a coin and closed her pocketbook. He liked Maudel, although he knew his grandmother didn’t. She was a large good-natured brown-skinned girl who walked hippishly and used too much rouge on her lips. But she always gave Sandy a dime, and she was always laughing.

He went through the crowd towards the soft-drink stand at the end of the hall. “Gimme a bottle o’ cream soda,” he said to the fat orange-colored man there, who had his sleeves rolled up and a white butcher’s apron covering his barrel-like belly. The man put his hairy arms down into a zinc tub full of ice and water and began pulling out bottles, looking at their caps, and then dropping them back into the cold liquid.

“Don’t seem like we got no cream, sonny. How’d a lemon do you?” he asked above the bedlam of talking voices.

“Naw,” said Sandy. “It’s too sour.”

On the improvised counter of boards the wares displayed consisted of crackerjacks, salted peanuts, a box of gum, and Sen Sens, while behind the counter was a lighted oil-stove holding a tin pan full of spareribs, sausage, and fish; and near it an ice-cream freezer covered with a brown sack. Some cases of soda were on the floor beside the zinc tub filled with bottles, in which the man was still searching.

“Nope, no cream,” said the fat man.

“Well, gimme a fish sandwich then,” Sandy replied, feeling very proud because some kids were standing near, looking at him as he made his purchase like a grown man.

“Buy me one, too,” suggested a biscuit-colored little girl in a frilly dirty-white dress.

“I only got a dime,” Sandy said. “But you can have half of mine.” And he gallantly broke in two parts the double square of thick bread, with its hunk of greasy fish between, and gravely handed a portion to the grinning little girl.

“Thanks,” she said, running away with the bread and fish in her hands.

“Shame on you!” teased a small boy, rubbing his forefingers at Sandy. “You got a girl! You got a girl!”

“Go chase yourself.” Sandy replied casually, as he picked out the bones and smacked his lips on the sweet fried fish. The orchestra was playing another one-step, with the dancers going like shuttles across the floor. Sandy saw his Aunt Harriett and a slender yellow boy named Billy Sanderlee doing a series of lazy, intricate steps as they wound through the crowd from one end of the hall to the other. Certain less accomplished couples were watching them with admiration.

Sandy, when he had finished eating, decided to look for the washroom, where he could rinse his hands, because they were greasy and smelled fishy. It was at the far corner of the hall. As he pushed open the door marked gents, a thick grey cloud of cigarette-smoke drifted out. The stench of urine and gin and a crowd of men talking, swearing, and drinking licker surrounded the little boy as he elbowed his way towards the washbowls. All the fellows were shouting loudly to one another and making fleshy remarks about the women they had danced with.

“Boy, you ought to try Velma,” a mahogany-brown boy yelled. “She sure can go.”

“Hell,” answered a whisky voice somewhere in the smoke. “That nappy-headed black woman? Gimme a high yaller for mine all de time. I can’t use no coal!”

“Well, de blacker de berry, de sweeter de juice,” protested a slick-haired ebony youth in the center of the place.⁠ ⁠… “Ain’t that right, sport?” he demanded of Sandy, grabbing him jokingly by the neck and picking him up.

“I guess it is,” said the child, scared, and the men laughed.

“Here, kid, buy yourself a drink,” the slick-headed boy said, slipping Sandy a nickel as he set him down gently at the door. “And be sure it’s pop⁠—not gin.”

Outside, the youngster dried his wet hands on a handkerchief, blinked his smoky eyes, and immediately bought the soda, a red strawberry liquid in a long, thick bottle.

Suddenly and without warning the cornet blared at the other end of the hall in an earsplitting wail: Whaw!⁠ ⁠… Whaw!⁠ ⁠… Whaw!⁠ ⁠… Whaw! and the snare-drum rolled in answer. A pause⁠ ⁠… then the loud brassy notes were repeated and the banjo came in, Plinka, plink, plink, like timid drops of rain after a terrific crash of thunder. Then quite casually, as though nothing had happened, the piano lazied into a slow drag, with all the other instruments following. And with the utmost nonchalance the drummer struck into time.

“Ever’body shake!” cried Benbow, as a ribbon of laughter swirled round the hall.

Couples began to sway languidly, melting together like candy in the sun as hips rotated effortlessly to the music. Girls snuggled pomaded heads on men’s chests, or rested powdered chins on men’s shoulders, while wild young boys put both arms tightly around their partners’ waists and let their hands hang down carelessly over female haunches. Bodies moved ever so easily together⁠—ever so easily, as Benbow turned towards his musicians and cried through cupped hands: “Aw, screech it, boys!”

A long, tall, gangling gal stepped back from her partner, adjusted her hips, and did a few easy, gliding steps all her own before her man grabbed her again.

Eu‑o‑oo‑ooo‑oooo! moaned the cornet titillating with pain, as the banjo cried in stop-time, and the piano sobbed aloud with a rhythmical, secret passion. But the drums kept up their hard steady laughter⁠—like somebody who don’t care.

“I see you plowin’, Uncle Walt,” called a little autumn-leaf brown with switching skirts to a dark-purple man grinding down the center of the floor with a yellow woman. Two short prancing blacks stopped in their tracks to quiver violently. A bushy-headed girl threw out her arms, snapped her fingers, and began to holler: “Hey!⁠ ⁠… Hey!” while her perspiring partner held doggedly to each hip in an effort to keep up with her. All over the hall, people danced their own individual movements to the scream and moan of the music.

“Get low⁠ ⁠… low down⁠ ⁠… down!” cried the drummer, bouncing like a rubber ball in his chair. The banjo scolded in diabolic glee, and the cornet panted as though it were out of breath, and Benbow himself left the band and came out on the floor to dance slowly and ecstatically with a large Indian-brown woman covered with diamonds.

“Aw, do it, Mister Benbow!” one of his admirers shouted frenziedly as the hall itself seemed to tremble.

“High yallers, draw nigh! Brown-skins, come near!” somebody squalled. “But black gals, stay where you are!”

Whaw! Whaw! Whaw! mocked the cornet⁠—but the steady tomtom of the drums was no longer laughter now, no longer even pleasant: the drumbeats had become sharp with surly sound, like heavy waves that beat angrily on a granite rock. And under the dissolute spell of its own rhythm the music had got quite beyond itself. The four black men in Benbow’s wandering band were exploring depths to which mere sound had no business to go. Cruel, desolate, unadorned was their music now, like the body of a ravished woman on the sunbaked earth; violent and hard, like a giant standing over his bleeding mate in the blazing sun. The odors of bodies, the stings of flesh, and the utter emptiness of soul when all is done⁠—these things the piano and the drums, the cornet and the twanging banjo insisted on hoarsely to a beat that made the dancers move, in that little hall, like pawns on a frenetic checkerboard.

“Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!” somebody cried.

The earth rolls relentlessly, and the sun blazes forever on the earth, breeding, breeding. But why do you insist like the earth, music? Rolling and breeding, earth and sun forever, relentlessly. But why do you insist like the sun? Like the lips of women? Like the bodies of men, relentlessly?

“Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!”

But why do you insist, music?

Who understands the earth? Do you, Mingo? Who understands the sun? Do you, Harriett? Does anybody know⁠—among you high yallers, you jelly-beans, you pinks and pretty daddies, among you sealskin browns, smooth blacks, and chocolates-to-the-bone⁠—does anybody know the answer?

“Aw, play it, Benbow!”

“It’s midnight. De clock is strikin’ twelve, an’⁠ ⁠…”

“Aw, play it, Mister Benbow!”

During intermission, when the members of the band stopped making music to drink gin and talk to women, Harriett and Mingo bought Sandy a box of crackerjacks and another bottle of soda and left him standing in the middle of the floor holding both. His young aunt had forgotten time, so Sandy decided to go upstairs to the narrow unused balcony that ran the length of one side of the place. It was dusty up there, but a few broken chairs stood near the railing and he sat on one of them. He leaned his arms on the banister, rested his chin in his hands, and when the music started, he looked down on the mass of moving couples crowding the floor. He had a clear view of the energetic little black drummer eagle-rocking with staccato regularity in his chair as his long, thin sticks descended upon the tightly drawn skin of his small drum, while his foot patted the pedal of his big bass-drum, on which was painted in large red letters: “Benbow’s Famous Kansas City Band.”

As the slow shuffle gained in intensity (and his crackerjacks gave out), Sandy looked down drowsily on the men and women, the boys and girls, circling and turning beneath him. Dresses and suits of all shades and colors, and a vast confusion of bushy heads on swaying bodies. Faces gleaming like circus balloons⁠—lemon-yellow, coal-black, powder-grey, ebony-black, blue-black faces; chocolate, brown, orange, tan, creamy-gold faces⁠—the room full of floating balloon faces⁠—Sandy’s eyes were beginning to blur with sleep⁠—colored balloons with strings, and the music pulling the strings. No! Girls pulling the strings⁠—each boy a balloon by a string. Each face a balloon.

Sandy put his head down on the dusty railing of the gallery. An odor of hair-oil and fish, of women and sweat came up to him as he sat there alone, tired and a little sick. It was very warm and close, and the room was full of chatter during the intervals. Sandy struggled against sleep, but his eyes were just about to close when, with a burst of hopeless sadness, the “St. Louis Blues” spread itself like a bitter syrup over the hall. For a moment the boy opened his eyes to the drowsy flow of sound, long enough to pull two chairs together; then he lay down on them and closed his eyes again. Somebody was singing:

St. Louis woman with her diamond rings⁠ ⁠…

as the band said very weary things in a loud and brassy manner and the dancers moved in a dream that seemed to have forgotten itself:

Got ma man tied to her apron-strings⁠ ⁠…

Wah! Wah! Wah!⁠ ⁠… The cornet laughed with terrible rudeness. Then the drums began to giggle and the banjo whined an insulting leer. The piano said, over and over again: “St. Louis! That big old dirty town where the Mississippi’s deep and wide, deep and wide⁠ ⁠…” and the hips of the dancers rolled.

Man’s got a heart like a rock cast in de sea⁠ ⁠…

while the cynical banjo covered unplumbable depths with a plinking surface of staccato gaiety, like the sparkling bubbles that rise on deep water over a man who has just drowned himself:

Or else he never would a gone so far from me⁠ ⁠…

then the band stopped with a long-drawn-out wail from the cornet and a flippant little laugh from the drums.

A great burst of applause swept over the room, and the musicians immediately began to play again. This time just blues, not the “St. Louis,” nor the “Memphis,” nor the “Yellow Dog”⁠—but just the plain old familiar blues, heartbreaking and extravagant, ma-baby’s-gone-from-me blues.

Nobody thought about anyone else then. Bodies sweatily close, arms locked, cheek to cheek, breast to breast, couples rocked to the pulse-like beat of the rhythm, yet quite oblivious each person of the other. It was true that men and women were dancing together, but their feet had gone down through the floor into the earth, each dancer’s alone⁠—down into the center of things⁠—and their minds had gone off to the heart of loneliness, where they didn’t even hear the words, the sometimes lying, sometimes laughing words that Benbow, leaning on the piano, was singing against this background of utterly despondent music:

When de blues is got you,
Ain’t no use to run away.
When de blue-blues got you,
Ain’t no use to run away,
’Cause de blues is like a woman
That can turn yo’ good hair grey.

Umn-ump!⁠ ⁠… Umn!⁠ ⁠… Umn-ump!

Well, I tole ma baby,
Says baby, baby, babe, be mine,
But ma baby was deceitful.
She must a thought that I was blind.

De-da! De-da!⁠ ⁠… De da! De da! Dee!

O, Lawdy, Lawdy, Lawdy,
Lawdy, Lawdy, Lawd⁠ ⁠… Lawd⁠ ⁠… Lawd!
She quit me fo’ a Texas gambler,
So I had to git another broad.

Whaw-whaw!⁠ ⁠… Whaw-whaw-whaw! As though the laughter of a cornet could reach the heart of loneliness.

These mean old weary blues coming from a little orchestra of four men who needed no written music because they couldn’t have read it. Four men and a leader⁠—Rattle Benbow from Galveston; Benbow’s buddy, the drummer, from Houston; his banjoist from Birmingham; his cornetist from Atlanta; and the pianist, long-fingered, sissyfied, a coal-black lad from New Orleans who had brought with him an exaggerated ragtime which he called jazz.

“I’m jazzin’ it, creepers!” he sometimes yelled as he rolled his eyes towards the dancers and let his fingers beat the keys to a frenzy.⁠ ⁠… But now the piano was cryin’ the blues!

Four homeless, plug-ugly niggers, that’s all they were, playing mean old loveless blues in a hot, crowded little dance-hall in a Kansas town on Friday night. Playing the heart out of loneliness with a wide-mouthed leader, who sang everybody’s troubles until they became his own. The improvising piano, the whanging banjo, the throbbing bass-drum, the hard-hearted little snare-drum, the brassy comet that laughed, Whaw-whaw-whaw.⁠ ⁠… Whaw! were the waves in this lonesome sea of harmony from which Benbow’s melancholy voice rose:

You gonna wake up some mawnin’
An’ turn yo’ smilin’ face.
Wake up some early mawnin’,
Says turn yo’ smilin’ face,
Look at yo’ sweetie’s pillow⁠—
An’ find an’ empty place!

Then the music whipped itself into a slow fury, an awkward, elemental, foot-stamping fury, with the banjo running terrifiedly away in a windy moan and then coming back again, with the cornet wailing like a woman who don’t know what it’s all about:

Then you gonna call yo’ baby,
Call yo’ lovin’ baby dear⁠—
But you can keep on callin’,
’Cause I won’t be here!

And for a moment nothing was heard save the shuf-shuf-shuffle of feet and the immense booming of the bass-drum like a living vein pulsing at the heart of loneliness.

“Sandy!⁠ ⁠… Sandy!⁠ ⁠… My stars! Where is that child?⁠ ⁠… Has anybody seen my little nephew?” All over the hall.⁠ ⁠… “Sandy!⁠ ⁠… Oh‑o‑o, Lord!” Finally, with a sigh of relief: “You little brat, darn you, hiding up here in the balcony where nobody could find you!⁠ ⁠… Sandy, wake up! It’s past four o’clock and I’ll get killed.”

Harriett vigorously shook the sleeping child, who lay stretched on the dusty chairs; then she began to drag him down the narrow steps before he was scarcely awake. The hall was almost empty and the chubby little black drummer was waddling across the floor carrying his drums in canvas cases. Someone was switching off the lights one by one. A mustard-colored man stood near the door quarrelling with a black woman. She began to cry and he slapped her full in the mouth, then turned his back and left with another girl of maple-sugar brown. Harriett jerked Sandy past this linked couple and pulled the boy down the long flight of stairs into the street, where Mingo stood waiting, with a lighted cigarette making a white line against his black skin.

“You better git a move on,” he said. “Daylight ain’t holdin’ itself back for you!” And he told the truth, for the night had already begun to pale.

Sandy felt sick at the stomach. To be awakened precipitately made him cross and ill-humored, but the fresh, cool air soon caused him to feel less sleepy and not quite so ill. He took a deep breath as he trotted rapidly along on the sidewalk beside his striding aunt and her boyfriend. He watched the blue-grey dawn blot out the night in the sky; and then pearl-grey blot out the blue, while the stars faded to points of dying fire. And he listened to the birds chirping and trilling in the trees as though they were calling the sun. Then, as he became fully awake, the child began to feel very proud of himself, for this was the first time he had ever been away from home all night.

Harriett was fussing with Mingo. “You shouldn’t’ve kept me out like that,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me what time it was?⁠ ⁠… I didn’t know.”

And Mingo came back: “Hey, didn’t I try to drag you away at midnight and you wouldn’t come? And ain’t I called you at one o’clock and you said: ‘Wait a minute’⁠—dancin’ with some yaller P.I. from St. Joe, with your arms round his neck like a life-preserver?⁠ ⁠… Don’t tell me I didn’t want to leave, and me got to go to work at eight o’clock this mornin’ with a pick and shovel when the whistle blows! What de hell?”

But Harriett did not care to quarrel now when there would be no time to finish it properly. She was out of breath from hurrying and almost in tears. She was afraid to go home.

“Mingo, I’m scared.”

“Well, you know what you can do if your ma puts you out,” her escort said quickly, forgetting his anger. “I can take care of you. We could get married.”

“Could we, Mingo?”

“Sure!”

She slipped her hand in his. “Aw, daddy!” and the pace became much less hurried.

When they reached the corner near which Harriett lived, she lifted her dark little purple-powdered face for a not very lingering kiss and sent Mingo on his way. Then she frowned anxiously and ran on. The sky was a pale pearly color, waiting for the warm gold of the rising sun.

“I’m scared to death!” said Harriett. “Lord, Sandy, I hope ma ain’t up! I hope she didn’t come home last night from Mis’ Lane’s. We shouldn’t’ve gone, Sandy⁠ ⁠… I guess we shouldn’t’ve gone.” She was breathing hard and Sandy had to run fast to keep up with her. “Gee, I’m scared!”

The grass was diamond-like with dew, and the red bricks of the sidewalk were damp, as the small boy and his young aunt hurried under the leafy elms along the walk. They passed Madam de Carter’s house and cut through the wet grass into their own yard as the first rays of the morning sun sifted through the trees. Quietly they tiptoed towards the porch; quickly and quietly they crossed it; and softly, ever so softly, they opened the parlor door.

In the early dusk the oil-lamp still burned on the front-room table, and in an old armchair, with the open Bible on her lap, sat Aunt Hager Williams, a bundle of switches on the floor at her feet.