They had no interest in him except when he brought them their plates of table scraps night and morning. They were a sorry pair, he thought, good for nothing but the chase, the catch and the kill. They wagged deprecatory short tails when they recognized him.
Rip barked deeply but the voice of the small mongrel was high and shrill. Old Julia the hound had followed his father in the wagon to Grahamsville, but Rip the bull-dog and Perk the new feist saw the form clear the fence and ran toward him. He swung himself over the fence on his two hands. He walked down the cornfield until he was out of sight of the cabin. He stood his hoe against the split-rail fence. It bored into him as the bees bored into the chinaberry blossoms, so that he must be gone across the clearing, through the pines and down the road to the running branch. The afternoon was alive with a soft stirring. Finding a bee-tree was nobler work than hoeing, and the corn could wait another day. The winter's cane syrup was gone and most of the jellies. It occurred to him that he might follow the swift line of flight of the black and gold bodies, and so find a bee-tree, full of amber honey. They burrowed into the fragile clusters of lavender bloom as greedily as though there were no other flowers in the scrub as though they had forgotten the yellow jessamine of March the sweet bay and the magnolias ahead of them in May. The wild bees had found the chinaberry tree by the front gate. The clearing itself was pleasant if the unweeded rows of young shafts of corn were not before him. He stood a minute, balancing the hoe on his shoulder. If she scrubbed the floor she would not miss him until he had reached the Glen. She would sweep the floor with a broom of ti-ti and after that, if he were lucky, she would scrub it with the corn shucks scrub. His mother was hanging up pots and pans after the noon dinner. The fire on the kitchen hearth was dying down. It trailed into the blue of the April sky and was no longer blue but gray. The smoke was blue where it left the red of the clay. A column of smoke rose thin and straight from the cabin chimney.
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