Her eyes, he noticed when he had released her and stepped away from her, were swimming with unshed tears.

  ‘Do you love me, Perse?’ she demanded.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘sure, I love you.’

  ‘Love me, Perse. Love me always,’ she pleaded.

  ‘Always,’ he promised, and turned away down the overgrown, mossy brick walk, beside which unkempt jonquils were in full bloom. His mare, saddled and ready, was hitched at the gate, and the clear sunshine flooded over the green meadows and the vigorous-looking plowed fields.

  But the night before, as once or twice earlier and on several nights to come, he had waked up in the middle of the night and raised himself on his elbow and stared at her sleeping face. It is hard to know anybody, he had thought, really know them. Now, riding along the lane in the morning freshness, he recalled that incident.

  And then he puzzled over the fact that he, who was now riding off down the lane toward town, had stood at the edge of a patch of woods five nights before, his ears sharpened to catch any warning whistle from the posted watchers, and had waited while three men dragged the plant bed there before him. That did not disturb him.

  He felt no sense of guilt because he could not tell May, even if there had been no oath of secrecy he would not have told her. He knew that. There was no reason to tell her. She lived in another kind of world, but on the occasions when he was to meet with the men of his band, Band Number 17, he told her that he had to stay in town late for work and would sleep at the hotel. If he should come in too late, it would disturb her. But, then, he did not want to go to the hotel at such an hour. The old man who kept the desk at night, and slept the fitful sleep of the aged on a cot in a cubbyhole just behind it, might wake up and notice him; or some late sitter in the lobby, one of those men who sat there alone some nights, hour after hour, smoking and spitting into the brass cuspidors, and staring at the opposite wall. Several times he spent the night with Mr. Wyngard, a member of Band 17 who was a bachelor and had a place near town. On other occasions, although Mr. Christian did not belong to his band, he stayed at the Christian place. Once they left the lamp burning in the hall for him, and he took his shoes off on the front porch, and carrying the lamp in one hand and the shoes in the other, crept up the stairs to the room which he had occupied that night when Mr. Ball had been there. But Mr. Christian heard him on the stairs and came out in his nightshirt to ask about the night’s business. He made Mr. Munn, who was dog-tired and rocking on his heels with sleep, stand there, holding the lamp, and go over every detail, point by point.

  ‘Yeah, yeah?’ Mr. Christian kept saying in a harsh, demanding half whisper every time Mr. Munn hesitated. Then, while Mr. Munn went on with the account, Mr. Christian would nod his head and in gentle, meditative strokes scratch his chest, which was covered with reddish hairs. Occasionally, he tugged at the hairs, rolling them between his big fingers.

  ‘That makes five you all took care of tonight, huh?’ Mr. Christian asked.

  ‘Yes, five.’

  ‘All of ’em had warning?’

  ‘Yes, and two had second warnings, Giles and Wagner. All their plants were scraped. The others, just half a bed.’

  ‘Wagner,’ Mr. Christian said, ‘now I’d thought he’d come in long ago, ain’t no starch to him. Yellow-bellied as a sapsucker. I reckon something was keeping him out. But Giles’ — and he shook his head — ‘now Giles, he’s a tough one, he’s a man, he is. I just hate to see him on the wrong side this-away. I hate to see his bed scraped.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn answered, the fog of sleep coming heavily over him so that he could scarcely keep his eyes open, and the lamp wobbling in his grasp.

  ‘Good night,’ Mr. Christian said.

  ‘Good night,’ Mr. Munn replied, and went off to his room, leaving Mr. Christian standing there barefooted, in his nightshirt, in the dark hall.

  Two of the other times when he stayed at the Christian place were nights when there were meetings of the band captains, but two of the times were nights when Mr. Christian’s band had also operated. Every time, after they had stabled their horses and gone up to the house, they found Lucille Christian waiting up. Once, she rose from the swing in the yard, her white dress wavering in the shadow, and came toward them soundlessly over the dew-drenched grass. It had been warm inside, she said, and she was just sitting out in the air. The other time, coming out of the dark parlor, her eyes deep and calm with sleep as though she had just been awakened, she met them in the hall. The lamp in the hall was turned half down.

  Both times she led them down the back hall, past a cot, where an old negro woman slept with her head thrown back and slow snores fluttering her lips in the uncertain lamplight.

  ‘Old Aunt Cassie,’ Mr. Christian explained the first time; ‘she stays up here to keep the bugaboos off Sukie when I ain’t here.’

  ‘Just for company,’ Lucille Christian said casually, ‘just company. I can keep the bugaboos off myself.’ She walked on into the kitchen, with the lamp held high in her right hand.

  ‘By God!’ Mr. Christian exclaimed, ‘by God, I believe that for a fact. I believe Sukie could. She ain’t scared of a thing. Not a thing. Are you now, Sukie?’

  ‘Not bugaboos, anyway,’ she said, and dropped a lighted match to the ready-laid wood and paper in the range, and shook the coffee-pot.

  ‘No, Sukie ain’t. And you oughter seen her handle General Smuts. Ain’t ten men in the county would hone to ride him, and Sukie here, she just marches out one morning and climbs on him. And stays on him. What she mounts, I bet she rides. She’s got as pretty a way on a horse, now, as ever you laid eyes on. For a fact. Now, ain’t you, Sukie?’

  ‘I rode him,’ she said.

  ‘For a fact,’ he agreed, and whacked her lightly across the buttocks.

  When she turned around, Mr. Munn expected a blush, or some slight expression of embarrassment on her face, or a word of remonstrance. But there was none of these things. ‘I rode him,’ she repeated, ‘now didn’t I?’

  ‘For a fact,’ Mr. Christian agreed.

  Then, stepping past him on her way to the safe, she paused to strike him solidly on the seat with the flat of her hand. He grunted with surprise, and swung around toward her. She was getting a covered dish out of the safe, beyond his reach. He wagged his head at her, saying: ‘You see that? I told you now, Perse, she’ll take care of herself all right. She’d dust off a bugaboo.’

  She set the covered dish on the table, laid two plates and forks, and went to the stove to see about the coffee.

  ‘None for me, thanks,’ Mr. Munn told her.

  ‘Just go on and pour his out, and I’ll drink it,’ Mr. Christian directed.

  She poured two cups of coffee, and uncovered the dish to expose half of an apple pie. Mr. Christian divided that into two equal portions, slid one piece onto a plate, and set the plate before Mr. Munn.

  ‘I couldn’t eat anything like that much,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘Like you say, Perse,’ Mr. Christian replied, and put a smaller slice on another plate. Then he put three spoons of sugar into the cup of coffee before him, stirred it briskly, and took a long draught. He began to eat the large piece of pie, cutting it into slabs and thrusting those into his mouth. When he chewed, the muscles at the jawbone knotted and rippled under the red skin. Lucille Christian sat across the table from the two men, but she kept her eyes on her father. She sugared the second cup of coffee for him, just as he drained the first.

  ‘Looks like all that coffee’d keep you awake,’ Mr. Munn observed.

  ‘Not me,’ Mr. Christian said. ‘I ain’t any nervous wreck, and I got a clean conscience. I can sleep any time I want to. And the funny part is’ — he paused to put another piece of piecrust into his mouth and to chew it — ‘is how any little thing, anything outer the way, that is, will wake me up right off. Now you let a rat or a mouse come in my room and he can just raise hell, and it’ll never faze me. Or a thunderstorm, now, that’ll never faze me, unless I know I oughter pull a window down, maybe. But you just let somebody move round downstairs, even on tiptoe, or turn a doorknob, and, by God, I’m wide awake. And it just seems like I know what it was waked me up. Just like a voice told me ——’

  ‘Papa’s like a cat,’ Lucille Christian interrupted, ‘a big, red, old tomcat. With one ear bitten off,’ she added.

  ‘Now you take that other night when you spent the night here, and I came out in the hall and talked to you. I bet I knew you was coming before a dog ever got wind of you. I woke up, and I knew, just like a voice said, Somebody’s riding over that little plank bridge on the pike. And I said to myself, There’s Perse coming now. Then, pretty quick, old Miss Belle Cunningham — now she’s got as good a nose as any dog I ever took off after ——’

  ‘It’s a touching habit,’ Lucille Christian interrupted, ‘papa has of naming dogs after young ladies he used to admire when he was young. He keeps their memory green.’

  ‘Get me some coffee, Sukie,’ he said, and shoved the cup toward her. She rose to obey him. ‘And Miss Belle Cunningham, now,’ he resumed, ‘she started to barking, and the others took it up. But I knew it long before that. Just like a voice spoke in the dark when your mare set a hoof on that bridge.’

  Lucille Christian placed the cup before her father. ‘I was awake, too, before all of papa’s old loves started to give tongue,’ she said, while she leaned over to sugar his coffee for him. ‘But I didn’t hear the bridge, or didn’t notice. Then I heard papa’s door screak when he went out in the hall, and I saw the light from the hall under my door.’

  Mr. Munn wondered which room was hers, the one directly before which they had stood that night?

  ‘You all certainly found a lot to talk about that time of night,’ she remarked. She returned to her chair.

  ‘Sure,’ Mr. Christian agreed, and lifted his cup.

  After he was in bed, it occurred to Mr. Munn that the real reason Lucille Christian stayed up was not to make coffee for her father. She wouldn’t sit up to all hours for that, and he could do it perfectly well himself. She sat up because she knew about everything. She had said she was out in the yard, in the swing, because it was warm. But it wasn’t a warm night, certainly not a particularly warm one. She had sat up because she knew, and wanted to see her father come in. Not worried, exactly. That was the wrong word, for he recalled the calmness of her face that night. She would not worry like most women, probably. But she had sat up, he was sure, to see her father come home.

  Twice in early June, when Mr. Munn rode up with Mr. Christian, Lucille Christian was not waiting alone. Captain Todd’s son, Benton, was there with her, sitting out in the yard in the swing. He was back from Virginia, and, he said, glad to be home. He shook hands firmly with Mr. Munn on both occasions, and shortly afterward said good-bye all around and got on his horse and rode off. It once crossed Mr. Munn’s mind that the boy was keeping mighty late hours with a young lady, and all. But then it occurred to him that Mr. Christian didn’t seem to mind, and if he had minded, he would have expressed himself in all likelihood so you couldn’t mistake him. And Lucille Christian could probably run her own business well enough.

  By the middle of June everybody knew that Benton Todd was courting Lucille Christian, hot and heavy. That was some time after Captain Todd had resigned from the board of directors of the Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco.

  Toward the middle of the spring all of the tobacco held by the Association was sold, except for a small amount of nubbins and snuff leaf common. The price had ranged from ten-ninety down in a usual proportion. Some of the sales during the winter outside the Association had brought more than some of the final sales in the Association. Ten days after the last Association sale, the first plant-bed raids occurred.

  By that time the new plants were well up — small, pale green, narrow-leafed plants growing closely together in beds that had been covered with canvas while the infinitesimal seeds sprouted and took root. The beds lay on slopes exposed to the south, or in places protected by woods. In them the earth was new, and burned-over, and black. Those beds, bounded by old boards and logs, contained the entire crop for the coming season. A long stroke of the hoe could destroy a thousand pounds.

  On one night forty-seven plant beds in three counties were raided. The beds belonging to six men who had been particularly active in opposing the Association were completely destroyed. Half of each of the remaining forty-one beds was scraped. No warning notes had been sent, and no notes were left. No notes were necessary. The implications were plain enough. Within two weeks, eighteen of the forty-one men whose plant beds had been only half-scraped joined the Association. They did this quietly, without much comment to their neighbors, although some of them had at first given out public statements of defiance.

  A sheriff and his deputies would go to the spot where the plant bed had been. The scene was always the same, the dug-up earth in the frame, the boards that had been jerked apart with the shreds of canvas still clinging to them, the patch of trodden ground with the marks of boot heels, and somewhere in the vicinity the pawed spot where the horses had been held. Once they found a dead dog lying in the bushes just beyond the plant bed. It had been killed by a crushing blow over the skull, probably when it had attacked one of the raiders. The stick which had killed it lay there too, in the bushes. A few coarse, yellow hairs from the dog’s head were stuck in the dried blood on the stick. ‘Took a right stout man to do that,’ one of the deputies said, looking down at the dog. ‘One lick.’ That was all they could find.

  A band would get its orders to go to a certain point at a certain time, a crossroads, a church, an abandoned store, and there it would pick up a guide, probably a man who was unknown to the members of the band. He would give them the words agreed on, and the band captain would reply, and the guide would say, ‘Well, let’s get going,’ and would lead them away. The men did not have to scrape the beds of their own immediate neighbors. Sometimes they might not even know the names of the owners of the beds. Only the guide and the band captain were sure to know. That was Doctor MacDonald’s idea. He was chief, elected unanimously by the thirty-four captains and four commanders at their first general meeting. Nobody knew much about him, but they elected him. Afterward, he had stood up and said in his gentle, offhand voice, ‘Well, gentlemen, I appreciate this, and I’ll try not to get you into any more trouble than necessary.’ That was all he had said then, by way of acceptance.

  At that same meeting, in planning the first raids he proposed his idea that a band should not operate in its own immediate neighborhood. Before the meeting, while the men were gathering, he had explained it to Mr. Munn.

  ‘Don’t you think that’s a good idea?’ he had asked Mr. Munn.

  ‘Yes,’ Mr. Munn had said, ‘I reckon so.’

  ‘At first, anyway,’ Doctor MacDonald had said.

  ‘At first?’ Mr. Munn had echoed, looking up at the other man’s face. Doctor MacDonald had worn that half smile, and his dead pipe had been stuck between his teeth, as was his habit.

  ‘Just to break them in, Mr. Munn, you might say,’ he had observed. Then he had turned away to enter the door of the schoolhouse where the meeting was to be held. But he had stopped, removed the pipe from between his teeth, and said, ‘You don’t know, it might turn out to be a long winter.’

  Mr. Munn had stood there, wondering how he would feel to go down the road and scrape the plant bed belonging to old Mr. Goodwood, whose place lay next to his. But old Mr. Goodwood was a strong Association man. Now and then, later, Mr. Munn thought how he would feel if he had to do that. He had known Mr. Goodwood all his life. He would do it, he decided, if he had to, but he would hate it. He would do it, because the idea of the Association was more important than how he felt about Mr. Goodwood. The idea bound a lot of men together and would get justice for all of them. And even for men who were not in the Association; even, in the end, for men whose beds were scraped now. It was win or lose now, he decided, and no turning back. And that was what Mr. Christian said to him that night when the council decided to take some men out and make them scrape their own beds, for the sake of example. ‘By God, Perse!’ Mr. Christian exclaimed, ‘we’re shooting our wad now. If we don’t win now, we never will.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Mr. Munn replied. ‘I voted against that business of taking a man out, and all, but I’ll do what’s voted. It just doesn’t look like the best way, that’s all. To me, anyway.’

  ‘It’ll do the trick, don’t you worry. And we gotta do that fast. If we don’t win, every man that plants tobacco is gonna be eating stinkweed and dog meat instead of greens and sowbelly this time next year. And that means damned near everybody in ten counties. By God, there won’t be nothing left if those tobacco buyers win out. It’ll be worse’n Indians. I’d rather fight Indians like my folks did when they come over the mountains, durned if I hadn’t.’

  ‘That’s the whole trouble,’ Mr. Munn said; ‘those fellows aren’t Indians.’

  ‘Now look here, Perse. I’ll fight fair long as any man, and I’ll let any man call the tune, but if he says it’s stomp and gouge, then, by God, it’s stomp and gouge. And that’s what they called, stomp and gouge. Nobody ever thought this’d be a Baptist Sunday-School picnic with chess pie all round and wading in the creek. Hell, Perse, you’re a grown man.’ He slapped Mr. Munn on the back so hard that the flesh stung under the impact. ‘Buck up,’ he said.

  Then Doctor MacDonald came out and stood beside them under the oak trees by the hitching-rack.

  ‘Well, doc,’ Mr. Christian remarked conversationally, ‘I was just saying to Perse here how it looks like the boys took to it all right.’

  Doctor MacDonald nodded. ‘Yes, sir,’ he then said, ‘yes, sir. And it’ll sorter break the men in. By degrees.’ He turned to Mr. Munn, looked directly into his face for an instant, and added, ‘Won’t it, Mr. Munn?’