JEWEL AND I COME UP FROM THE FIELD, FOLLOWING THE
path in single file. Although I am fifteen feet ahead of
him, anyone watching us from the cotton-house can see
Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above
my own.

The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth
by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green
rows of laid-by cotton, to the cotton-house in the centre
of the field, where it turns and circles the cotton-house at
four soft right angles and goes on across the field again,
worn so by feet in fading precision.

The cotton-house is of rough logs, from between which
the chinking has long fallen. Square, with a broken roof
set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering
dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in
two opposite walls giving on to the approaches of the
path. When we reach it I turn and follow the path which
circles the house. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking
straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the win-
dow. Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood
set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four
strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar-store Indian
dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from
the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the
opposite window and into the path again just as I come
around the corner. In single file and five feet apart and
Jewel now in front, we go on up the path toward the
foot of the bluff.

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