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'You poor child,' Mrs. Habersham said. So I didn't stop. But I couldn't help but hear them. It sounded like a ladies' club meeting with Mrs. Habersham running it, be­cause every now and then Mrs. Habersham would forget to whisper: '—Mother should come, be sent for at once. But lacking her presence . . . we, the ladies of

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the community, mothers ourselves. . . . child probably taken advantage of by gallant romantic . . . before realising the price she must—' and Mrs. Compson said, 'Hush! Hush!' and then somebody else said, 'Do you really suppose—' and then Mrs. Habersham forgot to whisper good: 'What else? What other reason can you name why she should choose to conceal herself down there in the woods all day long, lifting heavy weights like logs and------'

Then I went away. I filled the bucket at the spring and went back to the log-yard where Brasilia and Ringo and Joby were feeding the bandsaw and the blindfolded mule going round and round in the sawdust. And then Joby kind of made a sound and we all stopped and looked and there was Mrs. Habersham, with three of the others kind of peeping out from behind her with their eyes round and bright, looking at Brasilia standing there in the sawdust and shavings, in her dirty sweated over­alls and shirt and brogans, with her face sweat-streaked with sawdust and her short hair yellow with it. 'I am Martha Habersham,' Mrs. Habersham said. 'I am a neighbor and I hope to be a friend.' And then she said, 'You poor child.'

We just looked at her; when Brasilia finally spoke, she sounded like Ringo and I would when Father would say' something to us in Latin for a joke. 'Ma'am?' Bra­silia said. Because I was just fifteen; I still didn't know what it was all about; I just stood there and listened without even thinking much, like when they had been talking in the cabin. 'My condition?' Brasilia said. 'My------'

'Yes,' Mrs. Habersham said. 'No mother, no woman to ... forced to these straits—' kind of waving her hand at the mules that hadn't stopped and at Joby and Ringo goggling at her and the three others still peeping around her at Brasilia. '—to offer you not only our help, but our sympathy.'

'My condition,' Brasilia said. 'My con . . . Help and sym—' Then she began to say, 'Oh. Oh. Oh,' standing there, and then she was running. She began to ran like a deer, that starts to ran and then decides where it wants to go; she turned right in the air and came toward me,

running light over the logs and planks, with her mouth open, saying 'John, John' not loud; for a minute it was like she thought I was Father until she waked up and found I was not; she stopped without even ceasing to run, like a bird stops in the air, motionless yet still furi­ous with movement. 'Is that what you think too?' she said. Then she was gone. Every now and then I could see her footprints, spaced and fast, just inside the woods, but when I came out of the bottom, I couldn't see her. But the surreys and buggies were still in front of the cabin and I could see Mrs. Compson and the other ladies on the porch, looking out across the pasture to­ward the bottom, so I did not go there. But before I came to the other cabin, where Louvinia and Joby and Ringo lived, I saw Louvinia come up the hill from the spring, carrying her cedar water bucket and singing. Then she went into the cabin and the singing stopped short off and so I knew where Brasilia was. But I didn't hide. I went to the window and looked in and saw Bra­silia just turning from where she had been leaning her head in her arms on the mantel when Louvinia came in with the water bucket and a gum twig in her mouth and Father's old hat on top of her head rag. Brasilia was crying. 'That's what it is, then,' she said. 'Coming down there to the mill and telling me that in my condi­tion—sympathy and help— Strangers; I never saw any of them before and I don't care a damn what they— But you and Bayard. Is that what you believe? that

John and I—that we------' Then Louvinia moved. Her

hand came out quicker than Brasilia could jerk back and lay flat on the belly of Brasilia's overalls, then Lou­vinia was holding Brasilia in her arms like she used to hold me and Brasilia was crying hard. 'That John and I—that we— And Gavin dead at Shiloh and John's home burned and his plantation ruined, that he and I— We went to the war to hurt Yankees, not hunting women!'

'I knows you ain't,' Louvinia said. 'Hush now. Hush.'

And that's about all. It didn't take them long. I don't know whether Mrs. Habersham made Mrs. Compson send for Aunt Louisa or whether Aunt Louisa just gave them a deadline and then came herself. Because we were

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busy, Drusilla and Joby and Ringo and me at the mill, and Father in town; we wouldn't see him from the time he would ride away in the morning until when he would get back, sometimes late, at night. Because they were strange times then. For four years we had lived for just one thing, even the women and children who could not fight: to get Yankee troops out of the country; we thought that when that happened, it would be all over. And now that had happened, and then before the summer began I heard Father say to Drusilla, 'We were promised Federal troops; Lincoln himself promised to send us troops. Then things will be all right.' That, from a man who had commanded a regiment for four years with the avowed purpose of driving Federal troops from the country. Now it was as though we had not sur­rendered at all, we had joined forces with the men who had been our enemies against a new foe whose means we could not always fathom but whose aim we could always dread. So he was busy in town all day long. They were building Jefferson back, the courthouse and the stores, but it was more than that which Father and the other men were doing; it was something which he would not let Drusilla or me or Ringo go into town to see. Then one day Ringo slipped off and went to town and came back and he looked at me with his eyes •tolling a little.

'Do you know what I ain't?' he said. 'What?' I said.

'I ain't a nigger any more. I done been abolished.' Then I asked him what he was, if he wasn't a nigger any more and he showed me what he had in his hand. It was a new scrip dollar; it was drawn on the United States, Resident Treasurer, Yoknapatawpha County, Mis­sissippi, and signed 'Cassius Q. Benbow, Acting Mar­shal' in a neat clerk's hand, with a big sprawling X under it.

'Cassius Q. Benbow?' I said.

'Co-rect,' Ringo said. 'Uncle Cash that druv the Benbow carriage twell he run off with the Yankees two years ago. He back now and he gonter be elected Marshal of Jefferson. That's what Marse John and the other white folks is so busy about.'

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