Nicholas went on steadily, spurred by superstitious terror of the silence.  He remembered that Uncle Ish had said there were no “ha’nts” along this road, but the assurance was barren of comfort.  Old Uncle Dan’l Mule had certainly seen a figure in a white sheet rise up out of that decayed oak stump in the hollow, for he had sworn to it in the boy’s presence in Aunt Rhody Sand’s cabin the night of her daughter Viny’s wedding.  As for Viny’s husband Saul, he had declared that one night after ten o’clock, when he was coming through this wood, the “booger-boos” had got after him and chased him home.

At the end of the wood the road came out upon the open again, and in the distance Nicholas could see, like burnished squares, the windows of his father’s house.  Between the thicket and the house there was a long stretch of clearing, which had been once planted in corn, and now supported a headless army of dry stubble, amid a dull-brown waste of broomsedge.  The last pale vestige of the afterglow, visible across the level country, swept the arid field and softened the harsh outlines of the landscape.  It was barren soil, whose strength had been exhausted long since by years of production without returns, tilled by hands that had forced without fertilising.  There was now grim pathos in its absolute sterility, telling as it did of long-gone yields of grain and historic harvests.

Nicholas skirted the waste, and was turning into the pasture gate on the opposite side of the road, when he heard the shrill sound of a voice from the direction of the house.

“Nick!—­who—­a Nick!”

On one of the cedar posts of the fence of the cow-pen he discerned the small figure and green cotton frock of his half-sister, Sarah Jane, who was shouting through her hollowed palms to increase the volume of sound.

“I say, Nick!  The she-ep hev’ been driv-en u-p!  Come to sup-per!”

She vanished from the post and Nicholas ran up the remainder of the road and swung himself over the little gate which led into the small square yard immediately surrounding the house.  At the pump near the back door his father, who had just come from work, was washing his hands before going into supper, and near a row of pointed chicken coops the three younger children were “shooing” up the tiny yellow broods.  The yard was unkempt and ugly, run wild in straggling ailanthus shoots and littered with chips from the wood-pile.

As he entered the house he saw his stepmother placing a dish of fried bacon upon the table, which was covered with a “watered” oilcloth of a bright walnut tint.  At her back stood Sarah Jane with a plate of corn bread in one hand and a glass pitcher containing buttermilk in the other.  She was a slight, flaxen-haired child, with wizened features and sore, red eyelids.

As his stepmother caught sight of him she stopped on her way to the stove and surveyed him with sharp but not unkindly eyes.