In the woods the pale bodies of the beeches seemed to melt into the cloudy atmosphere.  There was no wind among the trees, and the pervading dampness had robbed the yellowed leaves of their silken rustle.  They fluttered softly, hanging limp from the drooping branches as if attached by invisible threads.  As he went on a deep bluish smoke issued from among some far-off poplars where a farmer was burning brush in a clearing.  The smoke hung low above the undergrowth, assuming eccentric outlines and varied tones of dusk.  Presently the fires glimmered nearer, and he saw the red tongues of the flames and heard the parched crackling of consuming leaves.  The figures of the workers were limned grotesquely against the ruddy background with a startling and unreal absence of detail.  They looked like incarnate shadows—­stalking between the dim beeches and the blazing brush heaps.  A few drops of rain fell suddenly, and the fires began slowly to die away.  At the foot of the crumbling “worm” fence, skirting the edges of the wood, deep wind-drifts of russet leaves stirred mournfully.  Later they would be hauled away to assist in the winter dressing of the fallows; now they beat helplessly against the retarding rails like a vanquished army of invasion.

Nicholas left the wood and passed the field of broomsedge on his way to the house.  Beyond the barnyard he saw the long rows of pine staves that had supported the shocks of peanuts, and from the direction of the field he caught sight of his father, driven homeward by the threatening rain.

Sairy Jane, who was bringing a string of dried snaps from the outhouse, called to him to hurry before the cloudburst.  She was a lank, colourless girl, with bad teeth and small pale eyes.  Jubal, at the churn in the hall, rested from his labours as Nicholas entered, and grinned as he pointed to his mother in the kitchen.  Marthy Burr was ironing.  As Nicholas crossed the threshold, she stopped in her passage from the stove and looked at him, a flash of pride softening her pain-scarred features.

“Lord, what a man you are, Nick!” she exclaimed with a kind of triumph.  “When I heard yo’ step on the po’ch I could have swo’ed it was yo’ pa’s.”

Nicholas nodded at her abstractedly as he took off his hat.

“Where’s pa?” he asked carelessly.  “I thought he’d have got in before me.  I saw him as I came up.”

“I reckon he won’t git in befo’ he gits a drench-in’,” responded his stepmother, glancing indifferently through the back window.  “If he does it’ll be the first time sence he war born.  ‘Twarn’t nothin’ to be done in the fields, nohow, an’ so I told him, but he ain’t never rested yet, an’ I don’t reckon he’s goin’ to till I bury him.”

As she spoke the rain fell heavily, and presently Amos Burr came in, shaking the water from his head and shoulders.

“I told you ‘twarn’t no use yo’ goin’ to the fields befo’ the rain,” began his wife admonishingly.  “But you’re a man all over, an’ it seems like you’re ‘bliged to go yo’ own way for the sheer pleasure of goin’ agin somebody else’s.  If I’d been pesterin’ you all day long to go down thar to look at that ploughin’, you’d be settin’ in yo’ chair now, plum dry.”