“This,” said Mr. Yancy, “are Scratch Hill, sonny.  Why Scratch Hill?  Some say it’s the fleas; others agin hold it’s the eternal bother of making a living here, but whether fleas or living you scratch fo’ both.”

CHAPTER II

YANCY TELLS A MORAL TALE

In the deep peace that rested like a benediction on the pine-clad slopes of Scratch Hill the boy Hannibal followed at Yancy’s heels as that gentleman pursued the not arduous rounds of temperate industry which made up his daily life, for if Yancy were not completely idle he was responsible for a counterfeit presentment of idleness having most of the merits of the real article.  He toiled casually in a small cornfield and a yet smaller truck patch, but his work always began late, when it began at all, and he was easily dissuaded from continuing it; indeed, his attitude toward it seemed to challenge interference.

In the winter, when the weather conditions were perfectly adjusted to meet certain occult exactions he had come to require, Yancy could be induced to go into the woods and there labor with his ax.  But as he pointed out to Hannibal, a poor man’s capital was his health, and he being a poor man it behooved him to have a jealous care of himself.  He made use of the dull days of mingled mist and drizzle for hunting, work being clearly out of the question; one could get about over the brown floor of the forest in silence then, and there was no sun to glint the brass mountings of his rifle.  The fine days he professed to regard with keen suspicion as weather breeders, when it was imprudent to go far from home, especially in the direction of the Crenshaw timber lands, which for years had been the scene of all his gainful industry, and where he seemed to think nature ready to assume her most sinister aspect.  Again in the early spring, when the young oak leaves were the size of squirrel’s ears and the whippoorwills began calling as the long shadows struck through the pine woods, the needs of his corn ground battled with his desire to fish.  In all such crises of the soul Mr. Yancy was fairly vanquished before the struggle began; but to the boy his activities were perfectly ordered to yield the largest return in contentment.

The Barony had been offered for sale and bought in by Crenshaw for eleven thousand dollars, this being the amount of his claim.  Some six months later he sold the plantation for fifteen thousand dollars to Nathaniel Ferris, of Currituck County.

“There’s money in the old place, Bob, at that figure,” Crenshaw told Yancy.

“There are so,” agreed Yancy, who was thinking Crenshaw had lost no time in getting it out.