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By Root 2380 0

she was not there. He hung over the edge of the bed and looked beneath it but she was not there either. He got up and dressed and went outside. She was sitting in the swing on the front porch, exactly the way she had been yesterday, looking across the lawn into the woods. The old man was very much irritated. Every morning since she had been able to climb, he had waked up to find her either on his bed or underneath it. It was apparent that this morning she preferred the sight of the woods. He decided to ignore her behavior for the present and then bring it up later when she was over her pique. He sat down in the swing beside her but she continued to look at the woods. “I thought you and me’d go into town and have us a look at the boats in the new boat store,” he said.

She didn’t turn her head but she asked suspiciously, in a loud voice. “What else are you going for?”

“Nothing else,” he said.

After a pause she said, “If that’s all, I’ll go,” but she did not bother to look at him.

“Well put on your shoes,” he said. “I ain’t going to the city with a barefoot woman.” She did not bother to laugh at this joke.

The weather was as indifferent as her disposition. The sky did not look as if it were going to rain or as if it were not going to rain. It was an unpleasant gray and the sun had not troubled to come out. All the way into town, she sat looking at her feet, which stuck out in front of her, encased in heavy brown school shoes. The old man had often sneaked up on her and found her alone in conversation with her feet and he thought she was speaking with them silently now. Every now and then her lips moved but she said nothing to him and let all his remarks pass as if she had not heard them. He decided it was going to cost him considerable to buy her good humor again and that he had better do it with a boat, since he wanted one too. She had been talking boats ever since the water backed up onto his place. They went first to the boat store. “Show us the yachts for po’ folks!” he shouted jovially to the clerk as they entered.

“They’re all for po’ folks!” the clerk said. “You’ll be po’ when you finish buying one!” He was a stout youth in a yellow shirt and blue pants and he had a ready wit. They exchanged several clever remarks in rapid-fire succession. Mr. Fortune looked at Mary Fortune to see if her face had brightened. She stood staring absently over the side of an outboard motor boat at the opposite wall.

“Ain’t the lady innerested in boats?” the clerk asked.

She turned and wandered back out onto the sidewalk and got in the car again. The old man looked after her with amazement. He could not believe that a child of her intelligence could be acting this way over the mere sale of a field. “I think she must be coming down with something,” he said. “We’ll come back again,” and he returned to the car.

“Let’s go get us an ice-cream cone,” he suggested, looking at her with concern.

“I don’t want no ice-cream cone,” she said.

His actual destination was the courthouse but he did not want to make this apparent. “How’d you like to visit the tencent store while I tend to a little bidnis of mine?” he asked. “You can buy yourself something with a quarter I brought along.”

“I ain’t got nothing to do in no tencent store,” she said. “I don’t want no quarter of yours.”

If a boat was of no interest, he should not have thought a quarter would be and reproved himself for that stupidity. “Well what’s the matter, sister?” he asked kindly. “Don’t you feel good?”

She turned and looked him straight in the face arid said with a slow concentrated ferocity, “It’s the lawn. My daddy grazes his calves there. We won’t be able to see the woods any more.”

The old man had held his fury in as long as he could. “He beats you!” he shouted. “And you worry about where he’s going to graze his calves!”

“Nobody’s ever beat me in my life,” she said, “and if anybody did, I’d kill him.”

A man seventy-nine years of age cannot let himself be run over by a child of nine. His face set in a look that was just a; determined as hers. “Are you a Fortune,” he said,