She sat for a little while on the doorstep and rested. The sun was sinking fast. More cars rattled by in the dust, as men went home from the fields. Soon it would be dinner time at The Chimnies. She must find Jackie quickly. In a panic she realized that her letter of explanation really hadn’t explained things. Jackie was needed to set matters right and ease Aunt Eunice’s mind. She got to her aching feet and plodded stiffly on through the powdery dust.
She thought that she would never reach the fourth house. It seemed always to recede, as she drew near it on her weary feet. It was a square house under some elms. It needed paint badly. There were lilac bushes by the sagging front door. In the side-yard an old hammock swung between two trees. In the trodden dirt beside the hammock two little children were playing—a girl at the toddling age, and a boy in overalls, who was a couple of years older. With joy she saw that they weren’t foreign children. Hopefully she went up to them.
“Hello!” said the little boy, with a smeared and friendly smile.
“Hello!” said Caroline. “Who lives here?”
“I do,” said the boy. He went on digging up dirt with an iron spoon and putting it into an old baking dish.
“What’s your name?” Caroline pursued.
“Freddie,” he told her. “She’s Annie. She’s my sister.”
“But what’s your other name?” begged Caroline. “What’s your mother’s name?”
“My mother’s dead,” Freddie told her nonchalantly. “Aunt Marfa’s my mother now.”
Aunt Martha! Then her search was over. This was the farm, and here were two of her cousins, and the cows were somewhere, ambushed, perhaps, in the big barn that was filling fast with shadows.