With a child's helpless seeking, she walked down the hall. She must tell her mother at once. She heard Stella's rocker moving monotonously on the sagging front porch. A loose board squeaked in soothing rhythm.
Sharply she visualized the simple, wrinkled face.... It could never understand....
She turned wearily into her own room, and threw herself face downward on the bed. The loud pounding of her heart frightened her; she turned upon her back, staring at the constricted darkness of the blank ceiling.
XVII
An old negro, his sleep-wrinkled, shiny coat and paint-stained overalls itchy from stubble acquired in a deserted barn, idled down the switching track that ran behind the Judson lands. His scrubby gray beard was stained with blackberries; his knees were gritty and dank from kneeling beside the brook that slipped over the quartz ledges beside Billygoat Hill. In doubtful cogitation he knocked cinder and chert clusters down the steep fills, swinging his hickory stick with an air of ancient mastery.
"Lawd bless me, look at dem long houses!" as he passed the lower end of Hewintown.
A white man eyed him closely, a short man with a tarnished metal badge on his ore-stained coat.
"Got any wu'k?"
The guard relit his pipe. "Too old, nigger."