"Dey cut him open in de horse-pittle, an' he's dead sho'. A nigger what wu'k dar done tol' me."
Stella was close-lipped about the matter. "Dey do say he is daid dis time, Miss' Mary. Too much preachin' ain't nacheral."
Diana saw, for the fourth time, the slouching figure in the dusk of the mountain roadway, as she returned that night from the big house. She came up to him with certainty, by now used to the mixed menace of his presence. "What are you hangin' around me for, Jim Hewin?"
"You know what I want, brown baby. Aw, don't be so damn' stingy!"
He took her familiarly by her dusky, well-rounded arm; she shook him off petulantly. "I've told you——"
He held the arm more confidently. "You ain't in no hurry. We'll walk up a piece——"
Her feet retarded, as he turned up the stubby grass-rugged path. He pulled her after him with a low chuckle of insolent arrogance.
Her tones were more docile, soberly argumentative. "Why don't you go to your white girl? You told me you were going to get married——"
"She kin wait."
They were deep in the obscurity of the oak thicket now; the path was cherty, grassless. She walked easily in front of him, then stopped in the topmost shadow, as the murky panorama of the night city opened before them. She stood wrapped in the dusky wonder of a sky stained with echoes of furnace fire, a dun horizon broken with twinkling patterns of streets and avenues. Around her waist he coiled a determined arm; in her he saw the beauty that she found in the broken mystery below.