he saw their lewd red mountain faces, and completed the image with sweat and corduroy. And in the town their city cousins. Brick, stucco, the white little eczema of Suburbia. Federated Half-Breeds of the World.
Into my Valley next with lawnmowers and front lawns. He ground out the life of the cigarette against an ashtray, and began a rapid window calculation of his horses, asses, kine, swine, and hens; the stored plenitude of his great barn, the heavy fruitage of his fields and orchards. A man came toward the house with a bucket of eggs in one hand and a bucket of butter in the other; each cake was stamped with a sheaf of wheat and wrapped loosely in clean white linen cloths. He smiled grimly: if attacked he could withstand a prolonged siege.
At Dixieland, Eliza slept soundly in a small dark room with a window opening on the uncertain light of the back porch. Her chamber was festooned with a pendant wilderness of cord and string; stacks of old newspapers and magazines were piled in the corners; and every shelf was loaded with gummed, labelled, half-filled medicine bottles. There was a smell in the air of mentholatum, Vick’s Pneumonia Cure, and sweet glycerine. The negress arrived, coming under the built-up house and climbing lazily the steep tunnel of back steps. She knocked at the door.
“Who’s there!” cried Eliza sharply, waking at once, and coming forward to the door. She wore a gray flannel nightgown over a heavy woollen undershirt that Ben had discarded: the pendant string floated gently to and fro as she opened the door, like some strange seamoss floating below the sea. Upstairs, in the small front room with the sleeping-porch, slept Miss Billie Edwards, twenty-four, of Missouri, the daring and masterful liontamer of Johnny L. Jones Combined Shows, then playing in the field on the hill behind the Plum Street School. Next to her, in the large airy room at the corner, Mrs. Marie Pert, forty-one, the wife of an itinerant and usually absent drug salesman, lay deep in the pit of alcoholic slumber. Upon each end of the mantel was a small snapshot in a silver frame—one of her absent daughter, Louise, eighteen, and one of Benjamin Gant, lying on the grass-bank in front of the house, propped on his elbow and wearing
