Jewel stops at the spring and takes the gourd from the willow branch and drinks. Tull's wagon stands beside the spring, hitched to the rail, the reins wrapped about the seat stanchion. In single file and five feet apart and Jewel now in front, we go on up the path toward the foot of the bluff.
Still staring straight ahead, his pale eyes like wood set into his wooden face, he crosses the floor in four strides with the rigid gravity of a cigar store Indian dressed in patched overalls and endued with life from the hips down, and steps in a single stride through the opposite window and into the path again just as I come around the corner. Jewel, fifteen feet behind me, looking straight ahead, steps in a single stride through the window. When we reach it I turn and follow the path which circles the house. Square, with a broken roof set at a single pitch, it leans in empty and shimmering dilapidation in the sunlight, a single broad window in two opposite walls giving onto the approaches of the path.
The cottonhouse is of rough logs, from between which the chinking has long fallen. The path runs straight as a plumb-line, worn smooth by feet and baked brick-hard by July, between the green rows of laid-by cotton, to the cottonhouse in the center of the field, where it turns and circles the cottonhouse at four soft right angles and goes on across the field again, worn so by feet in fading precision.
Although I am fifteen feet ahead of him, anyone watching us from the cottonhouse can see Jewel's frayed and broken straw hat a full head above my own. Darl Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file.
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