it don't feel, but I think it does. Everything
seems to think and feel. See it nodding its head to them other trees in
the woods? and a-wantin' to shake hands! But it can't move. I think that
tree must a growed in the night."

"Why, Shocky?"

"'Cause it's so crooked," and Shocky laughed at his own conceit; "must a
growed when they was no light so as it could see how to grow."

And then they walked on in silence a minute. Presently Shocky began
looking up into Ralph's eyes to get a smile. "I guess that tree feels
just like me. Don't you?"

"Why, how do you feel?"

"Kind o' bad and lonesome, and like as if I wanted to die, you know.
Felt that way ever sence they put my father into the graveyard, and sent
my mother to the poor-house and Hanner to ole Miss Means's. What kind of
a place is a poor-house? Is it a poorer place than Means's? I wish I was
dead and one of them clouds was a-carryin' me and Hanner and mother up
to where father's gone, you know! I wonder if God forgets all about poor
folks when their father dies and their mother gits into the poor-house?
Do you think He does? Seems so to me. Maybe God lost track of my father
when he come away from England and crossed over the sea. Don't nobody on
Flat Creek keer fer God, and I guess God don't keer fer Flat Creek. But
I would, though, ef he'd git my mother out of the poor-house and git
Hanner away from Means's, and let me kiss my mother every night, you
know, and sleep on my Hanner's arm, jes like I used to afore father
died, you see."

Ralph wanted to speak, but he couldn't. And so Shocky, with his eyes
looking straight ahead, and as if forgetting Ralph's presence, told over
the thoughts that he had often talked over to the fence-rails and the
trees. "It was real good in Mr. Pearson to take me, wasn't it? Else I'd
a been bound out tell I was twenty-one, maybe, to some mean man like
Ole Means. And I a'n't but seven. And it would take me fourteen years to
git twenty-one, and I never could live with my mother again after Hanner
gets done her time. 'Cause, you see, Hanner'll be through in three more
year, and I'll be ten and able to work, and we'll git a little place
about as big as Granny Sanders's, and--"

Ralph did not hear another word of what Shocky said that afternoon. For
there, right before them, was Granny Sanders's log-cabin, with its row
of lofty sunflower stalks, now dead and dry, in front, with its
rain-water barrel by the side of the low door, and i