Grandma had one piece of jewelry left, besides her wide gold wedding ring--a cameo brooch. She traded it for a nanny goat. On the ever useful dump the men found a wrecked trailer and they mended it so that it would hold the goat, which the children named Carrie. Later, Grandma thought, they might get some laying hens, too. Two days after the Big Storm, they set out for the Texas cottonfields. Mrs. King stuck a big box of lunch into the car, and an old tent which she said she couldn't use. "I hope I'll be forgiven for never paying heed to fruit tramps--fruit workers--before," she said soberly. "From now on I aim to. Though I shan't find none like you-all, with a Seth Thomas clock and suchlike." [Illustration: Off to the cotton fields] After the truck ride from Jersey even a fifteen-dollar automobile was luxury, with its roomy seats and two folding seats that let down between. Grandma joked, in her tart way, "I never looked to be touring the country in my own auto!" Rose-Ellen jiggled in the back seat. "Peekaneeka, Gramma!" she said. When it rained, the children scurried to fasten the side curtains and then huddled together to keep warm while they played tick-tack-toe or guessing games. For meals they stopped where they could milk Carrie and build a small fire. At night they put up the tent, unless a farmer or a policeman ordered them to move on. At first it seemed more of a peekaneeka than any of their adventures thus far. They met and passed many old cars like their own, and the children counted the strange things that were tied on car or trailer tops while Grandma counted license plates-when Sally was not too fussy. There was always something new to see, especially when they were passing through Louisiana. Daddy said Louisiana was the one state in the country that had parishes instead of counties, and that that was because it had been French in the early days. Almost everything else about it seemed as strange to the children--the Spanish moss hanging in long streamers from the live oak trees; the bayous, or arms of the river, clogged with water hyacinths; the fields of sugar cane; and the Negro cabins, with their glassless windows and their big black kettles boiling in the back yards. "But the funniest thing I saw," Rose-Ellen said later, "was a cow lying in the bayou, with purple water hyacinths draped all over her, as if it was on purpose." After a few days, though, even this peekaneeka grew wearisome to the children; while Daddy and Grandpa grew more and more anxious about an angry spat-spat-spat from the Reo. So they were all glad to reach the cotton fields they had been steering toward. But there they did not find what they had hoped for. There were too many workers ahead of them and too little left to do. Tractors, it seemed, were taking the place of many men, one machine driving out two to five families.