To-morrow, he must plant the cotton while the young moon waxed strong. There was much to do. He needed help. Maybe this child being born would be a boy-child, a help for his old age. A sorrowful woman will bear a boy-child, nine times out of ten, and God knows, that girl had been sorrowful. When she helped him plant the corn, she had dropped a tear in mighty nigh every hill along with the seed. No wonder it grew fast. Soon as the moon waned, the root crops, potatoes, pindars, chufas, turnips, must be planted. Field plants have no sense. If you plant crops that fruit above the ground on a waning moon, they get all mixed up and bear nothing but heavy roots, and root crops planted on a waxing moon will go all to rank tops no matter how you try to stop them. Plants have to be helped along or they waste time and labor, just the same as children you undertake to raise. That poor little girl was started off wrong. She was born on a moon so wrong that her mammy died in her birthing. He had done his best to raise the little motherless creature right, but he made a bad mistake when he let her go to Blue Brook without him last summer. She went to meet his kin and to attend the revival meeting. She was full of life and raven for pleasure. He couldn’t refuse her when she asked to go. But he hadn’t made her understand that those Blue Brook men were wicked devils. He knew it. He had been one of them himself. Poor little girl, she knew it now! Now when it was too late for anybody to help her out of her trouble. Years ago, over thirty of them, he had left Blue Brook and come to Sandy Island on account of a girl. She had named her child April because it was born this very month. Afterward, she had married and forgotten him. Now she was dead, but her child, April, was the finest man on Blue Brook. Barely middle-aged, April was already the plantation foreman, ruling the other farm-hands, telling them what to do, what not to do, and raising the best crops in years. April had made a name for himself. Everybody who came from Blue Brook had something to say about him, either of his kindness or of his meanness, his long patience or his quick temper, his open-handedness or his close-fistedness. On Blue Brook, April was a man among men. He had seen him, a tall, lean, black, broad-shouldered fellow, so much like himself that it was a wonder everybody didn’t know that he was April’s daddy. But they didn’t. For April’s mother had been as close-mouthed as the girl lying yonder on the bed. She never did tell who fooled her and made her have sin. She died without telling. Some day he’d like to tell April himself. But after all, what was the use? April had taken the name of his mother’s lawful husband and he loved the man who had raised him as well as an own father could have done. Why upset them?