The words were all erased now and her hands dusted free of the chalk. She was thinking of the men of the countryside as she knew them, as she had seen them about. She called the roll of them with a swift thought as she stood there, appraising them, measuring their quality, at first in one mass and later as one by one. Will Judson was busy, intent on his children and his business, scarcely aware of his wife, at whom he never looked. He was a pleasant, abstracted man of middle age, too deeply married to his wife ever to see her again. Thad was a kind, cheerful, conceited yokel. Fishman was married to his bottle, coupled by way of his beloved glass. Lee Cummings went then down the frieze of the roll and passed quickly by, for he had the odor of a goat or of a discarded kidney thrown behind the slaughter-house ten days. “It may be the corduroy he wears,” she said, and he passed with the calling of his name. Charlie Johns then, a gay youth, given to cock-fighting and over-dressing on Sundays, a lightness of touch in his goings and comings. The eldest Weakley boy was solid matter and was devoted to Rowena West, as was said, devoted finally and without departure. The Baker girls, sitting over their shadow-work, had told her this. West came then, Lucian West. He had been to visit the school with his daughters, Susan and Sallie, to see how they did. He was Rowena’s father, husband to their mother. He was full of kindly feeling and full of the goodness of life, and he went with brisk steps along the road, giving cheerful good-mornings to all the men and women alike, but the women would like him best. Beyond, in the next farm, past West, came Caleb Burns and his men, Shirley Bond and Lum Brown, the negro who shot the beef cattle. Lum Brown came and went on loaded wagons, a large man firmly put together, a large kindly mouth that turned easily with its utterances. Shirley Bond she knew of from the West child, Sallie; he rode away out of the country every Sunday to see some woman somewhere. He was a great sunburnt man, a giant upstanding to take the red of the sun on his face and on his neck, and he belonged with the Shorthorn cows in the pastures and breeding pens. Caleb Burns, then, the master of the Shorthorns, seen going along the road on the top of a wagon piled with old hay. He was the owner of the cows, Mollie, Queen, and Betty Hawthorne, and of the one Sallie had been taught not to dare name, the one she called the “male cow,” Good Boy. He rode down into the village on a trim horse with three white feet. “He’s a queer one,” Thad said to her once, explaining him after his departure, “but it takes all sorts to make up this-here world. He’s a queer one, but we-all got used to his ways a long while back, and we hardly notice how queer he might seem to a new-comer in our midst.” There had been a woman about him once, but Sallie was vaguely informed of her. He was a sun-browned man with dark hair, a gaunt man.