Woodie had the feel of things crumbling down inside of him. “I’ll--stop him somehow!” he said in a choked voice; but he felt frightened and confused. He looked into the troubled eyes of the little organist. “What can I do, sis--Charity?” he faltered. “Ah dunno, chile! Ah dunno! Ah’s knowed yer paw all mah life, and, preacher or no preacher, Zach Draper ain’t fitten ter tote swill fer um!” “Can’t you--can’t you change him somehow? Can’t you talk him out of it?” “Ah’s done tried ter! Ah’s talked ter um till he won’t listen ter me no mo’.” Woodie shook with sudden anger. “Did you tell him he’s ornery--lowdown--mean?” “Gawd A’mighty, boy, Ah dassent! Ah’m skeered uv um! Ev’ybody’s skeered uv um!” She lowered her voice almost to a whisper: “Dey do say he’s got er han’!” Woodie shivered. You got a “hand” from a conjure doctor, and it gave you supernatural power over your enemies. He had thought, off at school, that he had come to regard such things as nonsense, but down here a deep live current of terror ran through the people, and he found himself tingling to it as he used to do. Woodie stood for a long time beneath the swaying trumpet flowers, thinking. There was one person who could stop Draper if she would. Miss Jinny Pickens could stop any coloured man or woman in that county from doing anything. His grandfather and grandmother had belonged to her, and he had seen his father and mother turn to her in every emergency. He went to her now as naturally as they would have done. But first he told the three women what Charity had said, and made them promise to help him keep it from his mother. From the other side of the gentle tree-smothered valley that stretched before it the house lifted itself with its old air of remote nobility, but when he had walked up the long, winding driveway under the oaks and hickory trees and sycamores, he saw that the paint had flaked from the tall Corinthian columns--which no longer had the effect of propping up the sky--and that the iron balcony behind them drooped like a disillusioned mouth. And at the rear, where all coloured people were supposed to enter and his feet took him of their own accord, the arms of the tall fig tree couldn’t hide the broken shutters at the windows, the gaps in the railing of the upstairs porch, nor the rotting boards of the steps--the air the old place had of dropping minutely into ruin, bit by bit. The harsh smell of fig leaves in the sun came to him strongly, and he took a sudden sharp breath. It brought back his father more vividly than even the sight of his dead face had done. Tampa Simmons seemed to be standing against the big three-fingered leaves, heavily listed to the left on account of his lame leg, just as he had stood that day when he had brought cream (and Woodie) to the back yard and Miss Jinny had come out to talk with him.