home at all on those nights and he had come up out of the woods when we got to the field. But we didn’t tell. Summer was almost over then; we knew that when the nights began to get cool, she would be done if he wasn’t.
But when fall came and the nights began to get longer, the only difference was that he would always be in bed for pa to wake him, getting him up at last in that first state of semi-idiocy like when it first started, worse than when he had stayed out all night.
“She’s sure a stayer,” I told Cash. “I used to admire her, but I downright respect her now.”
“It ain’t a woman,” he said.
“You know,” I said. But he was watching me. “What is it, then?”
“That’s what I aim to find out,” he said.
“You can trail him through the woods all night if you want to,” I said. “I’m not.”
“I ain’t trailing him,” he said.
“What do you call it, then?”
“I ain’t trailing him,” he said. “I don’t mean it that way.”
And so a few nights later I heard Jewel get up and climb out the window, and then I heard Cash get up and follow him. The next morning when I went to the barn, Cash was already there, the mules fed, and he was helping Dewey Dell milk. And when I saw him I knew that he knew what it was. Now and then I would catch him watching Jewel with a queer look, like having found out where Jewel went and what he was doing had given him something to really think about at last. But it was