And him holding to my hand, his hand that hot and confident, so that I was like to say: Look-a-here. Can’t you see that mule yonder? He never had no business over here, so he never come, not being nothing but a mule. Because a fellow can see ever now and then that children have more sense than him. But he don’t like to admit it to them until they have beards. After they have a beard, they are too busy because they don’t know if they’ll ever quite make it back to where they were in sense before they was haired, so you don’t mind admitting then to folks that are worrying about the same thing that ain’t worth the worry that you are yourself.
Then we was over and we stood there, looking at Cash turning the wagon around. We watched them drive back down the road to where the trail turned off into the bottom. After a while the wagon was out of sight.
“We better get on down to the ford and git ready to help,” I said.
“I give her my word,” Anse says. “It is sacred on me. I know you begrudge it, but she will bless you in heaven.”
“Well, they got to finish circumventing the land before they can dare the water,” I said. “Come on.”
“It’s the turning back,” he said. “It ain’t no luck in turning back.”
He was standing there, humped, mournful, looking at the empty road beyond the swagging and swaying bridge. And that gal, too, with the lunch-basket on one arm and that package under the other. Just going to town. Bent on it. They would risk the fire and the earth and the water and all just to eat a sack of bananas. “You ought to laid over a day,” I said. “It would ’a’ fell some by morning. It mought not ’a’ rained tonight. And it can’t get no higher.”
“I give my promise,” he says. “She is counting on it.”