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for God to let them damn-blasted green-gutted worms bore into turnips. Us poor people always gets the worse end of all deals, it looks like to me. Maybe He don’t intend for humans to eat turnips at all; maybe He wants them raised for the hogs, but He don’t put nothing else down here on the land in their stead. Won’t nothing but turnips grow in winter-time.”
    Ellie May and Lov had rolled over and over a dozen or more times, like tumble-bugs; when they finally stopped, Lov was on top. Ada had followed them across the yard, and the grandmother too, and they stood ready to club Lov with the blackjack poles if he showed the first sign of trying to get up before Ellie May was ready to release him.
    While the others were in the far corner of the yard, Jeeter suddenly jumped to his feet, hugging the sack of turnips tight to his stomach, and ran out across the tobacco road towards the woods beyond the old cotton field. He did not pause to look back over his shoulder until he was nearly half a mile away. In another moment he had disappeared into the woods.
    The negroes were laughing so hard they could not stand up straight. They were not laughing at Lov, it was the actions of the Lesters that appeared so funny to them. Ada’s serious face and Ellie May’s frantic determination furnished a scene none of them could look at without laughing. They waited until every one had quieted down, and then they went slowly down the road towards Fuller talking about what they had seen in the Lester yard.
    Ada and the grandmother presently went back to the porch and sat down on the steps to watch Ellie May and Lov. There was no longer any danger of him getting away. He did not even try to get up now.
    “How many scoops-full does that No. 17 freight engine empty at the chute every morning, Lov?” Dude said. “Looks like to me them freight engines take on nearly twice as much coal as the passenger ones do. Them firemen on the freights is always chunking big hunks of coal at the nigger cabins along the track. I reckon that’s why they have to take on more coal than the passengers do. The passenger trains go faster, and the nigger firemen don’t have a chance to chunk out coal at the nigger cabins. I’ve seen near about a whole scoop-full of coal chunked out of the freights at one time. The railroad don’t know nothing about it, do they? If they did, they’d make the fireman stop that. They throw out more coal along the tracks than the engines burn, near about, I bet. That’s why niggers don’t have to cut wood all the time. They all burn railroad coal in their cabins.”
    Lov was too breathless to say anything.
    “Why don’t you burn coal in your house, instead of wood, Lov? Nobody would know about it. I ain’t going to tell on you, if you want to do that. It’s a lot easier than cutting wood every day.”
    Mother Lester, the old grandmother, sitting beside her bag of dead twigs, began groaning again and rubbing her sides with her fists. Presently she got up, lifted the bag over her shoulder, and went into the house towards the kitchen. She made a fire in the cook-stove and sat down beside it to wait until the twigs burned out. She was certain Jeeter would not bring any of the turnips back for her to eat. He would stay in the thicket and eat every one of them himself. While she waited for the fire to die down, she looked into the snuff jar on the shelf, but it was still empty. There had been no snuff in it for nearly a week, and Ada would not tell her where the full jar was hidden. The only time she ever had any snuff was when she accidently found the jar hidden away somewhere, and took some before anybody could stop her. Jeeter had knocked her down several times about doing that, and he had said he would kill her if he ever caught her stealing snuff again. There were times when she would have been willing to die, if she could only have for once all the snuff she wanted.
    “Why don’t the firemen blow the whistles more than they