The Heart of the Hills #231766

Up after the noonday meal; at the boy's, a comely woman with masses of black hair sat in the porch with her hands folded, and lifting her eyes now and then to the top of the spur. Of a sudden the man impatiently threw down his hoe, but through the battered straw hat that bobbed up and down on the boy's head, one lock tossed on like a jet black plume until he reached the end of his strag gling row of corn. There he straightened up and brushed his earth-stained fingers across a dull red splotch on one cheek of his sullen set face. His heavy lashes lifted and he looked long at the woman on the porch — looked without anger now and with a new decision in his steady eyes. He was getting a little too big to be struck by a woman, even if she were his own mother, and nothing like that must happen again.