Temple ceased to struggle.
She lay still, rigid.
The woman could hear her wild breathing.
“Will you get up and walk quiet?” the woman said.
“Yes!” Temple said.
“Will you get me out of here?
Will you?
Will you?”
“Yes,” the woman said.
“Get up.”
Temple got up, the shucks whispering.
In the further darkness Gowan snored, savage and profound.
At first Temple couldn’t stand alone.
The woman held her up.
“Stop it,” the woman said.
“You’ve got to stop it.
You’ve got to be quiet.”
“I want my clothes,” Temple whispered.
“I haven’t got anything on but.……”
“Do you want your clothes,” the woman said, “or do you want to get out of here?”
“Yes,” Temple said.
“Anything.
If you’ll just get me out of here.”
On their bare feet they moved like ghosts.
They left the house and crossed the porch and went on toward the barn.
When they were about fifty yards from the house the woman stopped and turned and jerked Temple up to her, and gripping her by the shoulders, their faces close together, she cursed Temple in a whisper, a sound no louder than a sigh and filled with fury.
Then she flung her away and they went on.
They entered the hallway.
It was pitch dark.
Temple heard the woman fumbling at the wall.
A door creaked open; the woman took her arm and guided her up a single step into a floored room where she could feel walls and smell a faint, dusty odor of grain, and closed the door behind them.
As she did so something rushed invisibly nearby in a scurrying scrabble, a dying whisper of fairy feet.
Temple whirled, treading on something that rolled under her foot, and sprang toward the woman.
“It’s just a rat,” the woman said, but Temple hurled herself upon the other, flinging her arms about her, trying to snatch both feet from the floor.
“A rat?” she wailed, “a rat?
Open the door!
Quick!”
“Stop it!
Stop it!” the woman hissed.
She held Temple until she ceased.
Then they knelt side by side against the wall.
After a while the woman whispered:
“There’s some cottonseed-hulls over there.
You can lie down.”
Temple didn’t answer.
She crouched against the woman, shaking slowly, and they squatted there in the black darkness, against the wall.
10
While the woman was cooking breakfast, the child still—or already—asleep in the box behind the stove, she heard a blundering sound approaching across the porch and stop at the door.
When she looked around she saw the wild and battered and bloody apparition which she recognised as Gowan.
His face, beneath a two-days’ stubble, was marked, his lip was cut.