Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. 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.