"Are you sure you're not just wanting to spite Webb and Kephart?"

For a few moments Harris didn't respond. Pemberton could hear the older man's breath slow. When Harris spoke, his words were more measured but just as belligerent.

"If we don't do this deal, Pemberton, we never do one, and that includes Townsend's acreage."

"But if the transaction's gone this far…"

"We can still get the land if we pay off Luckadoo. That's the only reason he called me in the first place. It's just going to cost more."

"How much more?"

"Five hundred," Harris said. "Luckadoo's giving us an hour to make up our minds. Like I said, we do this deal or we never do another one. That's the way of it, so make up your mind."

"I'll have to talk to Serena first."

"Talk to her then," Harris said, lowering his voice for a moment. "She's smart enough to know what's best in your long-term interest."

"I'll call you back as soon as I can."

"You do that," Harris said. "And make damn sure soon is within an hour."

Pemberton hung up and walked to the stable. Serena was in the back stall with the eagle, her fingers reddened from the raw meat she fed the bird. He told her about the phone call. She fed the eagle a last piece of meat and placed the hood back over its head.

"We need Harris' money," Serena said. "We'll have to humor him, this time, but have Lawyer Covington put in the contract that Harris can't begin any mining operations until the site's timber is cut. Harris has found something up there besides kaolin and some copper, something he doesn't want us to know about. We'll hire our own geologist and find out what it is, then refuse to cut the timber until Harris gives us a percentage, a good percentage."

Serena stepped out of the stall. She handed Pemberton the tin plate and lifted the wooden latch, closed the stall door. A few stringy remnants remained on the plate. Many of the workers claimed that Serena fed the eagle the hearts of animals as well, to make the bird fiercer, but Pemberton had never seen her do such a thing and believed it just one more bit of the camp's lore about Serena.

"I'd better go call Harris."

"Call Covington as well," Serena said. "I want him there when Harris talks to Luckadoo."

"Our having to pass on Townsend's land will doubtless delight Albright," Pemberton said, "but at least this will take care of Webb and Kephart on one front."

"I'm not so sure about that," Serena said.

WITH the purchase of a second skidder, the men now worked on two fronts. By the first Monday in April the northern crews had crossed Davidson Branch and made their way to Shanty Mountain, while the crews to the south followed Straight Creek west. Recent rains had slowed progress, not just forcing men to slog through mud but causing more accidents as well. Snipes' crews worked the west end of Shanty. Since McIntyre hadn't recovered from the falling snake incident, a man named Henryson had been hired as his replacement. Henryson and Ross were second cousins who'd grown up together in Bearpen Cove. Both men viewed the world and its inhabitants with a sharp and pessimistic wit. This shared dourness Snipes had duly noted, and hinted it would be the subject of some future philosophic discourse.

A cold rain had fallen all day, and by mid-morning the workers resembled half-formed Adams dredged from the mud, not yet molded to human. When Snipes signaled for a break, the men didn't bother to seek what shelter thicker trees might afford them. They merely dropped their tools where they stood and sat down on the boggy earth. They looked as one toward the camp and its day's-end promise of warmth and dryness with longing and a seeming degree of skepticism, as if unsure the camp's existence wasn't some phasma conjured in their waterlogged heads.

Ross took out his tobacco and rolling papers but found them too wet to hold fire even in the unlikely event he could find a dry match.

"I got enough mud daubed on my ass to grow a peck of corn," Ross said miserably.

"I got enough just in my hair to chink a cabin," Henryson said.

"Makes me wish I was a big boar hog, cause at least then I'd enjoy slopping around in it," Stewart sighed. "There can't be a worser job in the world."

Dunbar nodded toward the camp where several job seekers sat on the commissary porch steps, enduring the rain in hopes of proving their fortitude as potential hires.

"Yet there's folks wanting them."

"And more coming every day," Henryson said. "They's jumping off them boxcars passing through Waynesville like fleas off a hound."

"Coming from far and near too," Ross said. "I used to think hard times rooted best in these hills, but this depression seems to have laid a fair crop of them most everywhere."

The men did not speak for a few minutes. Ross continued to stare sullenly at his drowned cigarette while Snipes scraped mud off his overalls, trying to reveal some remnants of brightness amid the muck. Stewart took out the pocket Bible he'd wrapped in a square of oilcloth, shielded the book from the rain with the cloth. He mouthed the words as he read.

"Is McIntyre doing any better?" Dunbar asked when Stewart put the Bible back in his pocket.

"Not a lick," Stewart said. "His missus took him back over to the nervous hospital and for a while they was favoring electrocuting him."

"Electrocuting him?" Dunbar exclaimed.

Stewart nodded. "That's what them doctors said. Claimed it for a new thing they been talking up big in Boston and New York. They get some cables same as you'd spark a car battery off with and pinch them on his ears and run lectricity all up and down through him."

"Lord have mercy," Dunbar said, "they figure McIntyre for a man or a light bulb."

"His missus don't like the idea one bit neither, and I'm with her," Stewart said. "How could you argue such a thing would do anybody good?"

"They's a scientific principle involved in it," Snipes said, speaking for the first time since the men had stopped work. "Your body needs a certain amount of electricity to keep going, same as a radio or a telephone or even the universe itself. A man like McIntyre, it's like he's got a low battery and needs sparked back up. Electricity, like the dog, is one of man's best friends."

Stewart pondered Snipes' words a few moments.

"Then how come they use it down there in Raleigh to kill them murderers and such?"

Snipes looked at Stewart and shook his head, much in the manner of a teacher who knows his fate is to always have a Stewart in his class.

"Electricity is like most everything else in nature, Stewart. They's two kinds of humans, your good and bad, just like you got two kinds of weather, your good and bad, right?"

"What about days it rains and that's good for a man's bean crop but bad because the feller was wanting to go fishing?" Ross interjected.

"That ain't relevant to this particular discussion," Snipes retorted, turning back to Stewart.

"So you understand what I'm a getting at, there being the good and the bad in all manner of things."

Stewart nodded.

"Well," Snipes said. "That's your scientific principle in action. Anyways, what they'd use on McIntyre is the good kind of electricity because it just goes into you and gets everything back to flowing good. What they use on them criminals fries your brains and innards up. Now that's the bad kind."

THE rain had not lessened by afternoon, but despite Pemberton's protests Serena mounted the Arabian and rode to check the southern front where Galloway's crew cut on the sloping land above Straight Creek. The angled ground would have made footing tenuous on a sunny day, but in the rain the workers labored with the slipfootedness of seamen. To make matters more difficult, Galloway's crew had a new lead chopper, a boy of seventeen stout enough but inexperienced. Galloway was showing where to make the undercut on a barrel-thick white oak when the youth's knee buckled as the axe swung forward.