1IT’S a hard country on man; it’s hard. Eight miles of the sweat of his body washed up outen the Lord’s earth, where the Lord Himself told him to put it. Nowhere in this sinful world can a honest, hard-working man profit. It takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off of them that sweats. It ain’t the hard-working man, the farmer. Sometimes I wonder why we keep at it. It’s because there is a reward for us above, where they can’t take their motors and such. Every man will be equal there and it will be taken from them that have and give to them that have not by the Lord.

2But it’s a long wait, seems like. It’s bad that a fellow must earn the reward of his right-doing by flouting hisself and his dead. We drove all the rest of the day and got to Samson’s at dust-dark and then that bridge was gone, too. They hadn’t never seen the river so high, and it’s not done raining yet. There was old men that hadn’t never seen nor heard of it being so in the memory of man. I am the chosen of the Lord, for who He loveth, so doeth He chastiseth. But I be durn if He don’t take some curious ways to show it, seems like.

3But now I can get them teeth. That will be a comfort. It will.