God's Little Acre Read Free

sign there’s gold somewhere.”
    Pluto screwed up his mouth and spat a stream of golden-yellow tobacco juice at a lizard under a rotten limb ten feet away. His aim was perfect. The scarlet lizard darted out of sight with his eyes stinging from Pluto’s tobacco juice.

CHAPTER II
    “I DON’T KNOW,” Pluto said, looking over the tops of his shoes for some other object at which to spit tobacco juice. “I don’t know. Somehow it seems to me like a waste of time to go digging these great big holes in the ground looking for gold. Maybe I’m just lazy, though. If I had the gold-fever like you folks, I reckon I’d be tearing up the patch like the rest. Somehow the gold-fever don’t seem to cling to me like it does to you folks. I can throw it off just by sitting down and thinking about it some.”
    “When you get the real honest-to-goodness gold-fever, Pluto, you can’t shake it loose to save your soul. Maybe you ought to be glad you ain’t got the fever. I don’t regret it none myself, now that it’s in my blood, but I reckon I ain’t like you. A man can’t be lazy and have the fever at the same time. It makes a man be up and doing.”
    “I haven’t got the time to spend digging in the ground,” Pluto said. “I just can’t spare it.”
    “If you had the fever, you wouldn’t have time for nothing else,” Ty Ty said. “It gets a man just like liquor does, or chasing women. When you get a taste for it, you ain’t going to sit still till you get it some more. It just keeps up like that, adding up all the time.”
    “I reckon I understand it a little better now,” Pluto said. “But I still ain’t got it.”
    “I don’t reckon you’ll be apt to get it, either, till you train down so you can work some.”
    “My size don’t hinder me. It gets in my way sometimes, but I get around that.”
    Pluto spat haphazardly to the left. The lizard had not come back, and he could find nothing to aim at.
    “My only sorrow is that all my children wouldn’t stay here and help,” Ty Ty said slowly. “Buck and Shaw are still here helping me, and Buck’s wife, and Darling Jill, but the other girl went off up to Augusta and got a job in a cotton mill across the river in Horse Creek Valley and married, and I reckon you know about Jim Leslie just as well as I could tell you. He’s a big man up there in the city now, and he’s as rich as the next one to come along.”
    “Yes, yes,” Pluto said.
    “Something got into Jim Leslie at an early age. He wouldn’t have much to do with the rest of us, and still won’t. Right now, he takes on like he don’t know who I am. Just before his mother died, I took her up to the city one day to see him. She said she wanted to see him just one more time before she died. So I took her up there and went to his big white house on The Hill, and when he saw who it was at the door, he locked it and wouldn’t let us in. I reckon that sort of hastened his mother’s death, his acting that way, because she took sick and died before the week was out. He acted like he was ashamed of us, or something. And he still does. But the other girl is different. She’s just like the rest of us. She’s always pleased to see us when we go over to Horse Creek Valley to pay a call. I’ve always said that Rosamond was a right fine girl. Jim Leslie, though—I can’t say so much for him. He’s always looking the other way when I happen to meet him on the street in the city. He acts like he’s ashamed of me. I can’t see how that ought to be, though, because I’m his father.”
    “Yes, yes,” Pluto said.
    “I don’t know why my oldest boy should turn out like that. I’ve always been a religious man, all my life I have. I’ve always done the best I could, no matter how much I was provoked, and I’ve tried to get my boys and girls to do the same. You see that piece of ground over yonder, Pluto? Well, that’s God’s little acre. I set aside an acre of my farm for God twenty-seven years ago, when I