The 2 Indians crossed the plantation, toward the quarters. Neat with whitewash, of <hand-hewn and fitted>
baked soft brick, the two rows of houses faced one another across the mild shady dust of the lane marked and scored
with naked feet and with <the crude> a few crude home-made toys <with> which children had discarded, <the walls
and roofs and the dust of the lane splotched with>

"I know what we will find," the first Indian said. <His name was Three Basket.>

"What we will not find," the second said. <His name was Yo-ko-no-pa-taw-fa> Tho it was noon, the lane
was empty, the doors of the houses empty; no cooking smoke rose from the chinked and plastered chimneys.

"Yao. It happened so when the grandfather of him who is the Man now, was the Man."

"You mean, who was the Man."

"Yao." The first Indian's name was Three Basket. He was perhaps 60. They were both squat men, a little solid,
paunchy, with big heads, big broad faces of a certain blurred serenity like carved <Mongolian> heads on a ruined
wall in Siam or Sumatra, looming out of a mist. The sun did it, the violent sun, the violent shade. Their hair
looked like sedge-grass in the dry season. Clamped thru one ear Three Basket had an enameled Paris-made snuff-box.
"Yao. I have said all the time that this way is not the good way. In old days, there were no quarters, no negroes.
A man's time was his own then. He had time. But now a man must spend his whole life finding work <that those who
sweat> for them who sweat to do."

"They are not like horses and dogs," the second said.

"You said it. Nothing contents them save sweat.

"It is not as tho the Man himself had <to bother> to find work for them."

"Yao. You said it. I do not like slavery. It is not <a> the good way. In the old days there was a good way. But not now.

"You do not remember the old way, either."

"But I have <heard> listened to them who did. And I have [lived?] this way. And man was not made to sweat."

"Yao. See what it has done to their flesh."

"Yao. It has a bitter taste, too."

"You have eaten <the> it?"

"Once. I was young then, and more hardy in the appetite than now. Now it is different."

"Yao. They are too valuable to eat now."

"There is a bitter taste to the flesh which I do not like."

"They are too valuable, any way."

The lane was empty. The mute meagre toys - the fetich-shaped objects of wood and rags and feathers - lay in the dust about the
<patin> patina-ed doorsteps, among bones and broken gourd dishes, and hatchets and [knives?]. But there was no sound from any
cabin, no face in any door. Yet they were there, crouched about the cold hearths since yesterday, when the old chief had
died. But they knew what they would find.