arrogant, their bodies clothed in identical blue coats and
mustard-colored breeches, they were as much alike as two bolls of
cotton.
Outside, the late afternoon sun slanted down in the yard, throwing
into gleaming brightness the dogwood trees that were solid masses
of white blossoms against the background of new green. The twins'
horses were hitched in the driveway, big animals, red as their
masters' hair; and around the horses' legs quarreled the pack of
lean, nervous possum hounds that accompanied Stuart and Brent
wherever they went. A little aloof, as became an aristocrat, lay
a black-spotted carriage dog, muzzle on paws, patiently waiting
for the boys to go home to supper.
Between the hounds and the horses and the twins there was a
kinship deeper than that of their constant companionship. They
were all healthy, thoughtless young animals, sleek, graceful,
high-spirited, the boys as mettlesome as the horses they rode,
mettlesome and dangerous but, withal, sweet-tempered to those who
knew how to handle them.
Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and
foot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were
neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of
country people who have spent all their lives in the open and
troubled their heads very little with dull things in books. Life
in the north Georgia county of Clayton was still new and,
according to the standards of Augusta, Savannah and Charleston, a
little crude. The more sedate and older sections of the South
looked down their noses at the up-country Georgians, but here in
north Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education
carried no shame, provided a man was smart in the things that
mattered. And raising good cotton, riding well, shooting
straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and
carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were the things that
mattered.
In these accomplishments the twins excelled, and they were equally
outstanding in their notorious inability to learn anything
contained between the covers of books. Their family had more
money, more horses, more slaves than any one else in the County,
but the boys had less grammar than most of their poor Cracker
neighbors.
It was for this precise reason that Stuart and Brent were idling
on the porch of Tara this April afternoon. They had just been
expelled from the University of Georgia, the fourth university
that had thrown them out in two years; and their older brothers,
Tom and Boyd, had come home with them, because they refused to
remain at an institution where the twins were not welcome. Stuart
