He walked out through the door, hesitated, and stood on one foot again.

Then he went slowly down the hill.

Mammy, standing in the door with her apron flung over her head, watched him climb up on the fence and sit there to consider.

Finally, he dropped down to the other side, and started in the direction of the gander thicket.
It was a place that the negroes had been afraid of since her earliest recollection.

It was only a little stretch of woodland, where the neglected underbrush had grown into a tangled thicket.