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 ROBERTREG'S CRITICAL COMMENTARY on  SECTION 4 & CHAPTER 6

Section 4 of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD is made up of Chapter 6, Chapter 7 and Interlude #4. This section describes the Bannon family move to Aven, Buck's scandalous relationship with Big Vic and Buck's leadership in laying out the street plan for the town of Aven. It's about August of 1890 so Buck is only 21 years old but in the three years since leaving home, Buck's general store and payday loan business in Aven have already made him a wealthy young man. 

One of the most important literary achievements of the novel DEVIL MAKE A THIRD is the synthesis of the maturation of a man named Buck Bannon with the simultaneous development of the railroad boom town of Aven. The time and place of this 30 year-long saga of American enterprise are a potential point of confusion for the reader because the first date mentioned in the book comes on page 215 and in the first 58 pages, the only clue as to the geographical location of Aven is that it is located in "a small corner of Alabama" that's probably a day's train ride away from Albany, Georgia. The author's avoidance of a narrow identification of his fictional places and characters may have been his attempt to have the reader view the events of the novel as events that could have occurred anywhere in which similar conditions prevailed and that the people portrayed in the book could exist wherever human beings live.

Any confusion produced by this intentional ambiguity fades away when one understands that the present-day city of Dothan, Alabama is called "Aven" in the novel. Anyone familiar with Dothan's people, history and geography has no problem understanding where the author found inspiration for the creation of his fictional place and characters. A literary critic in the September 12, 1948 ATLANTA CONSTITUTION stated it well when he wrote, "DEVIL MAKE A THIRD rings true as an exciting portrait of a strong man and a bustling town. Perhaps it is more so because of the author's peculiar qualifications. For Dougie Bailey is a native of Dothan, the locale of his  novel, and also comes from a family of strong men, any one of whom might have served as a pattern for Buck Bannon."

Chapter 6 opens with Buck daydreaming while leaning up against a tree located across St. Simon Street from the big unpainted house he just finished building for his family to move into when they roll into town on their wagons later that afternoon. Buck served as architect, building materials supplier, construction supervisor and interior decorator for this project and he's justly proud of his accomplishment because the location of the Aven city block of land he bought to build it on was across the street from his store so he was able to work on the house without it interfering with business at his store. Buck tells himself,"A man oughtn't to live over two hoe handles from his business." 

Buck's life on the streets of Aven never changes the rural aphorisms that pepper his thoughts and his speech. "A hoe handle away" or "half a hoe handle away" was an expression familiar to most 19th-century American rural folk coast-to-coast to indicate close proximity.  For the rest of the novel, the contrast between "life in the country" and "life in Aven" will be highlighted by the Aven residents preferring their rural vocabulary and table fare to whatever current food and fashion that's being offered by their newly founded railroad town. Eighteen chapters later in the novel, this preference for "all things rural" by early Aven residents begins to drive the novel's action after Buck's mother receives notice that she has a terminal case of cancer.

ROBERTOREG'S NOTES ON CHAPTERS 1 to 6

ROBERTOREG'S NOTES

SECTION 1

DEVIL MAKE A THIRD is not structurally complex. The events in each chapter occur chronologically from about 1890 until 1915; however, the author employs 12 asides called Interludes to move the timeline forward rapidly so that the novel can cover over 25 years of Buck Bannon's life within its 33 chapters. Each Interlude is a confidential conversation between two railway brakemen who always discuss the consequences of Buck's actions in Aven which have been described in a few previous chapters. Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and the first Interlude make up the first of these 13 major divisions of the novel. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 describe Buck's life on the family farm,  Buck's first impressions of Aven and how he got into the position to make his fortune on his first morning after waking up in town. The first Interlude has the brakemen discuss how the action in the first two chapters has shown how Buck became Aven's first teenage loan shark and on the road to riches a little over a year after arriving in town.

Chapter 1 

 

Chapter One introduces the reader to many important themes in the life of Buck Bannon which will be repeated and will progress in subsequent chapters. Most important will be the life-long burning desire of Buck to escape and to never return to rural life.  Being raised with "The Golden Rule" teachings of his Christian parents on their family farm and facing the realities of Aven's materialistic boomtown society create a moral conflict which the novel will never resolve. Buck will spend the rest of his life accumulating a fortune  so he could get as much money as he could put together between himself and his family and a life dominated by child labor, debt peonage and unrelenting, uncompensated toil. Buck's words and actions in the first chapter create  a foreshadowing of all the struggles Buck will face during his unconventional career.

In the opening scene of the novel DEVIL MAKE A THIRD, the reader is introduced to young Buck Bannon behind his plow "blinded by the sun" with sweat stinging his eyes and burning as it soaked  into the raw places on his neck chafed by his mule's reins but none of that mattered because "he was eighteen  and he was following a mule for the last time." Popping a sweat in the early morning sunshine reminded Buck that it was time for this "dirt road sport" to leave the farm and try his luck in town. He had a twenty dollar gold coin burning a hole in his pocket and the time had come for him to make his big move.

The label "dirt road sport" coming in the first paragraph of the second page of the novel holds much portent for this novel. The author's use of the word "sport" to describe his main character refers to the "sporting man culture" which is defined by Wikipedia as involving "men leading hedonistic lifestyles that included keeping mistresses as well as excessive eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, and big game hunting. It is applied to a large group of middle- and upper-class men in the mid-19th century, most often in Great Britain and the United States." The "dirt road" part of the label refers to Buck's isolated rural background. Once he leaves the family farm in Chapter 1 and in each subsequent chapter, the reader sees Buck adopt a Gulf South version of "sporting man culture" and after the first few chapters, only gains clues as to the precise methods used by Buck to quickly amass the great fortune necessary to support such a lifestyle and at the same time provide financial support to his 13 younger siblings. 

To begin to build the better life required Buck to take his hard-earned $20 gold coin and to head to Aven, the new boomtown a few miles away from the Bannon farm. Suddenly rising out of the South Alabama piney-woods wilderness, the new town consisted of a railway station with a small row of tin-roofed stores and unpainted houses. 

Turning his plow out of the soft dirt of the field, Buck looked between his mule's ears for the last time to see his mother rocking on her porch as he aimed his mule toward the sandy hard-packed clay of his Mama's meticulously swept yard. Buck rejoiced at his coming freedom from the drudgery of his parents' farm. In an act of both rebellion and celebration, Buck reined his mule  in concentric circles as he plowed up the bare-earth of his Mama's front yard. Slapping his mule with the looped ends of his lines, Buck yelled, danced and kicked up his heels while imitating the movements of his mule. Finally, he calmed down enough to speak and when he did, he imitated a square dance caller,"ROUND AND ROUND, swing yore partner and do it again."

The entire time he was plowing and rejoicing at his anticipated freedom, Buck kept his eye on the second most important character in this novel: his mother, Jeanie McPhearson Bannon,  pregnant with her fourteenth child, who sat rocking on her front porch, dipping snuff and observing her oldest boy showing off.  After he finally finished tearing up her carefully groomed yard and telling her he was heading to Aven, Jeanie remarked, "Them pickpockets'll fight over you." Mrs. Bannon obviously had no confidence in her oldest son's ability to succeed in a town that was as far as she could tell nothing more than a den of thieves.

 

The novel's second scene occurs inside the Bannon family home after the evening meal with Buck preparing to get a ride to Aven  that night with his younger brother Jeff driving him to town in the Bannon's flat-bed wagon. As Buck prepares to leave the farm for the last time, the reader is introduced to two of Buck's brothers and his father Joe. The other Bannon children are present but the reader only gets important information describing Buck's younger brothers, Jeff and Hearn. These five characters described in this first chapter (Buck Bannon, Mrs. Joe Bannon, Joe Bannon, Jeff Bannon and Hearn Bannon) are the ones from which most of the action in the novel grows.

One of the most important things that occurs in this first introduction of the entire Bannon family is the fuss created when Buck exclaims "For God's sake..." in reaction to one of his brothers. This use of the Lord's name in vain elicits a scolding from Buck's mother and gives the reader an indication of how far Buck is about to fall from his parent's expectations. The rest of the novel will reveal one example after another of how Buck's absolute lack of spiritual vitality provides him with no protection against succumbing to worldly Aven's carnal temptations. 

The novel's third scene describes Buck and Jeff's evening journey to Aven and the reader gains insight into Buck's personality as the monotony of the wagon ride produces a stream of images from his consciousness which causes the young man to recollect scenes from the rural life he is abandoning and producing the first feelings on homesickness.

Rather than having Jeff cross a creek with his wagon, Buck jumps off the wagon, bids goodbye to his little brother and walks the remaining half mile into Aven. In the last paragraphs of Chapter 1, the reader is finally told that the scene of the action in the novel will mostly occur "in a small corner of Alabama [that] wasn't lying fallow any longer, but was heavy with the germ of a town."

 

Chapter 1 ends with teenage Buck walking "into the moon and looking it in the face and he could almost feel it as he crossed the tracks." The reader still has no idea that young Buck is a commercial and political genius but here we see that Buck felt he had been touched by a higher power as he walked along Aven's tracks and sensed his fate and his future were in "Aven's first row of tin-roofed shacks." With his fourth-grade education, a few wagon rides to the grist mill and more than a few years experience in working his tail off for nothing other than for the privilege of being the oldest child and living on Mama and Daddy's farm, a hungry Buck walked toward Aven bursting with enthusiasm. 

Filled with ambition, Buck left his family's farm with little idea of his future other than he "ain't aimin' to dig in no dirt." The new set of railroad tracks  gleaming below his family farm were pointing toward a new life that promised to be better than the one he had before. 

Chapter 1 also introduces Buck's attitude toward other major characters in the novel. As Buck plowed he noticed his mother rocking on her porch. He saw she had begun to show her age. Pregnant with her thirteenth child, Buck noticed his mother "was wearing the shapeless dress she always wore when she was going to have another baby." He also took note of "the first solid streaks of grey in her hair." Buck "shifted his eyes to his mother's face. It was swollen a little, around the jaw..." and he "could tell how she felt by the tired puffiness around her eyes." Mrs. Joe Bannon may have been dipping snuff to relieve a toothache and she was probably about ready to get some store-bought teeth and that took money. That was one more reason for Buck to head out for Aven immediately and to get rich quick.

 

The things about Buck's mother which draw his attention show he was fully aware at a young age of what a toll a life-time of grueling farm labor took upon a person entering middle-age. Throughout the novel, Buck continually exhibits this ability to get inside another person's head, to find out what they want and to give it to them. 

On the second page of the novel a foreshadowing of the coming moral conflict between Buck and his parents comes when the author describes the "sense of power" Buck experiences as he plows up his mother's meticulously swept yard that has him "swingy in the hips like a dirt-road sport." The use of the term "dirt road sport" tells the reader that even though Buck's parents may have wanted Buck to follow the moral compass they provided for him in their home, the realities of winning the daily commercial battle on Aven's dusty streets would require some bending of "the Golden Rule." As Buck would ask his brother, Jeff, later in the novel, "Don't you know a man is bound to stir up some mud when he kicks off from bottom?"

Not only does Buck trust his younger brother Jeff to drive him to Aven on the family wagon but also felt "it's high time you'uz learnin' the way to Aven." Buck goes on to reassure his mother, "You'll all have to be comin' in town to see me, and Jeff can drive you." Buck's last words of warning to Jeff before walking into town shows Buck expects Jeff to take his place in the family, "Don't let Papa make you plow the big mule, boy. Big John'll pure pull yore arms out at the sockets. But you got to quit sleepin' in the cotton rows when you ought to be choppin'." 

In the first chapter, eighteen year-old Buck takes every opportunity to speak dismissively about life on the family farm. When his father remarks about how much Buck resembles members of his mother's family, Buck jokes that his nose has a hump in it because "that comes o' rootin' for vittles in his here sorry clay." At that smart remark, both Bannon parents defend their agrarian lifestyle. Buck's father responds, "We made vittles out o' that clay, Buck. And you et 'em. Don't run the land down." 

The toll that a life behind the plow takes on a man is described with Joe Bannon's manner of walking, "His shamble was a little stiff now, bringing the hunch back to his shoulders, as if he were still thrusting hard against a plow stock." Buck's excitement about his move to Aven comes from his commitment that life away from the farm will be easier for him as well as for his entire family. Buck firmly believes the Bannons might not live longer in Aven but they'll sure want to live longer than they would growing cotton year in and year out. No matter how much he or his parents enjoy the love, companionship or other rewards of their family farm or how much Buck might miss it during his lonely hours alone in Aven, the promise of a new life outside the farm fills Buck with excitement from the first page of Chapter 1 to the last, "Buck didn't know what it was, but he knew he was too full to hold it."

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 opens on Buck's first morning in Aven with him resting on top of a baggage truck beside Aven's railroad depot. The strict order of the chapters does not prevent the author from taking an excursion into the past. The first three pages of Chapter 2 describe, through Buck's dream-like stream of consciousness, his impressions of two of his younger brothers and his parents. Buck judges his new bed on top of the baggage truck to be superior to the pallet which he had shared with two brothers on the floor of their parents' house during the nights before arriving in Aven. This view of the two younger brothers through Buck's mind's eye shows the reader the characteristics of Jeff Bannon which will lead him to become Buck's life-long business partner and the flaws of Hearn Bannon which will result in Buck finally telling his despicable brother in Chapter 27, "I'd have killed any other man. You'll be lucky to just walk out."  

After thoughts of his brothers fade, Buck then recalls a philosophical expression his mother used to describe the fear she held for the future of her family: "Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves." This popular 19th century expression was used to describe the phenomenon of one generation of a family that overcame poverty by accumulating wealth having the family's fortune destroyed by the poor decisions of future generations who refuse to make the sacrifices necessary to maintain the family's assets. Jeannie Bannon's doubts about her sons' ability to hold on to what she and her husband Joe had accumulated during the tumultuous years during and immediately after  Reconstruction scares Buck and drives Buck's ambition making him strive to show his mother that she has raised a farm boy who uses his rural experience to conquer every obstacle that the growing young town of Aven puts in front of him.

This chapter introduces the reader to the newly constructed town of Aven consisting of "a row of tin-roofed store buildings lining the street nearest the railroad" and a few unpainted houses. At the end of some trails leading off from the one business street could be found a few painted houses owned by the village elite.  Buck sees Aven's new buggies and painted houses and knows he has to find a way so he can own a new buggy and a new house . As the novel progresses, this "germ of a town" grows along with Buck's business success and just as Buck appears to adopt Aven as his home at first sight, the people of Aven will also adopt Buck as one of their own and will extend the opportunity for him to express his commercial and political genius in every chapter of the novel that follows this one. Buck's obsession with guiding Aven's growth is a major force in moving the novel's action forward but Buck's first impression of the town is that "right now it looks like somebody just flung it out there because they didn't have no use for it."

Buck's dream-like stream of consciousness is interrupted by the yells of a railroad clerk who ends up offering Buck a laborer's job as soon as he wakes up. Buck declines saying,"Much obliged but I ain't aimin' to dig in no more dirt." Buck bids the clerk goodbye and hops off the baggage truck to begin his first walk down Aven's single business street. He's hungry and he wants a job "long as it ain't handlin' a tool."

Buck's short journey ends in front of a general store where he encounters a family from the country who have come to town intent on trading a calf for seed and tobacco. As Buck and the family wait for the owner of the store to finish taking care of his customers, Buck decides he'll do the owner of the store a favor and see if he can be of service to the waiting family himself. This results in Buck trading a sack of seed, two plugs of tobacco and a stick of licorice candy for the calf. Both Buck and the family are pleased with the trade and the family leaves the store with the goods and with Buck in possession of the calf.

When the store owner finally gets the time to wait on Buck, he is enraged to find out that Buck has taken such liberty with his merchandise but when Buck offers to buy the calf in order to cover the cost of merchandise he traded to the family, the owner declines the offer because he knows the calf is worth twice as much as the goods Buck traded for it. Buck asks for a job and the owner agrees and shakes on the deal before he and Buck ever discuss salary.

Their salary negotiations result in Buck getting the money he wants plus the owner agrees to allow Buck to live in the back of the store. Living in proximity to the source of one's cash flow is a theme repeated for the rest of the novel. The new store's business is so hectic that the owner understands he needs an employee like Buck and allowing him to live in the back of the store frees him from having to open up in the morning. During these negotiations, Buck takes the liberty of eating a couple of the store's bananas so Chapter 2 ends with Buck accomplishing everything he set out to do on his first morning in Aven,"Food comes first. Then I got to get me a job-job where a man don't have to use a tool." And Buck does it all without ever breaking his $20 gold piece.

INTERLUDE #1 

An interlude is a literary device where the author breaks from the narrative to insert a story that somehow connects to the theme of the novel. Twelve times through DEVIL MAKE A THIRD,  the author breaks the flow of the narrative to give the reader an intimate conversation between two railroad brakemen, Jake Willis and Bascom Wooten. This first interlude is concurrent with the plot but moves the action forward 16 months.

From their first conversation we learn that the past year has been a lucrative one for young Buck Bannon's after-hours loan business @ Green's Store. By charging 25 % interest per week on a $2 loan, Buck spends his time making Aven's citizens his loan customers instead of making them his friends. In the case of Jake and Bascom, both of their lives of debt peonage to Buck Bannon began the day they were broke before payday but wanted to go the whorehouse. By pawning their watches and borrowing two bucks from Buck so they could go see Aven's girls, each one of the pair, in the words of Tennessee Ernie Ford, "sold his soul to the company store"; "The company store" in this case being a nineteen-year-old entrepreneur who only wants his loan customers to ignore their mounting debt and to cover their loan's interest every payday, insuring that they live the rest of their lives making Buck Bannon a profit.

Both of these brakemen feel like idiots when they have to give this new kid in town money every payday but Bascom has the added guilt of knowing "I'm the damned fool that started it all. 'F I hadn't borrowed the first dollar from Buck Bannon, he'd never o' made a loan. I was itchin' to get to Mabe's place and didn't have a copper. By God, I had to tell him how much interest to charge, and I offered to put up my watch."

Buck Bannon missed out on attending a university's school of commerce so the dusty streets of Aven became his classroom and every railroad payday found him marking his account book, collecting his loan payments and "figurin' how much us railroaders own him. Been there ever' payday for over a year." Buck's successful first year living in town taught him many tricks of his new trade but he also learned to acquire some of same habits that afflicted his loan customers. Jake and Bascom took satisfaction in knowing that they were there when Buck, the green country boy who just walked out of the piney woods, was introduced to Aven's sketchy adult entertainment provided by the whores down at Mabe's Place. As they laugh about the memory, Jake imitates Buck's slow drawl as he stood goggling the elaborate curtains and mirrors inside the fancy foyer of Mabe's place, "Jake, them's white girls."

With this first mention of the race of Mabe's prostitutes, the author lets the reader know that Aven is a segregated society and during the course of the novel, the author never makes comments nor condemns Aven's discriminatory customs which condemned many of its residents to a life of toil for which they received little compensation. There are no strong Black characters in the novel and in the twenty or so places where Blacks make an appearance, they work in menial jobs such as waiters, bellboys, cooks, shoe shine boys, maids, cooks, chauffeurs, or farm laborers. The closest the author gets to an enterprising Black character is a street corner preacher who has some goats to sell. The legacy of slavery is mentioned only once and that is part of an elaborate rationalization concerning his rich former father-in-law which Buck creates to justify his own greed, "I got no guilty feelings. Maybe I've squeezed a mortgage too close and maybe I've shaved off a little for myself when I bought for the city. Folks forget anyhow. They've forgot how old Longshore's folks trafficked in slaves so they could raise him in a big white house in the middle of ten thousand acres of sandy loam. Maybe forty-fifty years from now, some Bannon'll be oozin' religion at the church door and folks won't remember that Buck turned his eyes off while his hands gathered a crop they didn't make."

In these first two chapters and the interlude, Dougie Bailey establishes most of the characters from which all of the novel's action will emerge and gives the reader a vivid portrait of a railroad boomtown's commercial environment which produces all of the obstacles that the character of Buck Bannon will conquer. There's no idealism or striving for social justice in Devil Make A Third. It is a down-to-earth story of how one country boy leaves home to move to a strange place armed only with a $20 gold coin and an optimism which allows him to confront everything that stands in the way of his progress and to overcome every challenge.

 Chapter 3

Chapter 3 begins the next segment of the book sixteen months after Buck's arrival in boomtown Aven.  Aven hadn't progressed to the point of actually having a bank so negotiations for Buck's first business loan would occur on the front porch of Amos Longshore's big house. While working up the courage to ask the richest man in town for a loan, Buck reflected upon his new life as he stood on the street in front of the Longshore's house. Aven had grown from a row of wooden shacks across from a railroad depot. Fresh water from a spring a half mile away from the depot had led to the construction of a whiskey distillery and with it a new commercial district emerged to compete with the one by the depot where Buck worked. 

The hick from the sticks who'd never even seen a train a few months before now recognized each engineer's whistle and pawning those railroad men's pocket watches was the new crop country boy Buck was tending now. Harvest time was every railroad man's payday and Buck knew he was on the path to riches because he's "willin' to live like a hog in the back of Green's store, and stayin' lonesome because you can't make money by lendin' to friends."

Buck's short loan business was only part of his commercial education in Aven. Months of serving Aven's public at the counter of Green's store had honed Buck's powers of persuasion and convinced him that he'd found a way to make money so he could get ahead in the world but "getting ahead" for Buck meant more than just becoming a well-to-do counter clerk. Buck wanted to be lead wolf in the pack that ran the town. Buck's exaggerated individualism in Aven's developing urban environment was forged on a cotton farm where each day had seen the Bannon family struggle for existence.

  Longshore's daughter answered Buck's knock at the front door and this resulted in Buck discovering he wanted a little more from Longshore than just his money. As he watched the pretty girl walk down the hall to go get her father, Buck craved what he saw, "like finding rock candy in the syrup bucket." 

Suddenly, Buck had more than business on his mind.  The brown paper bag in which Buck carried the down payment for the mortgage he was seeking, along with his well-worn wardrobe, had not enhanced Buck's first impression upon Longshore and seeing Buck's interest  in his daughter didn't help Buck's chances of getting a loan. 

Buck overcame all of Longshore's suspicions simply by allowing the old man to have a glimpse of the inside of the paper sack filled with Buck's greenbacks. When Longshore pointed out that he could easily use his own money to buy the bargain-priced property Buck desired rather than financing Buck's purchase, Buck pointed out that Longshore would rather have Buck's five hundred dollars than a bargain price on the property and Buck was correct. When Buck told the old man, "You want my five hundred," Longshore responded, "You're right and I think I'm going to get it. Come back tomorrow and I'll have the money and the papers ready."

 After knocking on Longshore's front door, Buck discovers the existence of Longshore's daughter. Suddenly, Buck has more than business on his mind.  The brown paper bag in which Buck carried the down payment for the mortgage he was seeking along with his well-worn wardrobe had not enhanced Buck's first impression upon Longshore but seeing Buck's interest  in his daughter didn't help Buck's chances of getting a loan. Buck overcomes all of Longshore's suspicions simply by allowing the old man to have a glimpse of the inside of the paper sack filled with Buck's greenbacks. When Longshore points out that he could easily use his own money to buy the bargain-priced property Buck desires rather than financing Buck's purchase, Buck points out that Longshore would rather have Buck's five hundred dollars than a bargain price on the property and Buck was correct. Even though the two  part with Longshore insulting Buck by calling him a thief for exploiting a tragedy, Buck walks off Longshore's porch and into Aven's night knowing that his business plan has made a tremendous leap forward. Buck's last words to Longshore give a good description of Buck's strategy, "I ain't got time to stop and build bridges when I come to a creek. I've got to jump to stay on schedule."

 Even though Longshore insulted Buck by calling him a thief for exploiting a tragedy, Buck walks off Longshore's porch and into Aven's night confident that his business plan had made a tremendous leap forward. Buck's last words to Longshore give a good description of Buck's strategy, "I ain't got time to stop and build bridges when I come to a creek. I've got to jump to stay on schedule." 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 4

Chapter 4 opens with Buck finishing off a glass of whiskey in Aven's only saloon, a "Jim Crow" enterprise with a double ended pine bar that separated the races by means of a thin partition across the middle of the bar and serving its Black customers through a curved slot cut into the flimsy wall which allowed the banjo music from their end of the bar to entertain the saloon's entire crowd.

No matter how intelligent 20 year-old Buck might have been, Aven's corn liquor was guaranteed to help him do something stupid so he had sense enough before beginning his drunken evening to deposit in the saloon's safe the $500 down payment he'd taken to Longshore's house for the mortgage negotiation. As the bartender pours Buck one more for the road, he reminds Buck of how liquor stirs evil passions by paraphrasing a proverb from the Bible, "It stingeth like an adder and biteth like a serpent." This biblical reference may not be the only one in this chapter.

Buck had a lot on his mind. Not only was he going to close on his first mortgage the next day but he was now sitting on a bar stool lost in lust while his mind's eye attempted to recall every detail of Longshore's gorgeous  daughter. There was no way Buck was going to accomplish anything listening to the saloon's banjo music and dreaming about the blonde-headed eye candy he'd just left at Longshore's house. Buck's barroom boredom could easily be eliminated with only a short walk from the saloon through Baptist Bottom to the place where Buck's payday loan customers spent the money they borrowed from him: Mabe's whorehouse. Buck's customers were also the customers of Mabe's girls and on this night Buck decided to get stupid just like the rest of them and to seek satisfaction in the arms of one of Aven's lewd women. As Buck told the bartender before he left the saloon, " I'm a'goin' to Mabe's Place and kiss all the girls and run climb a tree an' wait for them to cut me down."

Like the moon on that night when Buck first walked into Aven sixteen months earlier, the moonlight on this foggy evening filled liquored-up Buck with a sense of the potential power he'd discovered which assured him that he would one day achieve his destiny and make a fortune from Aven's populace but the corn liquor he'd consumed guaranteed that this late night stroll was not going to contribute to his future fortune. Like the maxim "nothing good ever happens after midnight", Buck's evening ramble to Mabe's Place would never fulfill the promises the moonlight was making.

As he walked through muddy Baptist Bottom, a stumbling, drunken Buck encountered a street corner preacher who was just ending the sermon he was preaching to a crowd gathered on the street in front of a honky tonk called the Puddin' House. Buck immediately requests that the reverend "Preach me some hell-fire and alligator teeth."

The Black preacher, an experienced salesman, immediately sizes Buck up and begins a series of questions, each one ending with the preacher calling Buck, apparently a total stranger, the "boss." By calling Buck "boss", the preacher was going through all the motions that showed him to be a "good, humble Negro" while at the same time setting Buck up to purchase "a pair o' fine billy goats, Boss, which'd make mighty pretty pets" for the whores Buck was about to meet at the brothel just beyond Baptist Bottom.

Possibly as an allusion to the bizarre biblical story in Genesis of Judah promising to pay for the services of the Bible's first prostitute with a goat, the author of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD has his protagonist tugging a pair of billy goats into an elaborately decorated den of iniquity. Taking goats inside a whorehouse is a prescription for disaster and the destruction the charging goats' horns made of the bordello's mirrors and vases ends this chapter with the brothel owner telling Buck, "Even a whore has got feelin's and if a fellow can't earn the name of a gentleman in a whorehouse, he won't get it nowhere." 

Stung by the insult, Buck sobers up a little and makes a prophetic statement on this night before he was to sign his first mortgage with Longshore , "There'll be a man out here tomorrow mornin' to fix your place back. I don't give a damn about bein' a gentleman, but, by God, I'll be payin' my debts, till I die."

No doubt that the man who would show up the next morning to repair Buck's damage to Mabe's Place would also be one of his payday loan customers who was trying to settle up some of his debt by doing day labor for Buck. Buck's repair job and his replacement of the broken furniture also had him investing in Mabe's lucrative sex-trade business and subsequent events would show that Buck's attempt to make right his senseless destruction would enhance his reputation with Mabe as well as with the girls who worked for him. Buck's drunken stunt would enable the young entrepreneur  to seamlessly transition into a more vertically integrated business plan.

 INTERLUDE #2

Each of the novel's 12 INTERLUDES moves the novel's plot forward in time. In the case of INTERLUDE #2, the action occurs four months after Buck's visit to Mabe's Place the night he struck a deal with Longshore for the mortgage that enabled him to buy Green's store. Twenty year-old Buck is now two years along in his successful business career.

The tragicomedy quality of Buck's billy goats' visit to Mabe's Place in Chapter 4 continues in INTERLUDE #2 as the story opens with Jake's arrival at the Aven freight depot aboard the No. 54 train from Albany. Jake is so hungover that simply walking is painful for him and not only that, he's broke and late paying on his loan from Buck. Jake meets his fellow brakeman, Bass, who brings more bad news by informing Jake that his watch is gone because Buck has left town. Jake tries to process this information and exclaims, "Wheeoo, watch gone, job gone." 

Jake's sad conclusion, causes Bass to show his railroading friend some sympathy and to reassure Jake that all is not lost and that Buck will soon return from his short trip back home. This news lifts Jake's spirits momentarily but as he contemplates the future of his watch, Jake says, "I don't like this. He'll lose it, or break it, or, by God, he'll swap it off for a rubber-tired buggy." 

Again Bass reassures Jake that Buck simply has gone back home to convince his parents to leave farm life and to move the entire family to Aven. This information only worsens Jake's bleak attitude because he knows that the demands of Buck's family will mean that Buck will become an even greedier pawnbroker and payday loan shark. 

INTERLUDE #2 ends with Bass finally agreeing with Jake's conclusion that the future of Jake's watch, as well as his brakeman job, were indeed rather gloomy simply because Buck "left in a rubber-tired buggy, all right."

In each of their conversations, Jake and Bass discuss their grievances with Buck  but they also discuss how Buck gives back to the same people he exploits. In the case of Jake, a hopeless victim of Buck's usurious lending practices, the years that this failed railroad brakeman spends working off his debt to Buck may give him status in the Aven community by Jake being one of "Buck's men" and of having the reputation of being commercially associated with Aven's most important decision maker, Buck Bannon.

The characters of Jake and Bass only appear in the novel's 12 Interludes and the progress of their lives and relationship gives the reader another window into the intimate details of Buck's life. Both of these undisciplined railroad brakemen allow their appetite for liquor and fast women to sink them into debt to Buck with no hope of recovery. The consequences of Buck's financial robbery are quite severe for Jake. INTERLUDE #2 will be the last time the reader will see Jake on a train. For the rest of the novel, Jake will never return to railroading and he will spend the rest of his time working odd jobs for Buck in order to pay off his debt. This form of debt slavery doesn't totally annihilate Jake's autonomy, however, his financial bondage to Buck will limit Jake's options and his only escape from continual debt would to be to move out of Aven and to run away.

The last line of INTERLUDE #2, "He left town in a rubber-tired buggy, all right,"also gives us insight into Buck's motivation. One of the first things that impressed Buck during his first morning in Aven was "a small neat buggy with new harness." That Buck chose to visit his parents' farm in a "rubber-tired buggy" shows that Buck is adapting to life in Aven by acquiring all of the status symbols associated with his small town business success.

Chapter 5

  The events described in Chapter 5 take place where most of the events of Chapter 1 took place, on the Bannon farm a few miles outside Aven. In fact, Chapter 5 reintroduces all of the characters the reader encountered in Chapter 1: Joe Bannon, Jeanie Bannon and two of Buck's younger brothers, Hearn and Jeff. Buck's return to the Bannon farm takes place about 1889, two years after Buck made the decision to move to Aven when he turned 18. Times have changed on the Bannon farm. Even though Joe Bannon is still a prosperous farmer, time and hard labor have taken its toll on old man Bannon and as he loses his strength the Bannon farm risks falling apart because when it comes to Buck's younger brothers "ain't neither one of them too much hand to work."

Chapter 5 opens with Buck loosening the reins on his little red mare so he can speed his shiny new rubber-tired buggy down the road toward the Bannon family farm. He's wearing a derby hat and dressed in his Sunday best coat and tie but protected from the road dust by a driving coat. 20 year-old Buck has now acquired all the hallmarks of a successful businessman but it's hard to  imagine that a former farm boy who'd never left home during his first eighteen years of life would move to a town only a few hours wagon ride away from his childhood home and then wait two years before returning to visit his parents and twelve brothers and sisters at the old home place but once the reader understands the purpose of Buck's mission, his absence begins to make sense.  Buck hasn't visited his parents in two years because Buck was too busy making money and now he plans on using that money to create a better life for his large family. Buck senses that the new growing season will be his father's last cotton crop but Buck believes he has a way for his father to avoid the grave, to cease his hard labor and to enjoy his last days by leaving the Bannon farm and moving to Aven. Buck feels he can successfully convince his parents to make such a drastic change because he's now made enough money in Aven to make it happen. 

It had been four months since Buck closed the deal to buy Green's store in Aven and by this time, he'd accumulated enough cash from that enterprise along with his payday loan business to accomplish his mission which according to Bascom in Interlude #2 was "to argy his folks into movin' to Aven." There will be one person in the Bannon family who Buck won't have to convince to move and that's his brother Hearn who, upon Buck's arrival at the Bannon place, sees Buck's latest fashion and brand-new rig and exclaims, "Look here, Buck. Take me back when you go. Maybe I can get a buggy, too." Convincing Buck parents to leave the family farm and move to Aven was going to be a lot more challenging than convincing his little brother.

Buck had taken on a great challenge when he decided that after a two year absence, he would return to the Bannon farm and reframe reality for his family by convincing his parents to leave their farm. If experience is the measure of a life then the commercial life of a railroad town beats the Bannon farm every time but if the measure of one's life is love and companionship, then the family farm beats the Aven rat race every time. Buck understands this as he approaches the Bannon place in his new rubber-tired buggy. He reminisces about the smells and tastes of his childhood, saying to himself, "Hey, Lord, a little eatin' like that will make me forget the grubbin' I been doin'. Sellin' and buyin' all day and lendin' and collectin' most of the night. Worth it, though, ever' minute of it." In Chapter 1, Buck let his parents know what he thought of their farm when he joked that the hump in his nose "comes o' rootin' for vittles in this here sorry clay." Now in Chapter 5, Buck has sharpened his argument when he tells his father, "Farmin' right now ain't helpin' you none." To his Mother, Buck is even more brutal in his opinion of the Bannon farm's future, "Sell it, or throw it away. Do anything, but get Papa off it." 

One of Jeanie Bannon's favorite expressions is, "Shirtsleaves to shirtsleaves." This 19th century maxim refers to the tendency of the children of those who have escaped poverty to squander what wealth their parents have accumulated and to see the family return to a state of poverty. Buck shares the same fear as his mother and his attempt to create his own commercial empire in Aven is his way to avoid catastrophe because Buck knows that he will never take his father's place on the family farm and he also knows his brothers will never succeed at farming. As he tells his mother, "...they won't never put out enough on this place to help Pa much. This ain't no one horse farm. It needs good labor and lots of it."

Buck has an alternative to farming. Buck proposes that the family move to Aven so they can "farm" the farmer. Buck asserts to his mother,"Look, pore farmers have got to be furnished and somebody's got to furnish them...See here, the man that does the furnishin' makes more'n the farmer. You know that. Rent him his land, sell him his tools, seeds, guano, anything he wants. He'll owe you and he won't like you. He'll cuss you, but you'll have to take it. He may kick you, but take it. Then, by God, if he makes a crop, take it."

Aven's dishonest commercial world which Buck describes to his mother abounds with every social evil associated with greed gratification but Buck's argument makes an impression on Jeanie Bannon. She knows that the farm's future is unsustainable. As she tells Buck, "A man breaks land for forty years but the land don't break a man but once." But Aven's ways aren't the Bannon ways and Mrs. Bannon cannot imagine selling her family's hard earned land and moving to a town where "them pickpockets'll fight over you." Buck ends his sales pitch to his mother before it turns into an argument by saying, "You all muddle it out tonight. It won't hurt." With that mother and son call it a night and go to bed. 

From his pallet on the floor in the children's room, Buck finds himself unable to sleep. Laying there, Buck listens to the sounds coming from his parents' room. When he hears his mother get out of bed and walk into the kitchen to the back porch, Buck gets up and follows her outside and whispers, wanting to know what his father said about moving to Aven. His mother replies, "What did he say? What he said don't count. It's other things. It was him- fumblin' at the ham tonight, and hackin' it up when he used to cut it like butter. It's me havin' to button his shirt and make out like I'm doin' it for fun. It's them things, them, and him turnin' over in yonder and flingin' his poor stiff hands out in his sleep. They're the things that'll move us."

Buck knows that his mother is the decision maker in the family and that this is one decision that she doesn't want to have to make. Buck leaves his mother on the back porch but before closing the door, he overhears her prayer which she whispers as she stands on the porch looking up to the heavens, "Please don't let me be scared of all them folks."

Mrs. Bannon understands that there is no alternative to leaving the farm so the family will move to Aven but she will never forget the cotton farm. She and her family's memories of the good things about farm life will become an Edenic myth. In modern Aven the Bannons will preserve many of their rural customs and continue to eat their country cooking as reminders of the happier and more harmonious life they lived but lost when they left the farm.

INTERLUDE #3

The third section of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD consists of only Chapter 5 and Interlude #3. By showing the circumstances under which the Bannons leave their farm, this short section sets the stage for the rest of the novel. In Chapter 5, Buck convinces his aging parents that their failing health guarantees that their cotton farm is an unsustainable enterprise and that an alternative and profitable form of commerce may be found in Aven because that's the place where the area's poor farmers go to borrow money each year to finance their next season's crop and when that crop is harvested, those same poor farmers must surrender their harvested crops to their lender or turn over all property which was used as their collateral for their initial loan. Buck's mother is repelled by Buck's description of such a way of making a living but Buck wins the argument simply by saying, "Them that furnishes live a long time. The land don't break them."

The Bannon's farmland had certainly broken Buck's father, Joe Bannon, and Buck's mother knows it. Since she is the decision maker in the Bannon family, she makes the choice to leave her old way of life for the modern conveniences of Aven's emerging industrial urban society. She summons all her faith in preparation for this radical change and sends up a simple prayer to her Lord, "Please don't let me be scared of all them folks."

One of "all them folks" in Aven is a former railroad brakeman named Jake Willis. The reader only sees Jake in the novel's interludes which are a literary device which the author uses to advance the novel's time line. Interlude #3 opens with a miserable Jake Willis talking to himself as he stares into the flames of the fire he has built with the scrap wood left over from the construction of the big house Buck Bannon is building for his family in Aven. "Bible says we'll always have pore folks. But how come, by God, it's got to be me?"

Jake lost his watch and his job in Interlude #2 so now he's doing odd jobs for his lender, Buck Bannon. Buck convinced his mother and father to move the family to Aven and now he is constructing them a house big enough to serve the large Bannon family. Buck has hired Jake to be his nightwatchman.

Jake's friend, Bascom Wooten, overhears Jake's complaints and joins him at his fire. Bascom checks the time on his watch and remarks that it is past midnight. Seeing Bascom look at his timepiece irritates Jake even more because it reminds Jake of his own railroad watch which he lost to Buck due to a late payment. Without his watch, Jake lost his job as a brakeman. Jake continues to gripe to Bascom, "Be damned if they ain't somethin' wrong when a man can lend you two dollars on a sixty-dollar watch, then in two-three year have it run up to more'n the watch cost."

When you owe money, you don't own yourself. You may not be in a condition of actual slavery but your "chains" are disguised under a form of contract labor and peonage or debt slavery. Your lender has a mortgage on you. This is the tough lesson that Jake Willis finally learns in Interlude #3. In the first two interludes, Jake is working as a brakeman on the railroad but a late payment on Jake's payday loan caused his creditor, Buck Bannon, to foreclose on Jake's railroad watch and as Jake says in Interlude #2, "Wheeoo, watch gone, job gone." In the novel's final eight interludes, Jake never returns to his railroad job and lives the rest of his working life doing odd jobs for Buck or for one of Buck's political cronies. Toward the end of the novel, Buck gives Jake his watch back but Jake's too old to go back to work on the railroad. As a consequence of a single payday loan, Jake Willis spends his entire working life as Buck Bannon's "mule." As Jake says in the novel's last interlude, "Me, I'm a damned mule. I just drag along, gee or haw."  

 ROBERTREG'S CRITICAL COMMENTARY on  SECTION 4 & CHAPTER 6

Section 4 of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD is made up of Chapter 6, Chapter 7 and Interlude #4. This section describes the Bannon family move to Aven, Buck's scandalous relationship with Big Vic and Buck's leadership in laying out the street plan for the town of Aven. It's about August of 1890 so Buck is only 21 years old but in the three years since leaving home, Buck's general store and payday loan business in Aven have already made him a wealthy young man. 

One of the most important literary achievements of the novel DEVIL MAKE A THIRD is the synthesis of the maturation of a man named Buck Bannon with the simultaneous development of the railroad boom town of Aven. The time and place of this 30 year-long saga of American enterprise are a potential point of confusion for the reader because the first date mentioned in the book comes on page 215 and in the first 58 pages, the only clue as to the geographical location of Aven is that it is located in "a small corner of Alabama" that's probably a day's train ride away from Albany, Georgia. The author's avoidance of a narrow identification of his fictional places and characters may have been his attempt to have the reader view the events of the novel as events that could have occurred anywhere in which similar conditions prevailed and that the people portrayed in the book could exist wherever human beings live.

Any confusion produced by this intentional ambiguity fades away when one understands that the present-day city of Dothan, Alabama is called "Aven" in the novel. Anyone familiar with Dothan's people, history and geography has no problem understanding where the author found inspiration for the creation of his fictional place and characters. A literary critic in the September 12, 1948 ATLANTA CONSTITUTION stated it well when he wrote, "DEVIL MAKE A THIRD rings true as an exciting portrait of a strong man and a bustling town. Perhaps it is more so because of the author's peculiar qualifications. For Dougie Bailey is a native of Dothan, the locale of his  novel, and also comes from a family of strong men, any one of whom might have served as a pattern for Buck Bannon."

Chapter 6 opens with Buck daydreaming while leaning up against a tree located across St. Simon Street from the big unpainted house he just finished building for his family to move into when they roll into town on their wagons later that afternoon. Buck served as architect, building materials supplier, construction supervisor and interior decorator for this project and he's justly proud of his accomplishment because the location of the Aven city block of land he bought to build it on was across the street from his store so he was able to work on the house without it interfering with business at his store. Buck tells himself,"A man oughtn't to live over two hoe handles from his business." 

Buck's life on the streets of Aven never changes the rural aphorisms that pepper his thoughts and his speech. "A hoe handle away" or "half a hoe handle away" was an expression familiar to most 19th-century American rural folk coast-to-coast to indicate close proximity.  For the rest of the novel, the contrast between "life in the country" and "life in Aven" will be highlighted by the Aven residents preferring their rural vocabulary and table fare to whatever current food and fashion that's being offered by their newly founded railroad town. Eighteen chapters later in the novel, this preference for "all things rural" by early Aven residents begins to drive the novel's action after Buck's mother receives notice that she has a terminal case of cancer. 

 

These are all the notes that Eleanor Neely Buntin (1904-1989) https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/35010217/eleanor-buntin

wrote in the margins of her copy of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD. I have added links and information concerning each of her comments. Mrs. Buntin grew up in Montgomery and married T.E. Buntin (1896-1958) in 1926 so she never had the chance to meet many of the Dothan people who served as  models for characters in DEVIL MAKE A THIRD but she was well acquainted with many of Dothan's citizens whose lives were used by author Dougie Bailey to shape the characters in his fictional Southeast Alabama town of Aven. Her husband,  Thomas Eugene Buntin, was used as a model for the character of the
small red headed boy, Earnestine's oldest boy on page 171 of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD.

page 11
third paragraph." 'His mother' is under lined and in the margin reads 'Jane Baker.' "

Model for the character of JANE MCPHERSON BANNON:

from the October 27, 1953 DOTHAN EAGLE

from the May 9, 1918 WIREGRASS FARMER (Headland)

JANE SANDERS BAKER (1849-1918) https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762168/jane-baker

PAGE 13
last paragraph 'Coke" is underlined in in the margin is written:
"Uncle Coley (sic) whom I remember and gave me 1/2 stick of juicy fruit gum which he would cut with his pocket knife."

Model for the character of "Coke Bannon": 

from the September 24, 1937 DOTHAN EAGLE

COLIE BAKER (1886-1937) https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762159/colie-baker

PAGE 14, 

5th paragraph, 3rd sentence: Jeff and Hearn
In the margin reads:"Uncle Dan and Doug Baker"

A "Silent Northern" Motor Car in front of the Hotel Martin

 (model for THE HARRISON HOUSE), 1909. From left: Joe

 "Buck" Baker (model for the character of BUCK BANNON) ; C.

 F. "Doug" Baker (model for the character of HEARN

 BANNON); Eugene Lauck, a drug salesman from Montgomery;

 Byron Trammell, Post Master; Ed Winters, US Deputy

Marshall; Dan W. Baker (model for the character of JEFF

 BANNON). Courtesy Frank Gaines 

C.F. "Doug" Baker  from the October 28, 1930 Montgomery Advertiser

HEARN BANNON ~  based upon C.F. "Dug" Baker, circa 1882-1930. (FINDAGRAVE misspells Doug's name. It should read CYRUS FIELDS BAKER.) https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762160/cyrus-field-baker

JEFF BANNON ~ based upon Daniel William Baker 1879-1954 https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/25979489/daniel-william-baker

D.W. "Dan" Baker from the December 7, 1954 DOTHAN EAGLE

PAGE 14

7th paragraph: Joe Bannon
In the Margin: "Grandfather Joe Baker"

from the December 13, 1900 COLUMBIA BREEZE

The artist for the DOTHAN OPERA HOUSE MURAL mistakenly painted Joe Baker, Sr. instead of his son, Buck Baker.  

Joe Bannon (Joe Baker, Sr. 1836-1900, buried in the Baker plot of the Dothan City Cemetery)
https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Baker&GSfn=Joe&GSby=1836&GSbyrel=in&GSdy=1900&GSdyrel=in&GSst=3&GScnty=60&GScntry=4&GSob=n&GRid=31762170&df=all&
"The Joe Baker family came from near Abbeville. Mr. Buck Baker was a big stockholder in Houston National Bank. The Baker brothers built and operated the Martin Hotel, and dealt in real estate. Mr. Dan Baker, of the brothers is the only one living now." from Mrs. A.D. Whiddon's HISTORY OF DOTHAN published in 1945 in the DOTHAN EAGLE

PAGE 14

Last sentence:

You Kin see the McPherson stock...
Underlined McPherson and in the margin is written 'Sanders'

"McPherson" was character Jeanie Bannon's maiden name, "Sanders" was Jane Baker's maiden name. "McPherson" is also the name of the saloon below the room where Buck first plays poker on page 98 of Chapter 10. This may have been related to the Sanders family owning a saloon in old Dothan.

Page 50, last paragraph "Myrt and Nance,"
Written in the margin 'Maggie and Nanny?' There is a question mark after "Nanny."

This may refer to Maggie Baker and Nannie Baker or possibly Minnie Baker.  Minnie Baker Shadgett may be the model because in that passage of the novel, Buck was talking about his two older sisters and  Minnie was four years older than Maggie. 

Maggie Baker  Dowling (1874-1920)  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9451982/maggie-dowling

from the March 26, 1920 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER

Findagrave link for Nannie E. Baker (1872-1917) Cheek  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762401/nannie-e.-cheek          )

from the January 20, 1917 DOTHAN EAGLE

Minnie Baker Shadgett (1870-1932)

from the September 9, 1932 DOTHAN EAGLE

Chapter 6, PAGE 59, 1st paragraph 4th line. "the block of land"
In the margin is written N. Foster, Newton, N St. Andrews, Powell

from the October 23, 1926 DOTHAN EAGLE

from the October 27, 1953 DOTHAN EAGLE

PAGE 64
8th paragraph, the whole paragraph is in parenthesis and it begins with "She's a schoolteacher," and beside it in the margin is written 'Music Teacher'

PAGE 73, right above the INTERLUDE is written: ' The teachers name was Ida and Ghastie was named Ida after her and christened later when she was 2 - 3, she was renamed Ghastie.
It is not until Chapter 16 that more is written in the margins.

from the July 28, 1898 COLUMBIA BREEZE  

"Ghastie" was Ghastie Baker Miller (1884-1944) https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/26015465/ghastie-miller

 who was the model for "Victoria Bannon." Victoria was renamed "Christina" on page 73 of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD after the scandal with "Big Vic." Ghastie Baker was originally named "Ida Baker" after the "Ida Clark" scandal, she was renamed "Ghastie." Ida Clark had sued Ghastie's brother, Buck Baker, for breach of promise in 1898. 

Mrs. M.A. "Ghastie" Miller owned 504 North Foster, one of the three "gift houses" from page 173 of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD. Mrs. Willie Bailey, mother of the author of Devil Make A Third, owned 500 North Foster and her sister, Mrs. Vera Lane owned 502 North Foster.

PAGE 171 , this page is about Thomas Eugene Buntin Sr. (1896-1958), Buck's Nephew.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/35010203/thomas-eugene-buntin)

3rd Paragraph -"He (Buck) was near the door when a small boy came slowly down the hall. Syrup dripped from a soggy hole in a biscuit held just above his mouth and the boy licked gravely at the bottom. He had bright red curly hair and his nose looked like all the Bannons."
In the Margins reads "Tom Sr."

Also on PAGE 171, next to the last paragraph, last sentence:

"then he reached out and knuckled the red head, hard," 

This is underlined and in the margin is written a single word. 'Tom.'

Chapter 19, Page 195

At the top of this page is written
'Tom was hired by Buck as "water boy" at 5 cents a week.'

PAGE 196
In the center of the page where the dialog reads:
"Had it Long?"
"Ten Years,"
In the margin is written "Martin Hotel"

images from HOUSTON COUNTY: The First 100 years

from the January 4, 1908 DOTHAN EAGLE

The Hotel Martin was the model for the "Harrison House" in DEVIL MAKE A THIRD.

PAGE 202

5th Paragraph
"Tobe? I didn't ...."
Tobe is underlined and written 'Dominque' over his name.
 The character of "Tobe Parody" is modeled after former Dothan police chief, Tobe Domingus (1860-1942) https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762560/james-lewis_jefferson-domingus

from the October 27, 1953 DOTHAN EAGLE

"35 yards" should read 35 YEARS.

 

PAGE 204, last paragraph
"I'm Lota Kyle,"
In the margin reads:
'Lota was the name of one of Buck's nieces, Lota B. Cheek'

Lota B. Cheek was the daughter of Baker daughter, Nannie E. Baker Cheek (1872-1917).https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762401/nannie-e-cheek

 In 1922 she was awarded the title "AMERICA'S MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL" in a New York beauty contest and went on to work as a model and performed on stage and the movies. (from the June 9, 1922 WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL [Madison])

And Finally the last few written words.

Chapter 21, 4th paragraph,

"Laughing" Bell right in front...

Right over Bells name is written "Bush"

A "laughing Clem Bush" is mentioned in this June 13, 1913 DOTHAN EAGLE describing an excursion train from Dothan to Macon. 

from the May 15, 1929 DOTHAN EAGLE

Page 289, talks about the farm Buck bought his mother.
In the Margin in written 'Landmark'
Grandmother had underlined in the center of the page "I've got a thousand acres and a big white house ..."

In about 1981, acreage from the Baker Estate was donated to build the Landmark Park in Dothan. This property was the model for the property Buck buys his mother on Page 286 of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD.
 

Also on this page in the first line is the name "Myrt", over it is written 'Maggie'.
Maggie Baker  Dowling (1874-1920)  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9451982/maggie-dowling

PAGE 299 1st full paragraph, half way down is the name "Carmen".
In the margin is written 'Aunt Jessie'.

And Last on page 300, at the bottom of the page is underlined "the boys".
In the Margin is written 'Tommy, Otis and Joe.' 

The death of Eugenia Baker Buntin https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762334/eugenia-buntin

 in 1898 and her husband's death in 1900 made her children orphans. They were adopted by the Baker family. In the novel, Eugenia Buntin is the model for "Ernestine" and her children are referred to as  "Carmen" and the boys. Carmen, the girl, was modeled after Jessie Buntin Morgan https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/82029621/jessie-morgan

and "the boys" are modeled after her brothers, Tommy https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/35010203/thomas-eugene-buntin

Otis  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762338/otis-buntin

Joe  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762336/joseph-j-buntin

  The novel DEVIL MAKE A THIRD is the three decade story of how one man comes to dominate the brand-new southeast Alabama town of Aven after he discovers that the secret to unlimited wealth without having to work for it comes to those who can commercialize and exploit the lowest instincts of human nature. The reader follows the private life of the main character, Buck Bannon, after he leaves the family farm and develops the Midas touch by helping Aven's male citizens satisfy their lust for liquor and lewd women with the money they receive from Buck's high interest loans. In the end Buck learns that even though his wealth might be able to buy him the whole world and everybody in it, his money can't buy the one thing that this kind-hearted white-collar criminal desires most: his own self-respect.

The novel is composed of 13 sections which cover a period from 1887 to 1915 in the life of the novel's main character, Buck Bannon. Each section is made up of multiple chapters and an interlude which the author uses to advance his timeline. No dates are used in the novel but Chapter 1 through Chapter 15 ,which make up the first seven sections of the novel, cover the period from 1887 until the early 1890s. INTERLUDE 7 advances the action ten years with the fictional town of Aven going from a frontier boom town into a small urban area with paved streets, a water works, power plant, telephone company and all the other innovations of a turn-of-the-century urban area. Each of the 33 chapters is a short account of an amusing or interesting incident from Buck Bannon's perspective. The 12 interludes describe Buck Bannon from the viewpoint of two railroad brakemen, Jake and Bascom, who observe that Buck's love of liquor, gambling and lewd women never interfere with his ability to come out on top in every commercial and political challenge he encounters on his way through his life in Aven. Together the 33 chapters and 12 interludes paint a concise portrait of the main character, Buck Bannon.

Only after the publication of a second edition of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD in 1989 did the public discover that the author's original ending for the novel went unpublished due to  the fact that the publisher's editors wanted a happy ending. This original ending causes the reader to speculate upon the author's true opinion of the vivid character of Buck Bannon he created for his novel.

 

 The Forward of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD

As the town is the nation in seed, (The southeast Alabama town of Aven becomes a character itself as this novel unfolds an almost 30 turn-of-the-century year story  (1887-1916) which saw a fallow wilderness introduced to the American Industrial Revolution. Growing from a population of less than 200 to almost 10,000 in a few years, it is a tale about how a solitary frontier Wiregrass "dirt road sport" with a fourth grade education and an unquenchable thirst for domination went from a side job as a teenage pawnbroker to become a corporate psychopath who expanded his power to the point where he was able to control the entire population of Aven through finance, politics and property ownership. Imagine Aven as one of the novel's most important characters who the protagonist Buck Bannon "adopts" as one would an orphan and proceeds to guide this surrogate human as it grows and matures.)

so is a strong man the kernel of the town. 

(The novel never leaves the point of view of the character of Buck Bannon, a man whose values were forged through the childhood trauma produced by a life dominated by preparing, planting, nurturing and harvesting a field of cotton every year for the first eighteen of his life. With his actions and inner monologues over the course of 34 chapters and 12 interludes, we experience Buck's unsentimental vision of urbanization manifest itself.)

The life of the strong man is the beam from which the vigor of the town is projected, and, since the progress of man is by nature episodic, so a town may leap one year and stumble another. Robust in peak times, bloodless in the valleys, the commonwealth ebbs and flows with the temper of its men.

The lusty, always greedy, sometimes fumbling fingers of the strong man enrich the country in spite of his motives, as the earthworm's blind and selfish groping mellows the soil. (Just as the earthworm was born to instinctively consume waste and turn it into the black gold of fertile soil, so Buck Bannon's innate lust for power enriches those who share the streets of Aven with him. The unintended consequence of Buck's profit seeking is the growth of Aven which enriches the entire population of the town.)

Those other men, those who grovel and hesitate, live only within the boundary of their fears, in a dusty husk of a world, until the strong man comes, saying,

"I will build for myself, and if the public harvest follows my private vice, then join me at the board and leave it gratified." (In the novel's last chapter, Buck described his deep insatiable hunger to his wife, "The town's growing and I'll build more stores and buy more land, and make more money, as long as anybody makes it. I'll get mine all right, even if there are more face cards in the deck nowadays." 

ROBERTOREG'S NOTES

SECTION 1

DEVIL MAKE A THIRD is not structurally complex. The events in each chapter occur chronologically from about 1890 until 1915; however, the author employs 12 asides called Interludes to move the timeline forward rapidly so that the novel can cover over 25 years of Buck Bannon's life within its 33 chapters. Each Interlude is a confidential conversation between two railway brakemen who always discuss the consequences of Buck's actions in Aven which have been described in a few previous chapters. Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and the first Interlude make up the first of these 13 major divisions of the novel. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 describe Buck's life on the family farm,  Buck's first impressions of Aven and how he got into the position to make his fortune on his first morning after waking up in town. The first Interlude has the brakemen discuss how the action in the first two chapters has shown how Buck became Aven's first teenage loan shark and on the road to riches a little over a year after arriving in town.

Chapter 1 

 

Chapter One introduces the reader to many important forces in the life of Buck Bannon which will wind themselves through the novel. Most important will be the life-long burning desire of Buck to escape and to never return to rural life.  Being raised with "The Golden Rule" teachings of his Christian parents on their family farm and facing the realities of Aven's materialistic boomtown society create a moral conflict which the novel will never resolve. Buck will spend the rest of his life accumulating a fortune  so he could get as much money as he could put together between himself and his family and a life dominated by child labor, debt peonage and unrelenting, uncompensated toil. Buck's words and actions in the first chapter create  a foreshadowing of all the struggles Buck will face during his unconventional career.

In the opening scene of the novel DEVIL MAKE A THIRD, the reader is introduced to young Buck Bannon behind his plow "blinded by the sun" with sweat stinging his eyes and burning as it soaked  into the raw places on his neck chafed by his mule's reins but none of that mattered because "he was eighteen  and he was following a mule for the last time." Popping a sweat in the early morning sunshine reminded Buck that it was time for this "dirt road sport" to leave the farm and try his luck in town. He had a twenty dollar gold coin burning a hole in his pocket and the time had come for him to make his big move.

Turning his plow out of the soft dirt of the field, Buck looked between his mule's ears for the last time to see his mother rocking on her porch as he aimed his mule toward the sandy hard-packed clay of his Mama's meticulously swept yard. Buck rejoiced at his coming freedom from the drudgery of his parents' farm. In an act of both rebellion and celebration, Buck reined his mule  in concentric circles as he plowed up the bare-earth of his Mama's front yard. Slapping his mule with the looped ends of his lines, Buck yelled, danced and kicked up his heels while imitating the movements of his mule. Finally, he calmed down enough to speak and when he did, he imitated a square dance caller,"ROUND AND ROUND, swing yore partner and do it again."

The entire time he was plowing and rejoicing at his anticipated freedom, Buck kept his eye on the second most important character in this novel: his mother, Jeanie McPhearson Bannon,  pregnant with her thirteenth child, who sat rocking on her front porch, dipping snuff and observing her oldest boy showing off.  After he finally finished tearing up her carefully groomed yard and telling her he was heading to Aven, Jeanie remarked, "Them pickpockets'll fight over you." Mrs. Bannon obviously had no confidence in her oldest son's ability to succeed in a town that was as far as she could tell nothing more than a den of thieves.

 

The novel's second scene occurs inside the Bannon family home after the evening meal with Buck preparing to get a ride to Aven  that night with his younger brother Jeff driving him to town in the Bannon's flat-bed wagon. As Buck prepares to leave the farm for the last time, the reader is introduced to two of Buck's brothers and his father Joe. The other Bannon children are present but the reader only gets important information describing Buck's younger brothers, Jeff and Hearn. These five characters described in this first chapter (Buck Bannon, Mrs. Joe Bannon, Joe Bannon, Jeff Bannon and Hearn Bannon) are the ones from which most of the action in the novel grows.

The novel's third scene describes Buck and Jeff's evening journey to Aven and the reader gains insight into Buck's personality as the monotony of the wagon ride produces a stream of images from his consciousness which causes the young man to recollect scenes from the rural life he is abandoning and producing the first feelings on homesickness.

Rather than having Jeff cross a creek with his wagon, Buck jumps off the wagon, bids goodbye to his little brother and walks the remaining half mile into Aven. In the last paragraphs of Chapter 1, the reader is finally told that the scene of the action in the novel will mostly occur "in a small corner of Alabama [that] wasn't lying fallow any longer, but was heavy with the germ of a town."

 

Chapter 1 ends with teenage Buck walking "into the moon and looking it in the face and he could almost feel it as he crossed the tracks." The reader still has no idea that young Buck is a commercial and political genius but here we see that Buck felt he had been touched by a higher power as he walked along Aven's tracks and sensed his fate and his future were in "Aven's first row of tin-roofed shacks." With his fourth-grade education, a few wagon rides to the grist mill and more than a few years experience in working his tail off for nothing other than for the privilege of being the oldest child and living on Mama and Daddy's farm, a hungry Buck entered town bursting with enthusiasm.

Chapter 1 also introduces Buck's attitude toward other major characters in the novel. As Buck plowed he noticed his mother rocking on her porch. He saw she had begun to show her age. Pregnant with her fourteenth child, Buck noticed his mother "was wearing the shapeless dress she always wore when she was going to have another baby." He also took note of "the first solid streaks of grey in her hair." Buck "shifted his eyes to his mother's face. It was swollen a little, around the jaw..." and he "could tell how she felt by the tired puffiness around her eyes." Mrs. Joe Bannon may have been dipping snuff to relieve a toothache and she was probably about ready to get some store-bought teeth and that took money. That was one more reason for Buck to head out for Aven immediately and to get rich quick.

 

The things about Buck's mother which draw his attention show he was fully aware at a young age of what a toll a life-time of grueling farm labor took upon a person entering middle-age. Throughout the novel, Buck continually exhibits this ability to get inside another person's head, to find out what they want and to give it to them. 

Not only does Buck trust his younger brother Jeff to drive him to Aven on the family wagon but also felt "it's high time you'uz learnin' the way to Aven." Buck goes on to reassure his mother, "You'll all have to be comin' in town to see me, and Jeff can drive you." Buck's last words of warning to Jeff before walking into town shows Buck expects Jeff to take his place in the family, "Don't let Papa make you plow the big mule, boy. Big John'll pure pull yore arms out at the sockets. But you got to quit sleepin' in the cotton rows when you ought to be choppin'." 

In the first chapter, eighteen year-old Buck takes every opportunity to speak dismissively about life on the family farm. When his father remarks about how much Buck resembles members of his mother's family, Buck jokes that his nose has a hump in it because "that comes o' rootin' for vittles in his here sorry clay." At that smart remark, both Bannon parents defend their agrarian lifestyle. Buck's father responds, "We made vittles out o' that clay, Buck. And you et 'em. Don't run the land down." 

The toll that a life behind the plow takes on a man is described with Joe Bannon's manner of walking, "His shamble was a little stiff now, bringing the hunch back to his shoulders, as if he were still thrusting hard against a plow stock." Buck's excitement about his move to Aven comes from his commitment that life away from the farm will be easier for him as well as for his entire family. Buck firmly believes the Bannons might not live longer in Aven but they'll sure want to live longer than they would growing cotton year in and year out. No matter how much he or his parents enjoy the love, companionship or other rewards of their family farm or how much Buck might miss it during his lonely hours alone in Aven, the promise of a new life outside the farm fills Buck with excitement from the first page of Chapter 1 to the last, "Buck didn't know what it was, but he knew he was too full to hold it."

On the second page of the novel a foreshadowing of the coming moral conflict between Buck and his parents comes when the author describes the "sense of power" Buck experiences as he plows up his mother's meticulously swept yard that has him "swingy in the hips like a dirt-road sport." The use of the term "dirt road sport" tells the reader that even though Buck's parents may have wanted Buck to follow the moral compass they provided for him in their home, the realities of winning the daily commercial battle on Aven's dusty streets would require some bending of "the Golden Rule." As Buck would ask his brother, Jeff, later in the novel, "Don't you know a man is bound to stir up some mud when he kicks off from bottom?" The label "dirt road sport" coming in the first paragraph of the second page of the novel holds much portent for this novel. The author's use of the word "sport" to describe his main character refers to the "sporting man culture" which is defined by Wikipedia as involving "men leading hedonistic lifestyles that included keeping mistresses as well as excessive eating, drinking, smoking, gambling, and big game hunting. It is applied to a large group of middle- and upper-class men in the mid-19th century, most often in Great Britain and the United States."  Once he leaves the family farm in Chapter 1 and in each subsequent chapter, the reader sees Buck adopt a Gulf South version of "sporting man culture."

 

 This post will begin the process of footnoting the book based upon my PERSONAL OPINION.

DEVIL MAKE A THIRD

1. A quote by Shakespeare from his play KING HENRY VI, PART 2 ~ Act 3, Scene 2

QUEEN MARGARET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_of_Anjou#Depictions_in_fiction    :
                        "Mischance and sorrow go along with you!
                          Heart's discontent and sour affliction
                          Be playfellows to keep you company!
                          There's two of you; the devil make a third!
                          And threefold vengeance tend upon your steps."


"All the characters, all of the events and all of the places in this book are fictional."

2. Throughout his life, Dougie Bailey maintained that his book was a work of complete fiction.

"Essentially this novel is historical fiction. A reader well backgrounded in Dothan history cannot put aside the temptation to see Aven as Dothan." (from the September 9, 1948 DOTHAN EAGLE)

page 11: "Buck left the farm when he was eighteen."

3. from the May 23, 1908 DOTHAN EAGLE, "It was some eighteen years ago that the Bakers saw Dothan was about to be the Mecca of the wire-grass and began to put their money here, and they've stood by the town ever since."

image courtesy of https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762169/joe-baker

In 1890, Buck Baker would have been approximately 21 years old.

In his December 6, 1974 Dothan Eagle obituary, it is stated that Dan Baker arrived in Dothan in 1887. The Baker family was still living in Bakerville in 1887  and Dan was only 8 years old and Buck was 18 but Dan may have accompanied Buck when he moved to Dothan. In fact, the Baker family saw their 14th child born while they were still in Bakerville in September of 1890. (link to a BAKER FAMILY TIMELINE) https://reclaimalabama.blogspot.com/2020/06/1869-buck-baker-is-born.html

page 11: "She was wearing the shapeless dress she always wore when she was going to have another baby."

4. The last of Joe and Jane Baker's 14 children was born in September of 1890. (from the October 2, 1890 COLUMBIA RECORDER)

page 11: "Buck felt a sudden lurch under his ribs as he remembered that he was the first of twelve children. He could call back to mind the births of the last eight."

5. from the August 26, 1928 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER

The Baker Family
Front Row:  Minnie, Eugenia, Mrs. Jane (Sanders) Baker, with Vera, Joe Baker, Sr., holding Willie, Nannie, Ghastie and Coley
Second Row:  Dan, Robert, James, Maggie, and Doug.
Back: Joe, Jr. "Buck" and George

image courtesy of Sharman Burson Ramsey's SOUTHERN STYLE web site http://www.southern-style.com/Southeast%20Alabama%20Heritage%20Association/Baker.htm

page 11: "His mother was leaning forward now and Buck could see the sun glinting on the jar of Maccaboy snuff at her feet and picking out the first solid streaks in her hair."

6. Buck Baker's mother, Jane Sanders Baker, would have been 41 years old in 1890.

image courtesy of https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762168

image from the April 24, 1884 TROY MESSENGER

"Maccaboy" may also be spelled MACCOBOY . "Maccoboy, a moist and highly scented snuff"

image from the May 11, 1894 CLAY COUNTY ADVOCATE (Ashland, AL)

page 12: "His plow point curled out of soft dirt and began to labor in the hard-caked clay and he took his eyes off his mother for the first time."

7. PLOWING WITH A MULE

page 12: "He jerked hard on one line and drew his mule into a tight circle around the sanded yard, and the fullness in his chest began to choke up into his throat."

8. SWEEPING A SANDED YARD

page 12: "The sense of power swelling up made him feel reckless all over and swingy in the hips like a dirt-road sport."

9. From the PREFACE  of THE DIRT ROAD SPORT: Growing Up In Old Florida's Cow Country by Ed Thomas:

"What is a dirt road sport?"
"This old Southern phrase came from the poor families, homesteaders, cattle growers, farm hands, laborers and poachers of old rural Florida. There were all at the lower end of the social and economic ladder, always working hard for very little in return. Many were from way back in the woods where there were no paved roads. Most of them were content with a subsistence life just barely getting by and living off the land.
There were a few however, that had bigger ideas and dreams, combine this with the ambition and willingness to work hard and lay everything on the line are the few that achieved those dreams. These few faced life head on, took its blows, and kept going. Even though they didn't have money, support or higher education, they made up for it with a keen, creative mind, and good gift of gab, and a lot of hard work. They didn't bow down to, or take crap from anyone. They would give you the shirt off their back, just don't try to take it from them!
That is a dirt road sport."

page 12: "There was something like a gay release from pressure working up inside and the feeling was like a young bull feels when he goes in the pasture and plunges again and again into a springy sapling, testing his strength."

10. A male elk is also called a "bull." The following quote comes from https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/sports/outdoors/2016/11/19/heres-rub-buck-rubs/93743328/
 "rubs result when male elk, moose and white-tailed deer basically shadow-box with small- to medium-size trees in autumn. We assume they rub trees to work off mounting aggression as their testosterone builds for their species’ breeding seasons." 

This reference to a "young bull" may also be an allusion to the main character's first name, BUCK.


page 12: "The circles were getting smaller and Buck was having to swing the plow stocks wide, stepping loose-ankled on slabs of baked earth the plow had turned, and it was hard to kick up his heels."

11. from the March 26, 1903 ELBA CLIPPER

page 12: "His face was pokeberry red when the mule balked, stuttering four clumsy feet in a turn too short to make, and he was standing on the rim of the smallest circle, facing his mother."

12. pokeberry plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytolacca_americana

page 13: "He stopped yelling and tried to swallow past the burn in his throat and watched carefully while a dun-colored bantam hen walked with tight legs out from under the house and curiously tested the new softness of the dirt." 

13. Dun-colored bantam hens are buckskin color and their feathers are used in fly-tying.

page 13: "She leaned forward in her hide-bottomed rocker and spat delicately into the syrup bucket flowerpot at her feet."

14.  a link to an illustration of a hide-bottomed rocker https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/raw-hide-bottom-rocker/GAElkWdQjzp8YQ

from the December 27, 1921 SELMA TIMES-JOURNAL.

 Empty one gallon cane syrup buckets were used as flowerpots, spittoons, chamber pots, lunch pails, musical instruments, ice cream freezers, milk cans, bird houses, toys, coffee maker, bait can, berry picking can, storage container, etc. 

page 13: "He straightened up, quickly, and jerked the plow point out of the dirt. He tossed the handles slightly higher in point the plowshare straight down and drove it deep into the last unplowed spot."

Components of a simple drawn plow: 1) frame; 2) three point attach; 3) height regulator; 4) knife (or coulter) 5) chisel 6) plowshare 7) moldboard

15. Wikipedia link to PLOWSHARE   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plowshare

page 13: "I got twenty dollars and I'm headin' to town."

16. In 1890, a $20 gold coin contained an ounce of gold. Today's ounce of gold goes for about $1200.

page 13 "The eyes looked out at him like he was still a back-porch yearling"

17. A yearling cow or horse needs special attention to its diet and especially during a dry summer with parched grass in the pasture, they may have been tied to the back porch so that its diet could be supplemented. https://thehorse.com/14600/feeding-yearlings/

page 13 "She shook her head at him, full of gentle warning. "Them pickpockets'll fight over you," she said.

18. from the November 11, 1914 SOUTHERN STAR

page 13 "Coke was big enough to hang onto Buck and it looked like he wouldn't turn him loose."

19. Coke Bannon (Colie  Baker, 1886-1937 https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/31762159/colie-baker )

page 13 "For God's sake, Coke," Buck suddenly said, "let go o' my leg and do somethin' else. Suck a meat skin."

20. A meat skin was the outside of the smoked ham or shoulder that was often cut off and eaten raw, broiled or fried. I suppose parents often used a meat skin as a kind of pacifier for toddlers. 

from the March 16, 1921 CHOCTAW ADVOCATE (Butler, Alabama)

SAL'S GOT A MEAT SKIN was a popular Alabama fiddle tune.https://www.loc.gov/resource/afc9999005.35174.0

page 14 "She was sitting on the hand-hewn bench that had been soaped and scrubbed until little soft splinters stuck up now and then, even against the grain."

21. Just as Jeanie Bannon maintained a swept yard to keep insects out of her house,as a good housewife, she also periodically soaped and scubbed her furniture down to insure there were no unwanted infestations.

1939 DOROTHEA LANGE photo

page 14. "I say you ain't to use the Lord's name while you're in this house, Buck."

22. Mrs. Bannon does not repeat the 3rd Commandment that you should "not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain". She simply says "you ain't to use the Lord's name while you're in this house" with the assumption that anyone casually and irreverently invoking the deity's name during the course of daily activities will not be doing it with the proper respect and reverence such a name should receive from a true Christian.

page 14. "He was a tall man, with red hair that curled a little and a full red beard that he had chopped off straight across at his neck line."

23. Joe Bannon's character is modeled after Buck Baker's father, Joe Baker, Sr. Dothan's "Hidden Mural" located inside the Opera House has a portrait of a person purported to be "Buck Baker."

 The person painted is not Buck but his father, the bearded Joe Baker, Sr. In my humble opinion, of all the mistakes in Dothan's murals, this is by far THE WORST.

A Wikipedia comment concerning beards in the 19th century states, "Before Abraham Lincoln, no President wore a beard;^[39] after Lincoln until Woodrow Wilson, every President except Andrew Johnson and William McKinley had either a beard or a moustache of some sort.
The beard became linked in this period with notions of masculinity and male courage.^[38] The resulting popularity has contributed to the stereotypical Victorian male figure in the popular mind, the stern figure clothed in black whose gravitas is added to by a heavy beard."  
By the time Buck had reached maturity the clean shaven look had returned to style.


page 14. " 'I ain't goin' to do nothin', Mother," he said.

24. Because her husband immediately stood up after she scolded her oldest son, Mrs. Bannon assumed that Joe, Sr. was about to show 18 year old Buck that he "wasn't too big for a whipping ".

page 14. "He turned away from her and walked, shambling a little, over to help his son twist a baling wire around a small wooden box full of clothes."

25. Around a farm, baling wire was used to fix just about everything. In this case, it became the fastener on Bucks "suitcase."

page 14. "Don't you go sparkin' in them jeans o' mine, son. Them Aven folks'll think it's me."

26. "Sparkin' " was a country term for wooing, courtship or dating. https://blindpigandtheacorn.com/sparking-courtingwhich-s-dating/

from the July 13, 1905 ELBA CLIPPER

AVEN is the name of the fictional Alabama boom town in Dougie Bailey's DEVIL MAKE A THIRD which he modeled after DOTHAN. The literal meaning of an AVEN is "a vertical or highly inclined shaft in limestone, extending upward from a cave passage, generally to the surface"; in other words, the opening of a sink hole. Virtually ALL of the land in Dothan is part of the Lime Sinks region of Alabama. This is a common physiographic region in Georgia and Florida, however, only about 1000 square miles of Alabama are in the Lime Sinks. (Of course, Houston County also has a little town located slap dab in the middle of it called AVON. By changing the "O" to an "E", Dougie Bailey reminds us that old Dothan had a spelling controversy when its post office was misspelled DOTHEN from 1871 until 1897)  http://cartweb.geography.ua.edu/lizardtech/iserv/calcrgn?cat=North%20America%20and%20United%20States&item=States/Alabama/Counties/houston//Houston1977a.sid&wid=1000&hei=900&props=item(Name,Description),cat(Name,Description)&style=simple/view-dhtml.xsl

The Killebrew family of Newton had a large woolen mill where they made jeans which were in high demand in the Tri-State area. (the Killebrew Mill in Newton may have been Bailey's inspiration to name the two thieving brothers JONAS and ARBIE KILLIBREW. They are the ones who murder Tobe Parody in Chapter 23.0

from the December 25, 1913 ANDALUSIA STAR

from the September 15, 1888 NEWTON MESSENGER

page 14 "You kin see the McPherson stock ashinin' from fetlock to forelock."

27. McPherson is the maiden name of Jeanie Bannon. Sanders was the maiden name of Jane Baker.

The expression "from fetlock to forelock" was a common 19th expression to describe horses. It is found as early as 1879 in the newspaper THE NASHVILLE TENNESSEAN. The poet William Rose Benet, brother of Stephen Vincent Benet, used the expression in his poem WILD HORSES published in the May 1915 issue of THE CENTURY.

page 15 "That comes o' rootin' for vittles in this here sorry clay," he said...

28. VITTLES: from https://culinarylore.com/food-history:vittles-origin/

Vittles is an old-time word for food which we tend to associate with the rural South, cowboys, pioneers, mountain men, and the like. It actually comes from Middle English, by way of French.

It is sometimes suggested that victuals is the proper way of saying vittles and that vittles is simply a vulgar misspelling of a more refined word. The history of the word in English and in French tells a different story.

Vittles is actually a shortened and simplified spelling of the Middle English word vitailles, which arrived via the Old French word of the same spelling. It has been used in English since at least the early 1300’s.

The word vitailles was in use when it was discovered that the original origin of the word was the Latin word victualia. This caused some to imagine a ‘proper’ course of action would be to respell vitailles as victailles, which became the curious word victuals, supposed to be the proper spelling of vittles.

Vittles actually remained the most common use of the term, but the confused etymology caused many to think that vittles, all along, had been a misspelling and mispronunciation of victuals, which is pronounced without the ‘C’ as VIH-tuhl."

page 15 "They were all laughing as they crowded around the flat-bed wagon in the yard, and Buck felt the excitement rise up to choke him again.

29. a flat-bed wagon

page 15. "When I was twelve I went to mill and back and made the trade."

30. According to this link, Joe Baker, Sr. owned a water mill near Headland in 1886.
http://genealogytrails.com/ala/henry/history1.html

from the August 5, 1910 GOODWATER ENTERPRISE (Goodwater, Alabama)

page 16. "He didn't look at the little knot of mother and father and sisters and brothers when Jeff flicked the lines and pulled the mule sharply around to avoid a peach tree."

31. To "flick the lines" was a cue for the mule to pull the wagon forward. The driver would hold the reins over the mules backside and gently pop the mule's behind with them.

This maneuver made the use of the buggy whip unnecessary.

page 16. "He didn't look back, but his throat hurt a little from tightness and he listened carefully to the smooth whispering grind of the iron-rimmed wheels on hard sand."

32.

The Joe Baker, Sr. homestead where Buck Baker was raised was located on Sandy Creek in southern Henry County. https://alabama.hometownlocator.com/maps/feature-map,ftc,1,fid,153324,n,sandy%20creek.cfm

page 16. "He remembered the small room with the bed pushed over in the corner and the cotton quilt with the funny frocking on the edges."

33.

Walker Evans photo of a Hale County bedroom, 1935

"funny frocking on the edges" probably refers to an unusual fabric used to trim the quilt.

page 16. "The steady crunch of the wagon wheels lulled him the picture of the schoolroom was a jumble of his first day and his last day-that time when he was eleven and had to quit school to help in the fields-his Blue Back speller that cost a quarter bushel of meal- pitch pine popping and sparking and scorching some while others froze- swapping seats and wishing spring would come- sudden bursts of temper from being too close together- and the Peters boy that got somebody else's lunch bucket and they had to open it to prove it wasn't his- little Doshie Evans crying and ashamed to claim it when they saw that all she had was fatback, syrup and corn bread- and all the rest of them being real quiet because they didn't want anybody to see what they had."

34. Webster's Elementary Spelling Book, often compared to the Bible in terms of the number of copies printed in America, cost anywhere from 10 to 25 cents a copy and a quarter bushel of corn meal which was 12 pounds went anywhere from 10 to 25 cents per quarter bushel or peck.

Not only did Joe Baker, Sr., sell almanacs at his store in Bakerville but also probably sold BLUE BACK SPELLERS. Joe also owned a mill nearby so it would be simple for him to barter a quarter bushel of meal for a book.

from the June 17, 1884 THE TIMES AND NEWS (Eufaula)

35."pitch pine popping and sparking and scorching some while others froze"

Slash pine (Pinus Elliottii) was the common tree growing on sandy, third-rate land in the Wiregrass. Filled with pitch, this was the species of pine that was often tapped for resin in the turpentine industry.


36. LUNCH BUCKET 

37."fatback, syrup and corn bread"

Fatback was the cheapest meat available and "fatback, syrup and corn bread" was considered the diet of the poor.

from the March 10, 1938 DAILY TIMES NEWS (Burlington, N.C.)

from the December 7, 2001 PENSACOLA NEWS JOURNAL

38. "grabbed the lines to his chest"

Grabbing the reins of the mule and pulling them to the chest was a way to stop the animal.

from the December 17, 1994 PITTSBURG DAILY HEADLIGHT (Pittsburg, Kansas)

39. "mules unshod feet"

At the turn of the century, shoeing of mules and horses was a controversial subject. Many small towns had ordinances against unshod animals because it was believed to be inhumane and contributed to lameness. Others argued that the animal's hoof grew thicker without shoes and reduced the chances of lameness produced by walking on pavement or stones. In sandy Southeast Alabama, many farmers chose not to shoe their mules.

from the April 4, 1918 SHREVEPORT TIMES

from the February 4, 1908 LAWRENCE (Kansas) DAILY JOURNAL

from the November 13, 1919 BUFFALO (N.Y.) TIMES

40. "keep him from rattling the lines"

"lines" is another word for "reins"; "rattling the reins" is a more common expression. It's done by the rider to encourage the mule to move forward or done by the mule to show his rebellion.




41. "a frog thumped a tub"

This is probably the only time someone described a frog croak as "a frog thumped a tub." Generally "thumped a tub" refers to a politician enthusiastically advocating an issue and it was a fairly common term in the 1940s and 1950s but not in the 1890s, the time when this action took place. The earliest use of this term that I can find comes from a 1913 GUARDIAN, a newspaper published in London. ("banging a drum for" is a more common expression but generally describes the same activity)

42. "a chill in the air that came out of a wet bottom"

A "wet bottom" generally refers to low land which has standing water most of the time. https://books.google.com/books?id=4kkgAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=%22a+wet+bottom%22&source=bl&ots=m6uTgOZ1hD&sig=ACfU3U0p3Bec5fUeymNil3RlxRVdsZ56dA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjDo9fhk_ziAhXFUt8KHRmEC2M4FBDoATABegQICRAB#v=onepage&q=%22a%20wet%20bottom%22&f=false



43. "wrapped the lines around his wrist"

Again reins are described as "lines". There were "harness lines", "check lines", "plow lines", "jack lines" and the terms varied depending upon which region of the country you were in. 

44. "he reached out with a foot and tested his weight on the shaft. He placed his left hand on the mule's rump and began to walk out the shaft, sliding his hand along the rough sweaty ridge of backbone until he felt the up-curved end of the shaft with his foot. He pushed off, dividing his shove between his hand on the mule's collar and his foot on the shaft, and jumped clear of creek water."

The shaft would run along the lower side of the mule so Buck would step off of the wagon body, leaning over the back of the mule as he slid his feet from side to side along the shaft as he moved toward the mule's head. The mule's front feet were probably at the edge of the creek. When he arrived at the mule's neck, he was able to steady himself by grabbing onto the collar and holding it as he pushed off the shaft for his jump across the creek.

45. "Don't let Papa make you plow the big mule, boy," he said, "Big John'll pure pull yore arms out at the sockets. But you got to quit sleepin' in the cotton rows when you ought to be choppin'."

 "Chopping cotton is the first hoeing that occurs after the young cotton plants become sturdy enough to withstand the process. It involves thinning out excess plants, leaving groups of two or three spaced apart by about the width of the hoe blade. The crusty soil is then tilled with the hoe and gathered to reinforce the remaining plants while removing various weeds, such as Johnson grass, coffee weeds, and thorns." https://romans11v33.com/2016/05/20/chopping-cotton/comment-page-1/

46. "some of his mother's cush he could take and eat out of the palm of his hand like it was a bowl. He'd nuzzle into that Thanksgiving cush like a hound."

Ironically, Dan Baker is the model for the character of HERN BANNON. (from the July 23, 1933 DOTHAN EAGLE) 

47. "fill up on cush before they got to turkey. Corn meal and onions with meat stock were cheaper than turkey."

from a 1933 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER: "Dan Baker (model for JEFF BANNON) raised the subjeck of cush and he made me hungry about it.  Course Dan had to have a leetle joke about cush cause he sed they used to feed it to him when he was a leetle boy jest 'fore dinner so's he an the other chillun wouldn't eat up all the chicken and other fancy stuff."


from the July 23, 1933 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER

from the September 21, 1951 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER

from the August 23, 1933 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER

"Cush" is another word for CORNBREAD DRESSING.
from the September 27, 1951 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER

from the 1933 MONTGOMERY ADVERTISER

48. "the first shining finger of railroad glinted suddenly ahead of him and his feet began to crunch on the new roadbed. Cinders."

from the March 12, 1891 TROY MESSENGER

49. "smell of fresh-cut fat pine ties and tar and oil and smoke that coughed shudderingly out of the belled stack of a small switch engine whose firebox glowed line a woodsfire."
from the March 15, 1936 DOTHAN EAGLE

50. "a small corner of Alabama wasn't lying fallow any longer, but was heavy with the germ of a town."
 from the July 10, 1909 DOTHAN EAGLE 

51. "Aven's first row of tin-roofed shacks with a swing to his copper-toed shoes."
from the March 23, 1933 WIREGRASS FARMER (Headland)

52. "A brakeman in the new ACL yards"
from December 18, 1946 DOTHAN EAGLE

DEVIL MAKE A THIRD Commentary

 CHAPTER 2

Page 20: "pioneered with his shoulder blades"
 

Buck was introducing his back to their new place of rest, the knotty wood of the bed of a new railroad baggage truck.

Page 20: "baggage truck"

A baggage truck was simply a porter's cart for transporting freight around the depot in the late 1880s but by 1906, the carts were equipped with batteries and electric motors.

 Page 20: "It's better'n wakin' up with Hearn rootin' from one side and Jeff from the other till they prize me up off the pallet"

circa 1935 Walker Evan's photo of an Alabama child sleeping on a pallet on the floor.

Page 20: "the one curious older girls took behind the privy after school"

A Texas school privy with five vent pipes exposed.

Page 20: "already his eyes would glide over one girl without quickening, to suddenly narrow sleepily at the first sight of her sister." (Hearn was focusing his attention on greener pastures at an early age.)

Page 20: "sitting on the front porch pleating and unpleating her skirt" (A nervous gesture betraying an uneasiness. Buck's Mother's restless fingers take a fold in her skirt or apron and nervously bend it back and forth.)

Page 20: "shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves"

from the August 1, 1928 SOUTHERN STAR [Newton]

Page 20: "we got rid o' downright hard shirt sleeves"

The term "downright hard" often precedes the word "work", as in "downright hard work."

Page 20: "a live creek meandering the year round through the bottom" 

The term "live creek" describes a stream always flowing as opposed to an intermittent creek. "A live creek" is often used as a property description for land that is watered year-round by a stream.

page 21: "lifting the lid off a mess of greens and fatback"

Page 21: "the rifle at Chickamauga Gap and slippery ellum bark for dressing

Many Alabama units participated in the Battle of Chickamauga but I have no idea who Dougie may have modeled this after. As far as I know, Joe Baker, Sr. never served in the Confederate army. https://ehistory.osu.edu/exhibitions/Regimental/alabama/confederate/lawsbrig

from the June 14, 1898 NEWS-PALLADIUM (Benton Harbor, Michigan)

Page 22: "ease out of bed so the rustling of shucks wouldn't wake Joe"

"The shuck mattress was a horse of a different color. It was quite noisy to sleep on and required a fair amount of work to make because the corn shucks had to be painstakingly shredded or torn into tiny strips by hand. The easiest way was to cut the butt end of the shucks off with a pair of scissors thus making tearing them into strips quite a bit easier. They had to be fluffed up regularly like the straw and feather mattresses in order to keep them nice and soft. It took quite a bit of labor and time to make a shuck mattress but when it was finished it was quite noisy but comfortable.

The feather bed or mattress was made out of the fine feathers of chickens or ducks and geese. Each time a victim ended up on the table as the main course the feathers were put into a sack and saved till there was enough to stuff a tick with." https://www.themountaineagle.com/articles/straw-mattresses-were-the-worst/

Page 22: "hot smells of side meat and chicory coffee bellied out of the chimney's draught"

"Side meat" was another name for home-made bacon. 

from the October 29, 1953 NASHVILLE BANNER

Page 22: "He'd cut a step or two"

from the December 2, 1943 PRATTVILLE PROGRESS

Page 22: "tinka-bell reflections" 

Tinker Bell, the fairy in J.M. Barrie's PETER PAN, is associated with twinkling light, such as you would see reflected off of white sand used for flooring.

Page 22: "what the sand was for. Floorin'. Floorin' to cover the clay and drain off the bath water."

Page 22: "creek-bottom sand"

Page 22: "God's bottom. A hobo on a baggage truck I never thought to see."

Page 23: "if you're any kind o' hand with a pick"

Page 23: "but I ain't aimin' to dig in no more dirt"

Page 23: "He felt the excitement yeasting inside at sight of a small neat buggy with new harness"

INTERLUDE

page 29: "long billed railroad man's striped cap"

CHAPTER THREE

"rocking whip of the drive shaft"

DEVIL MAKE A THIRD. By Douglas Fields Bailey. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1948. Reviewed by EDWIN S. MILLS, JR. 

 MACHIAVELLI IN ALABAMA

 It's a refreshing experience, these days, to pick up a period novel— which also happens to be a first novel —and find in it both careful devotion to character and honest comment on American culture. It is even more refreshing when that comment is made so completely through character that one seems quite inseparable from the other. "Devil Make a Third" is all of these things, and—with allowances for the fact that it is a first go—perhaps more. For in Mr. Bailey's saga of the turn-of-the-century urbanization of an Alabama town, seen through the eyes of the man who virtually single-handed brought its growth about, there can be found some profound, unstated conjectures as to the nature of the lust for power in a man, its association with frontier America, and the brawny heritage of American enterprise. It is a creditable piece of work. 

  From the first to the closing page, Mr. Bailey's story never leaves the side of big, lusty, amiable Buck Bannon. Buck is very simply a strong man. With a massive, unsentimental (and/or immoral, depending on where you sit) thirst for domination, which Buck explains to himself as a desire to win anything he sets his mind to, he arrives as a rube farm boy of eighteen in the backwater Alabama town of Aven just a length ahead of the industrial revolution—in the form of a railroad spur. And when we leave him, about thirty years, two wives, and several million dollars later, he has become Aven. Colossus-like, he stands athwart it politically, financially, and (perhaps most peculiarly American of all his achievements) in property ownership.

 It is an odd and significant fact that although "Devil Make a Third" must be thus synopsized as the story of a man's climb to urban power, its author tells us little if anything about the specific means by which Buck Bannon achieves his Machiavellian ends. Rather than explain how, Mr. Bailey seems to prefer to investigate why. True, at first we do witness some of the seamy deeds Buck believed were necessary to achieve his ends: we see Buck as a usurous teen-age money-lender; we catch him in ruthless twenty-one-year-old villainies which are quite legal. But more and more, as the story progresses, Mr. Bailey unfolds his saga by selecting only intimate scenes in Buck's personal life. He avoids dramatizing the public scenes, and substitutes hearsay, reference, occasional soliloquies by Buck, and sporadic episodes in a pretentious "chorus" device for the scenes themselves. Instead of seeing Buck express his deep, insatiable hungers in public actions, we watch the effect of those action on his personal life. And from the succession of intimates personal scenes, we begin to draw conclusions of what the public scenes must have been. From a poker game, in which Buck quietly breaks the arm of a colleague caught dealing off the bottom of the deck, we can imagine two-score meetings between Buck and the ward bosses and politicians we never meet. From Buck's tough, implacable fight with his equally tough mother for control of the money he has amassed, we can project innumerable boardroom meetings with unintroduced Aven financiers. It is always in terms of character, rather than incident, that Mr. Bailey regards the lust for power. We concentrate on the fabric of a man and from the man measure the fabric of an era. This is a highly creditable approach to the task of writing a novel.  

Although Mr. Bailey seems to want to avoid editorialization as to Buck's merits and demerits as a social being, I'm afraid that the very absence of the seamier public scenes somewhat gilds his portrait. Buck fares a little too well in Mr. Bailey's hands. Many men who have performed major evils sincerely like to kiss babies and help the poor—and since we see Buck only intimately we witness only the baby-kissing and the Robin Hooding. The artist has flattered his model, and painted out the moles. To me this is a serious flaw; in losing some of its objectivity, the novel loses some of its not inconsiderable stature as American comment.

 

 Chapter 1: CHILD LABOR: UNCOMPENSATED TOIL

first paragraph of page 11: "He was eighteen and he was following a mule for the last time."

page 15: "That comes o' rootin' for vittles in this here sorry clay," he said,"

page 16: "-that time when he was eleven and had to quit school to help in the fields-"

page 17: "Don't let Papa make you plow the big mule, boy," he said. "Big John'll pure pull yore arms out at the sockets. But you got to quit sleepin' in the cotton rows when you ought to be choppin'."

Chapter 2

page 24: "Food comes first. Then I got to get me a job- job where a man don't have to use a tool. Tool jobs make corns on a man's hands and when he gets through he's so tired he ain't got sense enough to spend money right. Now, I got to lay onto the right job, but I don't know what it is. It oughtn't to make so much difference, long as it ain't a tool job. I hate to sweat."

 Just completed an interesting task for my DEVIL MAKE A THIRD Primer. I have selected quotes from the novel's Forward, 33 CHAPTERS, and 11 Interludes. I believe these quotes summarize the action in each chapter and my next project will be to compose brief summaries of the action from which each quote is taken.

FORWARD: "The lusty, always greedy, sometimes fumbling fingers of the strong man enrich the country in spite of his motives, as the earthworm's blind and selfish groping mellows the soil."

CHAPTER 1 (circa 1887) : "Headin' for town..."

CHAPTER 2: "Take the first job somebody offers me, long as it ain't a tool job."

INTERLUDE #1: " 'F I hadn't borrowed the first dollar from Buck Bannon, he'd never 'o made a loan."

CHAPTER 3:  "His wife's sick. He needs money right now for some doctorin' in Atlanta."

CHAPTER 4: "I don't give a damn about bein' a gentleman but, by God, I'll be payin' my debts, till I die."

INTERLUDE #2 (circa 1890) : "He left in a rubber-tired buggy, all right."

CHAPTER 5: "Please don't let me be scared of all them folks."

INTERLUDE #3: "Now I couldn't even be a night watchman if Buck wasn't buildin' his folks a house an' hired me so he could get his money back."

CHAPTER 6: "Big Vic. We got a Little Vic."

CHAPTER 7: "We're goin' to call her Christina."

INTERLUDE #4 (circa 1895) : "Wasn't for him, you wouldn't even have a job helpin' to lay out the town."

CHAPTER 8 (circa 1900) : "He'll be drunk for two days and won't have a chance to tell it in town."

CHAPTER 9: "I don't think you could do anything that wasn't pretty."

INTERLUDE #5 (circa 1905) : "He got me this job because he and old man Dean got to be big political buddies and he says if I'll pay him half my salary ever' week, he won't charge no more interest."

CHAPTER 10: "Stick around. Reckon we can gee on some other matters, too."

CHAPTER 11: "I'm all that and I'm a man that don't change. But if you're in love with the kind of man I am now, by the Lord, I ain't goin' to change."

CHAPTER 12: "We don't need light right now."

INTERLUDE #6: "Jake, what bothers me is, how come he can do things like he's doin' to you and you stay friends with him?"

CHAPTER 13: "Hold supper up. Got somethin'  to 'tend to."

CHAPTER 14: "Losses don't bother me. I just draw a new hand an' raise all bets."

CHAPTER 15: "Papa died."

INTERLUDE #7 (circa 1910) : "Talkin' 'bout me wastin' on, women, look at him. It was a woman made that girl clear out."

CHAPTER 16: "It was kinda fun fixin' up to give 'em that stuff."

CHAPTER 17: "One thing I've always wanted to see though, New York."

CHAPTER 18: "A hotel with a bathroom and a telephone in every room."

INTERLUDE #8: "Miss Edie, here's number twenty-five."

CHAPTER 19: "I hope you can find me a place."

CHAPTER 20: "You've only known me three weeks, you don't even know if you'd like to kiss me."

INTERLUDE #9 (circa 1915): "Old as Buck is, there ain't apt to be no more a'comin."

CHAPTER 21: "Go on down Lessie Whitfield."

CHAPTER 22: "Well, Preacher, lucky you didn't sleep in your tent last night."

CHAPTER 23: "I can just see little old Ed Reddick collectin' taxes from Josie's Hollow Horn girls."

INTERLUDE #9: "Well, sir, you can't never tell about Buck. I didn't figure he'd get over Tobe Parody gettin' killed"

CHAPTER 24: "She's just got a one-way fare, Buck, but she's routed right."

CHAPTER 25: "It's a plumb shame that everybody can't afford to live all the time like they didn't have but one more day."

CHAPTER 26: "Your place is so much like the house we used to live in, maybe you'd just let me come down here to visit."

INTERLUDE #10: "Pore Buck, ever'body around him droppin' out, an' his brand-new wife packin' off to boardin' school."

CHAPTER 27: "And, by God, when I get to where I have to be serviced like a damn brood mare, I'll get a man. It won't be a spineless dog."

CHAPTER 28: "Good God, let me get out of this place."

CHAPTER 29: "I'm going to wear white satin, cut real low, and white gloves up past my elbows. At the dedication, when you make the speech."

CHAPTER 30: "She's gone."

CHAPTER 31: "Put it on the records as a bridal suite and charge double our usual rates."

INTERLUDE #11: "Mighty good to see a fellow get in shape to retire." "Go to hell."

CHAPTER 32: "My God, that'll be the capitol calling from Montgomery."

CHAPTER 33: "Drop the guitar." 

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Contents of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD

Forward

SECTION 1- circa 1887

           Chapter 1- "Headin' for town..."

           Chapter 2- "Take the first job somebody offers me, long as it ain't handlin' a tool." 

           Interlude #1- " 'F I hadn't borrowed the first dollar from Buck Bannon, he'd never 'o made a loan."

SECTION 2- 16 months later; circa 1888-1889

           Chapter 3- "His wife's sick. He needs money now for some doctorin' in Atlanta."

           Chapter 4- "I don't give a damn about bein' a gentleman but, by God, I'll be payin' my debts, till I                                     die."

            Interlude #2-  circa 1890 "He left in a rubber-tired buggy, all right."

SECTION 3-  circa 1890

             Chapter 5- "Please don't let me be scared of all them folks."

             Interlude #3- " Now I couldn't even be a night watchman if Buck wasn't buildin' his folks a house                                          an' hired me so he could get his money back."

SECTION 4- circa 1890

             Chapter 6- "Big Vic," she said. "We got a Little Vic."  

             Chapter 7- "We're goin' to call her Christina."

             Interlude #4-  "Wasn't for him, you wouldn't even have a job helpin' to lay out the town."

SECTION 5- circa 1891

             Chapter 8- "He'll be drunk for two days and won't have a chance to tell it in town."  

             Chapter 9- "I don't reckon you could do anything that wasn't pretty."

             Interlude #5- "He got me this job 'cause him and  old man Dean got to be big political buddies and                                        he says if I'll pay him half my salary ever' week, he won't charge no more interest."

SECTION 6

              Chapter 10- "Stick around," he said, "reckon we can gee on some other matters, too." [Stylish George's card game. Meets Tobe.]

              Chapter 11- "I'm all that and I'm a man that don't change. But if you're in love with the kind of                                             man  I am now, by the Lord, I ain't goin' to change."

               Chapter 12- "We don't need a light right now."   [meets Virgil after his own wedding]

               Interlude #6- "Jake, what bothers me is, how come he can do things like he'd doin' to you and you 

                                       stay friends with him?"

SECTION 7

              Chapter 13- "Hold supper up. Got something to 'tend to."

              Chapter 14- "Losses don't worry me. I just draw a new hand an' raise all bets."

               Chapter 15- "Papa died."

               Interlude #7- (scene is set ten years later- circa 1900) "Talkin' 'bout me wastin' on women, look                                           at  him. It was a woman made that girl clear out."

SECTION 8 - circa 1900

               Chapter 16- "It was kinda fun fixin' up to give 'em that stuff."

               Chapter 17- "One thing I've always wanted to see though, New York."

               Chapter 18- "A hotel with a bathroom and a telephone in every room."

                Interlude #8- "Miss Edie, here's number twenty-five."

SECTION 9

              Chapter 19-  "I hope you can find me a place."

              Chapter 20-  "You've only known me three weeks, you don't even know if you'd like to kiss me."

              Interlude #9- "Old as Buck is, there ain't apt to be no more a'comin'."   

SECTION 10

             Chapter 21-  "Go on down. Lessie Whitfield!"

             Chapter 22- "Well, Preacher, lucky you didn't sleep in your tent last night."

             Chapter 23- "I can just see little old Ed Reddick collectin' taxes from Josie's Hollow Horn girls."

             Interlude #10- "Well, sir, you can't never tell about Buck. I didn't figure he'd get over Tobe Parody                                        gettin' killed." 

SECTION 11

            Chapter 24- "She's just got a one-way fare, Buck, but she's routed right."

            Chapter 25- "It's a plumb shame that everybody can't afford to live all the time like they didn't have                                      but one more day."      

            Chapter 26- "Your place is so much like the house we used to live in, maybe you'd just let me come                                   down here to visit."       

             Interlude #11- "Pore Buck, ever'body around him droppin' out, an' his brand-new wife packin' off                                          to  boardin' school."

SECTION 12

             Chapter 27- "And, by God, when I get to where I have to be serviced like a damned brood mare,                                        I'll get a man. It won't be a spineless dog.      

             Chapter 28-  "Good God, let me get out of this place."

             Chapter 29- "I'm going to wear white satin, cut real low, and white gloves up past my elbows. At                                        the dedication, when you make the speech."  

             Chapter 30- "She's gone."

             Chapter 31- "Put it on the records as a bridal suite and charge double our usual rates."

              Interlude #12- "Mighty good to see a fellow get in shape to retire."

                                      "Go to hell."

SECTION 13

               Chapter 32- "My God, that'll be the capitol calling from Montgomery."

                Chapter 33- "Drop the guitar."

 

 

 

 

SLAVE LABOR

https://armyhistory.org/a-tale-of-two-forts/

SLAVE RENTALS

http://muse.jhu.edu/article/419440/pdf 

Thomas Hulse http://docslide.net/documents/military-slave-rentals-the-construction-of-army-fortifications-and-the-navy.html