The Foreward of DEVIL MAKE A THIRD compares men to corn plants

As the town is the nation in seed, so is a strong man the kernel of the town.

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.

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."

 

 

"Chapter 1: Buck left the farm when he was eighteen."

The novel DEVIL MAKE A THIRD opens with young Buck Bannon behind the plow "blinded by the sun", with sweat stinging his eyes and burning as it soaked  into the raw places on his neck chafed by the mule's reins but none of that mattered because "he was eighteen  and he was following a mule for the last time." The reader has no idea whether Buck had spontaneously made this momentous decision or whether it was made after careful planning. One thing is for certain, the main thing on Buck's mind is how he's going to tell his Mama he's leaving the old home place forever and moving to the nearby town of Aven.