I actually took the time this morning to write a couple of paragraphs for ROBERTOREG'S NOTES on DEVIL MAKE A THIRD and the good thing about is that I think I finally know where I'm headin' with it.: 

 

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 four of the 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 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 lifetime of grueling farm labor took upon a person entering middle-age. Buck continued to exhibit this keen sense of future-time orientation with the introduction of his father, Joe Bannon, in the second scene of the chapter. In the simple act of standing up from his bench beside the family table, Joe's authority fills the room as Buck's mother grabs his arm anticipating that the head of the household is about to show his oldest son and that he's not too old for the belt since Buck had decided that his anticipated emancipation from the Bannon household entitled him to suddenly forget "you ain't to use the Lord's name while you're in the house...". It was a false alarm but it lets the reader know that these parents have high expectations of righteousness from their offspring. It was a desire that Buck did not necessarily aspire to after he was introduced to Aven. The rural ideals of his Christian parents and the reality of cutting corners so you could get rich quick in Aven create a conflict which will drive all the action for the rest of the novel.

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