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."