Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

A Note on Dialect

The southern contraction “yall”—plural of “you”—is most often written with an apostrophe. But I have dropped the apostrophe in this text for consistency. If we take “y’all” as a valid pronoun in its own right, it would be the only one that had one. As well, the multiple apostrophes it allows to worm their way into the possessive forms would be ludicrous. Thus I have omitted them.