Contrary to Lizzie May's predictions and somewhat to her disappointment, Judith failed to suffer from the marital troubles that increasingly vexed her own life. Jerry proved to be, at least according to Lizzie May's standards, a much better husband than Dan. He did not care for the sport of fox hunting, so there were no hounds to bay around the house at night and greedily lick of the corn meal that could ill be spared. He never went anywhere in the evenings, and he had not been drunk a dozen times in his life. Lizzie May had to admit to herself that Judy, the wild and harum-scarum, who was capable of almost any foolishness, had made a much more sensible choice than she. But of course it was nothing but luck, she told herself. She felt in a vague, half acknowledged way that she had a quite justifiable complaint to make against the powers that be because chance had favored the irresponsible instead of meting out just reward to the careful and prudent. This did not mean that she would have been willing to exchange Dan for Jerry. She would have scorned such an opportunity. Dan was Dan. He was the man who had courted her. He was hers. But she would have liked to borrow some of Jerry's qualities and insert them craftily into Dan's character, making him over into a husband more contributory to her comfort and convenience.
All that summer, in spite of the toil of the field, Judith was joyous and radiant. And she worked hard. She could not take the matter of earning a living as seriously as did Jerry; but she caught some of the infection of his ambition to raise big crops and lay by money for a home of their own. So she worked in the corn and tobacco as determinedly as he, stopping only to cook their simple meals and wash up the few dishes, with an occasional day off for washing clothes. Besides helping Jerry in the field, she looked after her chickens and turkeys
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 and made a kitchen garden near the house in which she raised beets, cabbages, beans, tomatoes, and other vegetables to take away the curse of bareness from their table.
The first big job of the season came in May. This was the tobacco setting. Late in February Jerry had made the tobacco bed. It was nine feet by sixty feet and it lay in a sheltered hollow sloping gently to the south. To kill the weed seeds Jerry had burnt the bed by covering it with old fence rails and setting them on fire. Then he had raked the ashes into the ground and made the earth as fine and smooth as sand. Into this he had sowed the small, almost microscopic seed, had tramped it well into the ground and spread over the whole a tightly stretched covering of cheesecloth to protect the young plants from wind and frost. According to the custom of tenant farmers' wives in the tobacco country, Judith had planted on the edges seed of tomatoes, peppers, and cabbages to make plants for the home garden.
It was a dry spring that year, and Jerry had had to work hard to keep the plants alive. Again and again, after his day's work was done, he had trudged to and fro between the nearest spring and the tobacco bed carrying big buckets of water to the thirsty young plants. Jerry found to his dismay that it took a great many buckets of water to wet a nine by sixty bed. At last in late April there came several days of gently falling warm rain and the plants took on new life. By the middle of May they were lush and lusty and ready to be set when the right weather conditions arrived.
The big rain came the last week in May, bringing the much desired "season." Little showers had fallen from time to time, but they were not enough to wet the ground deeply. Jerry was beginning to grow uneasy and had been scanning the weather signs with an anxious eye for many days. On the evening of the twenty-fifth, as he drove his horses up from the field where he had been cultivating corn, the sun sank behind an opaque wall of sickly yellow cloud. Looking about Jerry saw the sky overcast in every direction with a uniform pale gray. Birds flew low under the heavy gray canopy. The
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 whistle and rumble of a train several miles away sounded distinct through the still, brooding air; and as he walked along the top of the ridge behind the horses he heard twice the harsh cry of a woodpecker.
"We'll have a terbacker settin' rain afore mornin', Judy," he said, when she came out to help him put up the horses. "Everything says so."
Before they went to bed that night the rain began. Jerry went out and fixed the drain of the eaves trough so that the water would run into the cistern. The next morning it was still coming down in a warm, steady downpour. All day it fell in the same soft, gently-falling stream, like a blessing upon mankind, not from a self-centered Hebrew deity, but from some sweet natured and generous pagan god.
"Bejasus, this'll fetch things along, Judy," said Jerry, who was busily nailing soles on Judith's shoes beside the kitchen window. "Land, haow everything'll pick up after this rain! I sholy do love to see things grow in spring. An' about to-morrow afternoon we kin go to settin'."
The next morning dawned blue and warm, full of birdsong and the scent of wet growing things. The ground was dank with rain, but by afternoon Jerry thought it would be dry enough to begin setting. After breakfast he went to the tobacco bed to pull plants and Judith got on one of the horses and rode over to her father's to get Elmer to come and "drop." As the horse trotted along the top of the ridge and out onto the sodden "pike" full of puddles, she breathed deep of the fragrant air, felt the sun's warmth on her back and shoulders and almost fancied that she was a plant that had sucked in the life-giving rain and was preparing to raise its blossom to the sun.
She returned before long with Elmer, now grown into a loutish chunk of fourteen, all hands and feet and appetite. Elmer rode upon Pete, a young mule that Bill had bought to take the place of Bob, who had died the year before of old age. Pete was of a rich chestnut color, glossy, handsome, and liquid-eyed. He was also intelligent with the super-equine
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intelligence of a mule. He had a way of laying back his ears ever so slightly and looking at any one who approached him with a backward-sidewise glance of mingled playfulness and suspicion. It made Judith laugh to see him do this.
"Land, Elmer," she exclaimed, as they were putting up the horse and mule in the shed, "if that critter, Pete, hain't got the look of Uncle Sam Whitmarsh, I never seen two folks that looks alike. Uncle Sam has got jes that same way o' lookin' at you sharp an' sidewise an' yet smilin', as though he kinda suspicioned that you was a-tryin' to git the best of him, an' yet he wanted to be good friends an' have some fun with you too. An' if Uncle Sam could move his ears I'm sure he'd lay 'em back jes a little. They say animals can't smile. But if that mule hain't a-smilin' then what is he a-doin'?"
She patted his glossy neck admiringly. He flicked his ears and looked at her in his characteristic way, then poked his soft nose into her face.
"He's durn hard to ketch up in paster," grunted Elmer. "You come up alongside of him with the bridle, an' he gives you that 'ere look, an' fust thing you know he's a quarter of a mile off. My legs is run clean off since we got him."
After dinner the tobacco setting began. Elmer had the easy job. With a basket of plants on his arm he went along the rows that Jerry had laid off with the plow and dropped the plants at intervals of about eighteen inches, dropping two rows at a time. Jerry and Judith followed behind, each taking a row, and set the plants in the ground. They worked at first with their fingers, until the skin began to wear away. Then Jerry whittled two round, sharp-pointed sticks, and they used these instead of the fingers. With the sharp stick they made a hole in the wet earth, set the plant into it and pressed the earth down about the roots with their fingers.
At first they went along the rows gaily, rallying each other and trying to see which could work the fastest. Sometimes Jerry would get a little ahead and look back teasingly. Then Judith would make her fingers fly and outstrip him and laugh back at him from under her big blue sunbonnet. They soon
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 stopped this, however, and fell into the regular, clockwork routine of those who go through the same set of motions many hundreds of times over, only now and then standing erect for a moment to straighten their cramped legs and ease their aching backs. Very soon they had no energy left to laugh or even talk and plodded along the rows doggedly, silently, seeing only the wet ground and the plants that were to be put into it. The muscles of their legs grew sore and strained from the unusual exercise of constantly kneeling and rising, kneeling and rising. The ache in their backs became sometimes unbearable; and the backs of their necks, held always at tension and beat upon by the hot sun, throbbed with a dull, continual pain. The moisture rising from the soaked ground made the heat heavy and enervating. Their hands cracked and stiffened. The wet clay stuck in layer after layer to their heavy work shoes until they found it hard to lift their feet, and had to stop often to scrape away the caked mud. Elmer, who was barefoot, got along much better. When the strain of constant bending became unendurable and they stood up for relief, the earth swam about them and for a moment everything turned black. They reeled, righted themselves, and went at it again.
They drank enormous quantities of water. Elmer, who was not kept so busy as the other two, had the job of bringing water from the spring in an earthenware molasses jug with a corncob stuck in the neck for a cork. The cool water tasted delicious.
They kept this up until after sunset, as long as they could see the ground and the plants, for no moment of the precious "season" must be wasted. When at last they stopped for want of light and dragged their mud-encrusted feet up the hill and along the ridge toward home, no one of the three spoke a word. Spattered with mud from head to foot, they walked with bent heads and sagging legs, like horses that have tugged all day at the plow through ground too hard for their strength.
"My land, I'm glad I don't have to set terbaccer every day," said Judith, as she fried the cakes. "I'm gonna make the coffee jes three times as strong to-night."
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After they had eaten and drunk several cups of the rank decoction, they went immediately to bed. When they closed their eyes they could see nothing but tobacco plants standing up stiffly out of wet clay. They fell asleep with this picture painted on the insides of their eyelids.
Jerry had set the alarm clock for three. They seemed to have only just fallen asleep when its insistent ting-a-ling startled them awake. The early dawn was already melting the darkness of the room. Jerry jumped out of bed and in a few seconds had put on his shirt and overalls and was lighting the fire.
"Land alive, I wish I didn't have to get up," yawned Judith, stretching her slim young arms above her head. Reluctantly she put her feet out on the rag mat beside the bed, yawned, stretched, and began to put on her clothes. Elmer, who was still fast asleep in the other room, had to be shaken into consciousness twice before he crawled sleepily out and felt around on the floor for his overalls. They all washed on the bench outside the door, splashing the water about plenteously and rubbing vigorously with the towel to get the sleep out of their eyes. Soon Judith was frying the cakes, and the smell of boiling coffee filled the kitchen. They ate from the unwashed dishes of the night before. After the cakes and coffee they felt better and all three set out together for the tobacco field. This time they all went barefoot.
When they began to work, they found themselves so stiff in every bone and muscle that it seemed at first as if they could not possibly go on. After a while, however, they limbered up and managed to get through the morning. But the afternoon seemed as if it would stretch into eternity. The sun beat down fiercely. The mud caked thicker on their feet and the skin wore thinner on their aching fingers. Twice Judith collapsed and had to go and lie in the shade until her strength returned and the intolerable ache in her back and neck subsided a little. Jerry tried to persuade her to go back to the house and let him and Elmer go on with the setting; but she scorned his male assumption of superior strength and
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endurance. At last the sun sank and the cool evening air revived them a little. Gradually the sky paled, the light grew dimmer, and darkness closing in upon them made the green of the young plants intense and vivid. Still they worked on. At last they began to stumble over clods in the darkness and Elmer could no longer see to separate the plants from each other.
"Thank God we can't do no more to-night," said Jerry, in a tone of intense relief. He rose, straightened his strong young shoulders and surveyed the field.
"We got purty nigh an acre an' three quarters set," he announced. "An' the season's over. Agin to-morrow it'll be too dry."
"Gosh, I'm glad it will," said Judith, rubbing her bare feet on the grass to scrape away some of the caked mud.
Elmer went home that night the proud possessor of a dollar, and Jerry did not set the alarm clock. When they awoke next morning, the sun was high in the sky.
"Ain't you glad you don't have to set terbaccer to-day, Jerry?" said Judith, stretching luxuriously.
"You damn betcha I am," answered Jerry. "But there hain't no rest for the wicked. I gotta git into that corn right away if it's to be saved. The weeds'll grow like wildfire after this rain."
There came a second fairly good rain in early June, and they were able to set another acre of tobacco. A week or so later, it rained for a day and a night; and Jerry, going out next morning to see how deeply the rain had penetrated, was jubilant over his findings.
"She's soaked good, Judy," he called exultantly. "Even if the sun shines hot we'll be able to finish settin'. You git Elmer over this mornin' an' I'll pull plants."
He went off immediately after breakfast to pull plants; but in half an hour he was back, full of anger and disgust.
"You know what's happened, Judy? Somebody's stole near all our plants. There hain't plants left to set a half an acre, an' them's little bits o' runts no good fer nothin'. All them
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 nice big strong plants is took. An' I'm purty nigh sure I know who took 'em, too; an' it's Luke Wolf. He was too damn lazy to water his bed there when it was so dry in April, an' his plants didn't do no good. He didn't have hardly nothing in his bed. So after I found the plants was stole, I clim up on the brow o' the ridge an' looked over; an' there sure enough was him an' Hat a-settin' fer dear life. They had that half witted brother o' Luke's a-droppin' fer 'em. I had a good mind to go daown an' tell 'em to gimme back my plants. But there 'tis. I can't prove he took 'em; but I know damn well he did."
"Ain't that a mean shame!" exclaimed Judith. "An' after all how hard you slaved to save them plants! An' we can't git plants nowhere else, cause nobody hain't got plants this year, count o' the dry spring. You had the finest bed anywheres araound."
"We'll have to put it in corn," said Jerry disgustedly. "An' the corn'll be so late the frost'll take it. If I'd a knowed, I might a saved myse'f the work o' plowin' an' harrowin' the ground. But that's haow it goes. A man w............