Summer months go quickly by. The summer and early fall were soon gone, and the long season of cold and rain set in. The tobacco was a heavy crop. It had been cut and hung in the barn, had survived the moist, warm spells that so often cause tobacco to heat and spoil, and was ready to be bulked. For this it was necessary to wait for right weather conditions. Jerry was impatient and every morning and evening he scanned the sky anxiously.
One morning in early November when he went out to draw a bucket of water, a soft, mild wind was blowing from the south under heavy clouds. It was not raining, but the air was full of moisture. He sniffed critically.
When he got back into the house, he set the bucket down with a hasty thump that splashed some of the water out onto the floor.
"I'll be off, Judy, as quick as I git sumpin to eat. It's fine bulkin' weather. I think the terbaccer'll be nice an' soft. An' you'd best put me up a lunch so's I won't hev to quit work long at noon."
For several days, whenever the weather conditions were right, Jerry worked at bulking the tobacco. At last it was done and the long job of stripping began.
Judith had to help with the stripping, or it would never be finished in time to get the tobacco to market while the price held. The price had a disconcerting way of dropping when the great bulk of tobacco began to come on the market.
Through the short gray days of late November and December the alarm clock was set for four. Bed was never so seductively delicious as during the few moments after its impertinent ting-a-ling had startled them awake. They curled together luxuriously in the warmth and softness. It was Jerry who had the strength of mind first to throw off the covers and bound out into the icy blackness. As he hurriedly poked
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 kindlings into the cold stove, he cheered himself by singing, to the accompaniment of chattering teeth, a little song that he had heard somewhere and into which he had fitted his own name:
Jerry git up in the mornin',
Go out an' feed the foal.
Jerry git up in the mornin',
Bejasus hain't it cold!
"Naow, Judy," he would exhort her when the fire was going strong, "it's nice an' warm an' no chore at all to git up." And he would throw a coat on the floor by the stove, so that she could stand on it to dress.
When they arrived at the stripping room Jerry lighted a fire, while Judith arranged a bed of coats for the baby. When the heat of the box stove began to make the room heavy, Billy too would begin to nod and Judith would lay him beside the baby to finish his sleep. Then the long day began.
Hat and Luke shared the stripping room with them. Things were easier for Hat because she had no children to bother with. Judith half envied her. Compared with her she felt in a manner degraded and in bondage.
In the stripping room there was even less conversation than there had been two years before. For now even Judith felt no desire to talk. Instead she was the most preoccupied and indifferent of them all. When she met Luke's little pig eyes fastened upon her she felt no stir of excitement of any kind, neither interest, nor aversion, not even disgust. Always tired and always sleepy, her body and mind alike numbed into a dull torpor, she saw nothing and thought of nothing but the browns and reds and yellows of the silken tobacco leaves. On account of her unusual sense of color and texture she had become the best tobacco stripper of them all. She could make seven grades where Luke and Jerry could make only three and four. Hat, who up to now had considered herself the queen of tobacco strippers, could make five. They stood upon gunny sacks or bits of board to keep their feet from the damp
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 ground. Endlessly and in a heavy, sodden silence they all stripped and stripped and stripped.
Every three hours or so, when the baby cried, she stopped to nurse him. She was glad of this chance to sit down, for her feet and ankles ached from the strain of long standing. Sometimes when she sat beside the stove nursing the baby she dozed and dreamed, wakened with a start, dozed, and dreamed again.
If the weather was not too bad Billy was wrapped up and put outside to play. But he did not stay there long; he soon came back hungry for company. Inside he got into people's way and was often fretful and badgering. Sometimes he annoyed Luke and Hat, and they were not slow to show it. As a general thing they treated him kindly enough, rallied and teased him, and asked him if he didn't want to come and live with them. Sometimes Hat even brought him a little paper of sugared popcorn or a top or marble that she had found lying about. Luke made him a trumpet out of a goat's horn and painstakingly taught him how to blow it. It gave out a musical, melancholy sound far reaching and resonant.
They both liked the child well enough and were inclined to spoil him with petting and teasing when he was good. But when he was bad they guarded jealously their sacred right as a childless couple to peace and freedom from disturbance. Hat was sometimes heard to mutter something under her breath about "Other folks' snotty-nosed brats," and Luke looked at the child with little cold eyes full of dislike and annoyance.
Mercifully the days were short. By half past four it was too dark to see to grade and they bundled up the babies and went home.
But Judith's day was not yet over, nor was Jerry's. While he milked and fed the horses and did up the other outside chores, she washed the breakfast dishes, swept and straightened the kitchen, washed out the diapers, washed and fed the children, and got the supper ready. After they had eaten supper she put the children to bed and washed the dishes and strained and put away the milk and set the table for breakfast and fried corn cakes to take with them for lunch the next day;
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 and at last she was through, at least until the nursing baby waked and cried in the night.
The next morning at four o'clock the same thing began all over again.
As they neared the end of the long job, a febrile uneasiness stirred the dull atmosphere of the stripping room. It was the anxiety about the market, the eagerness to get done, and catch the opening price. It was whispered that on account of the war in Europe tobacco was going to bring the biggest price in years. Hat and Luke came early and stayed late. Their fingers flew. They were far ahead of Jerry and Judith, because Judith had to stay home at least one day a week to wash for the children. Jerry fretted at the slowness with which the work went on. Daily the tension of his anxiety grew more strained.
Not only in the stripping rooms, but all over the face of Scott County excitement grew and spread as the time of the opening of the market drew near. The price of tobacco was such an unstable thing that it was always a matter for conjecture. It was not a thing that varied within limits and according to known conditions, like the price of hogs and corn. In its variations the price of Kentucky Burley scorned limits; and the circumstances that controlled it were to the tobacco growers a shrouded mystery. Wherever men met together, there was only one thing talked about: the price that tobacco was going to bring. Each man shook his head sagely and hinted darkly that he had inside information on the subject. In reality they were as babes unborn. Speculators great and small hung about stripping rooms, appraising the tobacco. The growers themselves began to dicker about buying each other's crops. Every man who had a drop of sporting blood in his veins was itching to buy, sell, to take some sort of a chance. Their wives coldly counseled them to sit tight and tend to their own business, which advice made them surreptitiously determined to stake something on the turn of Fortune's wheel.
Before they had finished stripping, Jerry caught a cold which developed into a sort of influenza. He kept on working, miserable with a swollen throat and aching head. Then one
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 morning he was hot with fever and had to stay in bed. He was away from the stripping room for four days.
The day that he went back to work, Judith felt her own throat growing sore. The next day she, too, had to stay in bed. For three days she was unable to get up, and Jerry, who had to stay home and take care of the children, floundered about the kitchen with the clumsiness and helplessness possible only in a man who has been brought up by a devoted mother in complete ignorance of every domestic detail.
When on the fourth morning, weak and shaky in the knees, she got up and went out to the kitchen, she found everything in a dreadful mess. The floor showed no appearance of having been swept since she went to bed. The stove was covered with ashes, grease, and the charred remains of something that had boiled over. Dirty dishes and dishes with little dabs of this and that in them were to be found in the most unexpected places. The children's clothes were unspeakably dirty; and the few things that Jerry had tried to wash were of a pale drab color. The slop bucket was a thing of horror. Everything she touched felt sticky, greasy, or slimy. The room smelt of burnt grease, sour milk, and unwashed diapers. Disgust and anger rose in her.
"Seems like you might 'a' tried to keep the place a little better'n a hogpen while I was in bed," she snapped, wiping the top of the stove vigorously with a rag. "Anybody'd think you'd tried to see how much dirt you could make, let alone clean anything."
"Well, I don't lay claim to be no expert pot wrastler ner wet nurse neither," returned Jerry, shrugging his shoulders. His three days of forced kitchen service had not improved his temper. His mind was on his tobacco and he felt irritable with anxiety. He wanted to get back to his stripping.
As she went about trying to get the breakfast, she felt faint and ready to drop with weakness. The dirt and confusion staggered and bewildered her. From the bedroom Billy began to shout for her to come and dress him, and wakened the baby, who set up a shrill cry. A shudder of revulsion went
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 over her. In that moment she did not know which she hated most, him or his clamoring young ones.
"Good Gawd, man," she exclaimed in exasperation, "air you so good fer nuthin' you couldn't even wash a cup clean?"
"Aw, shet up. You're too damn fussy," he growled, and flung out of the room with the milk bucket.
She glared after him, her black brows drawn together with concentrated fury. She was holding in her hand a little bowl. It had been rinsed through cold dish water and her fingers felt the inside smeared with grease. She gave a sharp exclamation of disgust and with a sudden movement threw the bowl against the stove where it crashed into a dozen pieces. For a moment she stood looking at the pieces of the broken bowl, and her lips curled into an upward twist of sardonic satisfaction. The lip was lifted from the teeth as a dog's lip is lifted in a snarl. Then a heavy dismalness settled down upon her. She swept up the pieces and went on drearily about her work.
The tobacco market opened with fine prices, some of the growers who had especially good crops getting as high as thirteen or fourteen cents a pound. Hat and Luke were excited beyond words. However, on the day that Luke hauled his crop to Lexington, the market had fallen off somewhat and he averaged only nine cents a pound. He and Hat would have been amply satisfied with this if some of the neighbors' crops had not brought higher prices. They were tormented by the thought that if they had been a few days earlier, or perhaps a few days later they might have got a cent a pound more. They calculated again and again how much this would amount to. Even half a cent a pound would have made a very considerable difference. Hat thought about all the things that she might have done with chis difference. Luke, who was not so unlearned in figures as in letters, meditated on the change it would have made in his bank book. Being childless and stingy, he had become the owner of a small but steadily growing bank account. The minds of both burned and seethed with these restless promptings of avarice.
Hat permitted herself only one extravagance. She "sent
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 off" to Sears Roebuck for the reddest sateen petticoat in the whole catalog. She had long coveted this petticoat, devouring the colored picture of the flaming garment with greedy eyes. When it arrived, after examining it in the most minute detail, she laid it reverently in the bureau drawer; and for the first few days opened the drawer at least a half dozen times a day to make sure that it was still there. When she went visiting on Sundays she wore it.
Cheerfulness, like a gleam of winter sunshine, brightened the Blackford household after the last tobacco stalk had been stripped and thrown on the trash pile. There was a feeling of some heavy incubus thrown off and a resulting sense of freedom and relaxation. A morning or two of lying in bed until seven instead of turning out at four had an enlivening effect on their spirits. Jerry whistled and sang again as he went about loading his wagon for the trip. It was February; but the good prices were still holding. Judith gave the house a vigorous cleaning, washed and mended for the children, and enjoyed a feeling of satisfaction, as she always did when she had made a fresh start. To both of them it was an immense relief to be out of the stripping room.
Jerry borrowed his father's horses to help haul the tobacco to Lexington; and on the third morning after they had finished stripping he was ready to start.
They got up at half past three. It was bitterly cold that morning. Judith turned over the contents of the bureau drawers and found three pairs of socks, two undershirts and two pairs of drawers, all of which Jerry put on.
"They've all got holes," he explained, "but the holes don't come in the same places. So I reckon my hide'll be covered."
He was in festive spirits. As he went about getting ready for the trip, he hummed a little song of the tobacco region.
When we sell the 'baccy an' the corn crop too
Susy Jane'll ride to church in a gaown an' ribbon new,
Slippers neat upon her feet. There won't be none like Sue
When we sell the 'baccy an' the corn crop too.
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"What do you want me to bring you from taown, Judy?" he asked in a pause of shaving. "I want to fetch you sumpin nice that you bin a-wantin', sumpin that's a real treat. Shall it be a new dress or what?"
A year or so ago the mention of a new dress would have filled her with delighted enthusiasm. Now she only smiled a little wearily. She felt years older than he.
"I don't go nowheres to need good clothes," she said. "Bring stuff to make Billy a warm coat. An' you'd otta git yerse'f one o' them corduroy coats with sheepskin inside an' wear it on the trip home. Your clothes hain't near warm enough fer sech a long trip. I'm afraid you'll be awful cold afore you git there."
She scurried about looking for wristlets, mufflers for him to put on.
"Aw, I hain't a-goin' to be cold," he reassured her. "If my feet gits cold I'll jump off an' walk a spell. I'll like enough walk up all the hills anyway."
She gave him a hot breakfast and put up a big lunch for him to take along. At last he was ready with his cap pulled down over his ears, his neck wrapped in mufflers, two pairs of gloves on his hands. He took her in his arms and kissed her warmly.
"Good-by, Judy, dear. When I come back I'll be wearin' di'monds."
The door clattered to behind him and he was gone. In the melting darkness outside things were just becoming visible and the hills lifted black shoulders against a paling eastern sky. She watched him through the window as he led the four horses out of the barnyard.
Outside the tobacco barn, the more than two ton load towered high above the hay frame. Jerry fastened the traces of the four horses, climbed to the high seat and gathered the lines in his hands. Under the overhanging mountain of tobacco he looked small and perilously poised. He spoke to the horses; they strained; the wagon gave a lurch forward and slipped back again. Three times they tried to start the load and each
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 time it fell back into the ruts made by its own weight. The fourth time they pulled it out. Slowly, steadily, and with a certain majesty the great brown mountain behind the two span of horses passed along the top of the ridge. The small speck that controlled it whistled cheerfully into the frosty morning air. When she saw the wagon pass, Judith waved a dishtowel from the doorway and heard his answering shout.
It was almost midnight of the following day when he returned. She was waiting up for him with a hot fire burning and the kettle boiling ready for coffee. It was still bitterly cold. The window panes were white with frost and the biting cold crept in around the sashes. She had rolled up an old mat and laid it before the door to keep out the draught. When she moved about at the end of the kitchen farthest from the stove, her breath was seen in a white steam.
"My, how cold he must be on the road," she thought and shivered.
At last she heard far off the rumble of the wagon on the top of the ridge, then the creaking sound of the dangerous descent down the steep hill track over the bare, frozen ground. Peering out into the darkness, she could see the gleam of his moving lantern. She set a lamp in the window, made coffee and put on cakes to fry. As she laid the table and turned the frying cakes, she could hear him unharnessing the horses and putting them up. She was in a flutter of excitement. Tobacco is not sold every day.
At last she heard his step approaching and rushed to open the door.
"My, but you must be near froze, Jerry—Jerry, what's the matter?"
He did not kiss her nor speak a word, but walked heavily to the stove and stood warming his hands. She looked anxiously at his face and saw that it was set and heavy. The eyes had a glassy, inward stare.
"Jerry, what's wrong? Haow much did you git a paound?"
"Four cents."
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"Four cents!" It was all she could say. She was speechless with astonishment and dismay.
"She d............