When she was able to be up and around again, she began to be possessed by a great dread and loathing of the thought of the coming on of winter.
One late afternoon in early December, when the thick mud and heavy skies of winter had laid hold upon the country, Jerry came into the kitchen carrying a crooked nail covered with blood and rust.
"Looky here, Judy, what I took out'n the side o' Nip's leg. The damn fool hoss'd done gone an' laid hisse'f daown on it. It was in near up to the head. Where's the turpentine?"
"My, it's an ugly lookin' one. Jes thick with rust, hain't it?" she said, as she rummaged for the turpentine. "Some heats the nail red hot an' sticks it back into the hole."
"I know, but I kinder hate to do it. I'll soak it well with turpentine an' that'd otta fix it. I can't fer the life of me see haow so many old boards with nails stickin' up in 'em gits laid about in the barnyard. All the time I keep pickin' 'em up, more keeps a-comin'. It looks like they growed there. Is that the turpentine? Give it here. The quicker I git it in the better."
He went out, slamming the door violently in his haste.
The wound healed over and Jerry had almost forgotten to worry about it, when about ten days later he noticed that the horse was not acting just like himself. He was nervous and fidgety and there was a stiffness in the injured leg. Looking at the sore he saw that it had broken again and there was a thin trickle of ugly looking matter oozing from it.
The next morning when he went into the stable to feed the horses, Nip was frothing at the mouth. The stiffness had extended to all his four legs, and he held them extended as if to keep himself from falling. He looked at his master with
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 wide, startled eyes that showed much of the whites and from time to time a shiver ran through his body.
Jerry saw himself faced with one of the most serious disasters that can befall a tenant farmer. Without going back to the house for his breakfast, he saddled Tuck and galloped away in search of Doc Beasley, the veterinary.
They came back a couple of hours later riding side by side. As soon as Jerry laid eyes upon the horse, he knew that he was much worse. The shivers had changed to convulsive shudders, and pain and terror looked out of the animal's dilated eyes.
The veterinary, a lean old grayhound with a face of tanned leather, shook his head.
"You'd best put a bullet into him, Jerry, an' have done with it. I cud cure him, but it'd cost yuh more'n what the hoss's woth. That damned antitoxin fer lockjaw's high's hell an' it takes so much fer a hoss 'tain't practical nohaow. If yuh wanta take a chanct on it's helpin' him, I kin give him a shot o' some other stuff that sometimes does the trick. It'll cost yuh five dollars, an' I hain't promisin' that it'll cure him. But onct in a while it does. Anyhaow whether yuh take it or whether yuh don't take it, I won't charge yuh nothin' fer comin' here, 'cause I'm on my way to Joe Patton's sick caow an' I know yuh hain't no millionaire."
"Let's try it, Jerry," implored Judith, who had come into the stable behind the men. "It seems a shame not to let him have one chanct."
"All right, Doc," agreed Jerry a bit huskily. "Go ahead an' try what you kin do. If I had the money I'd feel like tryin' the big cure. But I hain't got the money. So that settles it flat."
The horse doctor cleansed the wound, took a big syringe from his kit satchel, filled it with a yellowish fluid, and gave the horse an injection in the leg close to the wounded spot.
"There," he said as he replaced the syringe, "if he hain't a heap better agin to-morrer mornin' he hain't a-goin' to git no better. Anyhaow, you hain't got the hardest luck there is, Jerry, ole man. Two o' Jim Summerfield's hawgs has got the
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 cholera, an' the whole thirty-odd'll be dead afore the week's gone. So you see you might a had it worst."
With this cold but well meant comfort he was gone.
The next morning when Jerry went into the stable, the horse was down, his jaws were locked and he was writhing in agony. Tuck, tied at a little distance, looked at him with mild, questioning eyes.
He went to the house for his revolver. Judith said nothing. When she saw him take the gun out of the dresser drawer she did not need to ask what it meant. A few moments later she heard a shot and knew that it was all over for Nip.
It was war time and horse hides were worth four dollars or more. So, although he loathed to do it, Jerry skinned the poor animal that for so many years had been his friend and the companion of his labors. When the carcass was skinned he tied a chain about the hind legs, attached the other end to Tuck's harness and, taking the lines in his hand, said, "Git up, Tuck."
Restless and unhappy from the odious smell of blood, the horse started uneasily, shied a little and looked around with dilated nostrils and eyes that showed the whites. Then, seeing his master, hearing his voice and feeling his familiar hand upon the lines, he went forward with his usual steady step, dragging his dead companion.
Judith, watching sadly from the porch, saw the little procession pass across the pasture. It had snowed during the night and the ground was still white. Against the whiteness the dark figures of the man and horse plodded with bowed heads. Behind them trailed a long thing of an evil scarlet color. The front legs stood up stiffly in the air. The inert head and neck, preternaturally long, trailed behind like a snake. Behind the dragging head a dark streak marked its path from the barn.
On the far side of the pasture lay a deep gully. Here Jerry halted Tuck and manœuvered him back and forth so as to get the dead animal as near to the brink as possible and in the position he wanted. Then he unloosed the chain from the hind
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 legs and, using a fence rail as a pry, worked with the carcass until it went crashing over the brink. The noise startled Tuck, who looked around uneasily.
Returned to the stable he sadly salted the hide, while Tuck, surprised to find an empty stable, nickered and whinneyed and waited impatiently for his friend.
The buzzards did the rest.
For days they hung in the air over the gully. From the kitchen window Judith could see them moving on widespread wings. They would circle a while in one spot, then fly off a little distance and circle again, as though loath to give up their habits of search. The motion of these silent creatures, slow and steady, with no perceptible vibration of the sweeping, horizontal wings, was as beautiful as the flight of sea gulls. When they tilted, the sunlight caught the under side of the black wings and turned them gleaming silver. Watching the stately grace, the balanced dignity of their movements as they circled alone in the wide emptiness of the winter sky, Judith felt herself enfolded in a deep sense of calm, as though Nature had laid upon her brow a firm, soothing hand and told her to be at peace. The flight of the birds added beauty and dignity to the thought of death; and for the first time in her life it seemed a thing to be looked upon with calmness. She was affected as she might have been by a Greek tragedy or by Bach's coldly austere music. She felt no sense of shrinking, but rather a solemn uplift of the heart in the thought that some day she too would return to the ground; and that always, when she was no longer there to see it, sunshine in winter would be a lovely thing, and other buzzards, foul smelling birds though they were, would soar and tilt with incomparable grace and stateliness over other dead horses and dead dogs that like her had had their day.
After the buzzards were gone, she was still followed by the thought of death. But it was no longer a beautiful thought. She shrank from it and tried to turn her thoughts to other things.
The horse's death brought them many visits of condolence.
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 The men sat around the stove of an evening and told Jerry just what he ought to have done to save the horse and just what they themselves would have done if the horse had been theirs. Having exhausted this topic, they drifted to other things: the victories over the Germans, the high and ever climbing cost of flour, the scarcity of sugar, the unheard of prices that were being charged for overalls and shoes and stoves and hay forks and wire fencing.
"Waal, if we kin git forty cent a paound fer terbaccer this year, 'twon't pan out so bad," opined Uncle Sam Whitmarsh. "An' eggs an' butter is fetchin' a good price."
"You was allus a joker, Sam," said Columbia Gibbs, spitting into the woodbox. "You know dern well there hain't one of us in twenty'll git forty cent fer terbaccer. Mebbe a few lucky ones'll draw a big price; but the most of us'll be on'y too glad to drive back home with ten or twelve. An' if butter an' eggs is high, they hain't high compared with flour an' coffee. Afore the war I cud drive into taown with five, six dozen eggs an' the same number o' paounds o' butter, an' I cud git me a sack o' flour, a couple o' paounds o' sugar, a paound o' coffee an' a paper o' candy fer the young uns. Naow I take in that same lot o' butter an' eggs an' I can't hardly git me a sack o' dirty flour chuck full o' bran an' middlin's. I gotta go 'ithout the coffee an' sugar an' the young uns has gotta go 'ithout the candy."
He looked about the group clinchingly and made a feint of wiping away the streams of tobacco juice that had begun to dribble from the corners of his mouth.
"I wisht Roosevelt was back in agin," spoke up Gus Dibble. "When he was in the price o' mule colts was a heap better. One year I got fifty dollars fer a mule colt. An' las' year I didn't git but forty fer a better one out'n the same mare. I'd like to see Roosevelt back in."
Two weeks after Nip's death Uncle Amos Crupper received word that his son Bob had been killed, blown to pieces by an exploding shell.
The old man was broken by the news. Bob was his only
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 son, the son of the wife of his youth whose memory he had cherished for twenty years. He wandered about restlessly from neighbor to neighbor, seeking comfort and finding none. As he sat hunched over the Blackford stove, his usually erect shoulders bowed into a semi-circle, it seemed to Judith that winter had descended upon him over night, as snow falls on the hills.
She, too, as she went about her work, kept thinking of Bob—and of death.
The thought that he was dead would waylay her suddenly, startingly, and she would see him as she had known him in life, his lithe, muscular body, his boyish smile, his clear eyes, fearless and dreamy.
Once with a dustrag she slapped a fly on the wall. It fell mashed and mangled to the floor.
It came over her suddenly that he had died like that. With all his health, vigor, and charm, his power to make women love him, he had died like the fly. Some great, pitiless engine of war had mashed these things out of him and left only a few bits of stinking flesh.
"What are we all anyway but flies," she said to herself bitterly.
One morning when it was mild and the sun was shining she went out to clean the rain barrel that had grown slimy with a green scum. Bent over with her head and shoulders in the almost empty barrel, she scrubbed the sides vigorously with the scrubbing brush. When she had finished, her wrists felt weak and shaky. Taking hold of the top of the barrel with both hands she tried to tip it to drain away the dirty water and was suddenly aware that it was too heavy for her. She could not understand it. She had dumped the same barrel many times before with the greatest ease. She struggled with it and for the first time in her life felt herself overcome by a sense of physical powerlessness. Some virtue had gone out of her long, muscular arms trained from childhood to do heavy work. Her breath came in short, quick gasps and she felt her knees weaken and tremble in a way that she had never felt before.
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 When at last she succeeded in tipping the barrel and returning it to its place, she sank down on the ground gasping with exhaustion, her knees weak like water beneath her.
After that whenever she drew a full bucket of water from the well or carried slop to the hogs or stood too long over the churn or the washtub, she felt creeping over her this strange, tremulous sensation of extreme weakness. Countless times before she had known what it was to be tired. But this feeling of sinking knees, of shivering powerlessness was something new, something quite different from anything that she had experienced before in her life.
With it came an increased impatience with the chatter and wrangles of the children, a growing lack of interest in the affairs of the neighbors or even in those of her own household, a desire to retire within herself, to be alone and apart.
Ill luck seemed to love their company that winter and, like a hungry stray dog, would not leave their door. Luke Wolf said it was all because Jerry had torn the shoes from Nip's dead hoofs and later used them in shoeing Tuck.
"Nine times out o' ten," he said to Jerry impressively, "if yuh shoe a hoss with shoes taken off'n a dead animal, he'll die afore the year's out. An' if he don't die some other kind o' bad luck'll foller yuh."
Tuck did not die; but, as Luke had prophesied, other bad luck followed apace. When Jerry hauled the tobacco off to market he was caught in a drenching rain, and hundreds of pounds of what would otherwise have been a fine grade of tobacco were changed to the sort that brings a cent or two a pound. The tobacco should have been covered to protect it against such a contingency. But a tarpaulin is an expensive luxury which few tenant farmers can afford to buy. Most of them use their wives' rag carpets. But Judith had no rag carpet.
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