That night she set up an old stretcher in the kitchen and made herself a bed out of buggy robes and ragged quilts that had been discarded and used as pads on the wagon seat. She used it the next night and the night after that. It was a chilly and uncomfortable bed and on cold nights she had to sleep in all her clothes; but week after week went by and she showed no signs of wishing to leave it. After a few contrite but clumsy attempts at reconciliation, Jerry, too, took the stretcher as a thing accepted and permanent.
A sort of cold respect for each other grew up between them after the quarrel on Christmas day. To both it had been a warning of the abyss toward which they were tending, and they strove to maintain the outer decencies of human intercourse. This was best done by avoiding each other, having little to say and tending strictly to their own affairs, interfering as little as possible with those of the other. After their long siege of violent quarreling and mutual recrimination, this silence that had settled down between them seemed almost like peace. But at meals, over the corn cakes and rank salt hogmeat, they looked at each other with hard, inimical eyes. When they spoke it was in tones flat and dry from which all life had gone. A dreary oppression, dull, heavy and deadening, weighed upon the breasts of both of them, went with Jerry to the field and stayed with Judith as she shambled about the kitchen. When he came in at night from the field she rarely spoke or looked at him. Silently she slapped the corn cakes and fried meat on his plate and they ate in a hostile silence which was not disguised by the prattle and clamor of the children.
The stimulation that had come to Judith out of her determination to have no more children died away as all stimulation must, leaving her listless and slack. Daily she grew more slovenly about her work. More and more her mind turned in
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 upon itself, indifferent to her surroundings, thinking its own thoughts. Through the dismal, shut-in months of late winter and inclement spring she gradually drifted into that way of life, perhaps because it was the only way in which she could continue to endure the burden of existence.
When spring came at last in earnest and the mud dried up, Hat came quite often to visit her and talked glibly of Luke's injustices, of troubles with chickens and geese, of paper patterns and calicoes and the latest bulletins from the "Farm Wife's Friend," and of new songs that she had learned for the violin. She was rather glad of the break these visits made in her monotony and envied Hat her diversity of interests.
Once Hat came over with the triumphant news that she now had a bank account of her own. She had sold the bay mare which was, she declared, her rightful property; and before Luke could get hold of the money had taken it to Clayton and deposited it.
"An' naow," she concluded, "I'll hev sumpin' woth while to think about, seein' haow much I kin put to it."
Once she brushed a spider from her skirt.
"There, naow, Judy, that means a new dress. It's a sure sign. Jes fer that I'll drive into taown to-morrer when Luke's to work an' buy me the goods. Las' week I seen jes the piece I been a-wantin'."
And in truth Hat blossomed that spring in new dresses, frilled aprons and sunbonnets. Preoccupied though Judith was with her own misery, she could not help sensing a change in the bold, dark, childless woman. Her talk consisted mainly of complaints about one thing and another; and yet she gave Judith the feeling that she was especially well satisfied with life and with herself. She seemed more than usually self-assertive and blatant. She peered with more insistent curiosity into all the details of her neighbor's household. Shafts of excess vitality radiated from her and invaded irritatingly the younger woman's languor and listlessness. Often in her presence Judith was seized by a shrinking feeling as though she was a rabbit and a bird of prey was hovering above her.
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 Sometimes a strange look sprang out of Hat's eyes, a look at once questioning, cunning, mocking, and triumphant. It flashed only for the swiftest moment, then retired behind the mask of impassivity with which country people cover their faces.
It was in April that they took Joe Barnaby's wife, Bessie Maud, away to the insane asylum. For a long time she had been given to fits of destructiveness, when she would break dishes, smash window panes and try to tear up the furniture. These fits had of late been more frequent and violent. One day in April she was seized with this urge to destroy, and building a bonfire in the yard had thrown onto it chairs, bedding, and clothes. She had done such things before; but this time her mania had taken a worse turn. Joe, seeing the smoke from the fire and knowing only too well what it meant, had run up just in time to save the baby, which she was about to throw into the flames. That night they took her away to the asylum. It was too bad, the neighbors all told each other. But it wasn't as bad as it would have been a few years earlier when the children were all small. Now Ruby, the eldest girl, was eleven and big enough to cook the meals and take care of the baby; and at last Joe would know what it was to have peace in his house, and that was something.
One Saturday afternoon in May Jerry had gone to town for groceries and was late getting home. When Judith had given the children their supper and they had run away to play she sat on the doorstep to watch the sunset, leaving the flies to swarm over the unwashed dishes. It occurred to her that perhaps Bessie Maud had not been able to draw comfort out of the sunset and the late twitter of birds, and that was why life had gone so hard with her.
The sky was streaked with bands of light cirrus cloud, like sheep's wool washed and teased apart. White and fleecy and ranked in regular rows, they spread out over half the heavens like a great feather fan. Toward the earth they gradually thickened until they formed a solid bank. As the sun sank behind this bank, the light, fleecy clouds, which grew sparser,
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 finer and whiter as they neared the zenith, took on a soft flush that turned the whole western sky into a harmony of faint rose and tender blue.
Jabez Moorhouse, passing with a hayfork over his shoulder, stopped for a few moments' chat; and they looked at the sky together, talking of crops and of rain.
As they looked the faint, frail pink gradually deepened into a richer rose, then glowed for a few passionate moments the color of intense flame. The little delicate shreds high up in the sky were each a slender whiff of spun gold, fine and pure. The under edges of the clouds burned with the amber and scarlet of flame against a background of shaded grays and purples. The grayish purple bank that lay along the horizon was slashed here and there by bright swords of fire. The burning clouds hung low, as if one might reach up and touch them. A rosy flush hung over everything.
It seemed as if no color could be warmer, deeper, richer. And yet incredibly as they gazed it grew before their eyes richer, warmer, deeper, more vivid and intense, more full of living fire, until Judith involuntarily held her breath in sympathy with nature in this her supreme moment.
Short-lived it was, like every other supreme moment. A second after it had reached the height of its intensity it began to fade and fall away into ashes. As if a cold breath had passed over them, the little tendrils of spun gold in the zenith turned almost instantly to gray. Lower down the deeper colors lost their glow more slowly, melting back into the surrounding purple. Soon there was left nothing but a somber interweaving of purple gray and dull magenta.
"It's a heap like a man's life, hain't it," said Jabez, spitting into the grass. "It begins happy an' simple, like them innocent pinks an' blues; then turns flame colored when he grows to be a man an' learns to know the love o' wimmin. But it don't stay that color long. Fust thing you know it's gray, like his hair, what he has left of it. Yaas, Judy, the young time's the on'y time. It's the same in dawgs an' mules, an' the breath they draw hain't no diff'rent from ourn."
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Looking at his bowed knees and shoulders, his great seamed hands, his weatherbeaten face and the grizzled locks that curled behind his big ears and straggled over the brick-red creases of his neck, she thought how coarsened was every part of him except the fine, delicate lines about his mouth.
"Hain't life woth livin', Uncle Jabez?" she asked.
He laughed a short, harsh laugh and fell silent.
"Waal, I dunno, Judy," he said at last, meditatively shifting his quid of tobacco. "I reckon it makes a big diff'rence who you live it with an' a bigger diff'rence yet what work yuh lay yer hand to. Both o' them things, as I see it, is a matter of luck. An' if luck hain't with yuh—"
"Luck hain't been with you, Uncle Jabez?"
"Well, I reckon not. When I was a young feller I dearly loved to play on the fiddle. I thought about fiddlin' all day an' dreamed about it all night. But there wa'n't nobody to learn me haow to play, an' I didn't have much chanct to try to learn myse'f, 'cause as soon as I was big enough I had to make a hand in the field same's other boys. I was raised up in one o' the dark counties where they grow the dark terbaccer.
"When I was nineteen I married a purty, light-headed little gal, an' for a while I forgot all about the fiddle. I loved that woman, Judy. I poured out my heart like water for her. After a while I faound out she liked another feller better'n me, an' I told her she'd best go off with him. After she was gone I learned I'd been the laughin' stock o' the whole countryside fer months. I was the last to find out about the other feller. Sech things, you know, Judy, comes to every pair of ears but one."
He paused and looked meaningly at her. She avoided his looks, pulled a blade of ribbon grass and began splitting it between her long fingers.
"Well," he went on, "when I faound that out I took my clothes on the end of a stick an' come over here where nobody knowed me. Since then I've lived a spell with diff'rent wimmin' but I hain't never let none of 'em git a holt on the tender end o' my feelin's. They cud quit me termorrer or hev all the
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 other men they liked fer all o' me. By sech way o' livin' a man gits peace, but not much besides. Wimmin won't stay long with a man that feels that way. Naow, I'm old an' eat my morsel alone, I feel more satisfied than when I had a woman in the house. I kin go an' come when I like, eat when I like, smoke an' drink all I like, set over the stove of evenin's as late as I like, work as little as I like. Sech life suits me purty good."
He paused and looked at her with a fine, sad smile of gentle irony. How delicate, how inexpressibly fine and delicate, she thought, were the lines about his mouth.
"Which would have meant more to you," she asked, "the fiddle or the woman?"
He came and sat down on the step beside her.
"I reckon the fiddle, Judy. The world's chuck full o' wimmin; but a man hain't got but one set o' gifts. If I could a learnt to play the fiddle good I'd like enough forgot her long ago an' loved some other woman. As it was, I couldn't take my mind away from thinkin' about her. An' the kinder hard part of it is, if I saw the woman again to-day she wouldn't mean no more to me than any other woman. On'y the feelin's I had for her then I hain't never been able to forget."
"An' air you glad you're alive right naow?"
"I can't say I hain't, Judy. I reckon livin's made up more out of a lot o' little things than any one big thing; an' there's a heap o' little things I git injoyment out'n. Mebbe there hain't nobody in Scott County likes a smoke an' a chew better'n what I do. Terbaccer an' a quiet back door yard—sun 'ithout no wind—an' my mornin' glories an' rose bushes to look at, them things gives peace and comfort, Judy. Naow, I hain't got no woman araound to sweep me off'n the stoop, I set there through a good many mornin's. I like my coffee an' corncake an' my bit o' fried hogmeat when I git up; an' after it I like my pipe with the blue an' gray streams o' smoke a-driftin' up into a sunbeam an' a-curlin' raound among the little specks o' dust. I like to hear hens sing an' cackle an' watch kittens play an' dawgs stretch theirse'ves in the warm sun an' growl in
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 their sleep a-dreamin' they're nippin' the heels o' caows. I like the fust feel o' spring with frogs singin' in the holler, an' the fust nip o' frost in fall, the smell o' burnin' leaves an' cold, yaller sunsets. You stand a long time in the gray cold an' look at them; an' wh............