The sun was beginning to slant low in the sky, and a cool late afternoon breeze had sprung up. Carts and buggies and spring wagons rattled through the streets on their way toward the open country; and horsemen cantered past them, going in the same direction. Uncle Sam mounted his plow horse and with a farewell wave of the hand trotted ponderously away with the rest of the procession.
Jerry and Judith followed in the cart. As they passed through Main Street they were greeted by pervasive scents of stale beer and whiskey. The ground was littered with lunch wrappings, egg and peanut shells, and banana skins. The crowd had thinned out. Most of the family parties had already started for home; and of the unattached males who remained some were reeling and lurching about the sidewalk noisy with drunken laughter and ribaldry, others stood propped up against a hydrant or a telegraph pole, portentously solemn and self-important, arguing in declamatory fashion with companions as ridiculously drunk as themselves. Here and there a little knot had formed about men who were quarreling over some fancied grievance, their angry voices rising harsh and ominous as the whiskey seethed in their fuddled brains and they strode threateningly nearer each other and gripped the handles of the revolvers in their pockets.
Through the hubbub of this sordid bacchanalia the young couple drove in cold and sullen aloofness and passed out into the heavy silence of the country.
CHAPTER XIV
Jerry had a fine bed of tobacco plants that year and together he and Judith set out four acres. Now that the baby was weaned, Judith could leave him with Luella or Aunt Mary while she worked in the field. Her help was badly needed this year, for Jerry had no money left to pay a hired hand. She was glad to do this, for even setting tobacco was a change from the dreary sameness of the household. At a cost of oozing rivers of sweat, of untellable weariness, stiffness, lame backs, and aching necks and hands worn almost to bleeding, the four acres were set at last and they sighed with relief.
"Naow if there on'y comes a good rain," said Jerry, "they'll git a start."
But the good rain did not come. Day after day the sky was cloudless, the flame of the sun clear and hot. Day after day the hard clay hillsides baked harder and the tobacco plants shrank into themselves, turned from green to gray, from gray to brown, shriveled and dried up and blew away in dust.
"Gawd, hain't it discouragin'!" Jerry would say, looking darkly at the clear, blue expanse of sky.