As each guest was served, he fell to eating, without waiting for the others. Those who were still waiting began to shift uneasily in their chairs, while their eyes ranged restlessly from the diminished hind quarter to the plates of their more fortunate neighbors.
At last everybody was eating and Jabez filled his own plate and fell upon the contents. A silence followed, broken only by the crackle of the fire and the click of the knives and forks. In a patch of sunlight on the floor the baby sat and played with a skunk skin that Jabez was saving to make into a cap.
"Ki-ki, ki-ki, nice ki-ki," he kept saying, as he stroked the soft fur. When a large cat walked out from behind the stove, purring and arching her back, he forsook the skin for the living animal.
A heaping plate of corn cakes was set at each end of the table, from which the guests helped themselves at their will. These, with the meat, formed the whole meal.
For a long time no voice spoke, no eye was lifted. There was nothing but the play of knives and forks, the sound of munching, and the constant reaching out of hands toward the corn cakes.
It was only when the second hind quarter had been carved, served, and partly eaten that the diners began to lift their eyes from their plates, lean back in their chairs, and exchange occasional remarks.
Coffee, which had been boiling on the stove in a big granite stewpan, was now served by Jabez in whatever utensils he could find. Judith got hers in a jelly glass. Aunt Selina had a granite mug, Jerry a tin cup. Uncle Jonah was honored with a large, imposing, and very substantial mustache cup ornamented with pink roses tastefully combined with pale blue true lovers' knots and bearing the legend "Father" in large gilt letters.
Down at the far end of the table, Judith glimpsed her father's familiar habit of turning a spoon over in his mouth. He liked to soak his corn cakes in coffee and eat them with a teaspoon. He put the spoon in his mouth in the usual way and invariably brought it out bottom side up.
When Jabez had served everybody else, he used the dipper to hold his own portion of coffee; and holding it aloft by the long handle, he stood up at the end of the table and rapped for attention.
"Neighbors," he began, "I wish I might give youall sumpin' better'n coffee to drink a toast in. But this here's a dry year. I never reckoned the winter'd come that I'd spend 'ithout a drop o' whiskey on the shelf. But this is that winter. The Bible says that he that tilleth the soil shall have plenty o' bread; an' anybody'd think he'd otta. But you an' me knows, none better, that he don't allus have plenty o' bread, an' still less o' meat. Another thing the Bible says is that the poor man is hated even of his own neighbor; an' I reckon there's heap more truth in that sayin' than in the other one. The earth's a mean an' stingy stepmother, an' she makes the most of her stepchillun pretty mean an' stingy too. A hard life makes 'em hard an' close an' suspicious of each other. They cheat an' they git cheated, an' oftener'n not they hate their neighbors. But if a hard life breeds hates, it breeds likin's too; an' it's because youall is folks that I'm praoud to call my friends, that I ast you to come here to-day. Friends, let's drink a toast to the health of our landlord an' neighbor, Uncle Ezry Pettit. This here is his treat."