"Well, if there hain't Judy Pippinger a-gallopin' past like mad on her dad's mule, her hair a-blowin' out jes like she used to ride when she was a little gal. What's fetched her away from home, I wonder?"
All along the road she drew similar comments from the neighbors who were fortunate enough to live on the pike. The conclusion generally arrived at was that only urgent need of the doctor could satisfactorily explain her appearance. Otherwise it was an unheard of and hence unseemly thing for a married woman the mother of three children to be seen out alone on horseback and going at breakneck speed. But then, after all the things that had been whispered about her, anything might be expected of Judy Pippinger.
Unmindful of the prying looks cast after her from stuffy kitchens, Judith galloped on, feeling as light as a puff of thistledown blown through the September morning.
When the first wild exhilaration of the ride had spent itself and she became aware that Pete was sweating and breathing hard, she pulled the mule down to an easy trot and turned him from the pike onto a grass grown wagon track that wound in and out at the foot of gently sloping hills.
It was such a peaceful, meandering, sleepy, sun-steeped wagon track that before she knew it she had let the lines drop along the mule's neck, and she and Pete were lazing along in the sunshine like two natural born loafers as though there never had been and never would be a furrow to plow or a floor to scrub. Since the day when she had fled from Jerry's tub of hog guts, she had never been away from the house in the morning. Yet now the hundreds of dreary mornings spent in the stuffy clutter of the kitchen fell away into unreality like a dream and she was a girl again, free to come and go as she liked, happy and careless.
The grass grown wagon track, bordered by golden rod and sprays of little purple asters, dozed so sweetly and calmly in the sun that it seemed removed by the width of the world from human filth and fret. Soon, however, it wound around a curve where there was a gap between the hills and she could look out over acres of alfalfa, fields of corn and tobacco and the shanties and pigsties of those who tilled them. In the middle distance she saw three men cutting tobacco, going along the rows with the precision of machines. How small they looked to her eyes.
In another field she saw men cutting corn and stacking it in shocks. In the spaces where they had cut the scattered pumpkins appeared bright and golden. The whole made a pretty picture to look at. But she knew that now in the noonday heat the men's arms and backs were aching and the sweat pouring from their faces as they worked.
Over a bluegrass pasture cattle and sheep browsed. They were at ease and at peace among themselves. Three young colts raced up and down in an alfalfa field, brimming with health and the joy of life.
In the dooryard of a shanty not far away a frowsy woman was chopping wood. In another dooryard another woman was frantically chasing a pig that had broken out of its pen. Her long slatternly skirt tried to trip her as she ran. She heard the wail of a baby and the harsh scream of an older child, followed by the still harsher-toned reprimand of the harassed mother. A skinny-armed girl, little more than a child, with a long flaxen pigtail down her back, was rubbing out clothes at a washtub by the door.