"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 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.