For another moment she stood eyeing him with a look of exasperation mingled with cold despisal. Then red fury burst in her and she grasped the handle of the stove lifter.
"You git out o' that chair, you damn filthy haound. Hain't it enough that I gotta spend the hull day scrapin' greasy burnt pans an' puttin' up with them pesterin' young uns, 'ithout havin' you lurchin' in here with a dirty drunk an' plantin' yer carcass right where I wanta git the supper? I hain't in no humor to put up with none o' yer drunken sulks. You git away from this yer stove an' do it mighty quick too."
He did not move nor even glance at her. He bulked big and sullen, a silent affront.
Trembling all over she uttered a scream of rage and swung the stove lifter in fury. It descended sharply on his skull.
With a thick curse he sprang up, wrenched the stove lifter from her hand and flung it to the other end of the room. It fell into a pan of milk and the milk splashed in every direction. Then, grasping her by the shoulders, he began to shake her. He shook her so violently that her teeth chattered and her furious screams of rage came in a shrill tremolo hideous to hear. Like a tigress she struggled in his grasp. If she had had a knife she would have plunged it into him.
Her frenzied struggles drew them close to the wall; and it was the sound of her head beating with a hollow noise against the boards that at last penetrated his drunken fury and brought him to his senses. With the movement of one who drops hot iron, he let fall his hands from her shoulders and fled out into the darkness, leaving the door swinging open behind him.
CHAPTER XXIII
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.