Without doubt the troublesomeness of Judith was partly due to the fact that she was better fed than most of the other children. Bill was one who never stinted his children in their food if he could possibly help it. When there was a shortage he let it affect his own plate. The Pippingers were not so saving as most of their neighbors; they did not take every ounce of butter to the village store to sell at fifteen cents a pound. Eggs, too, were not entire strangers to their table. The fact of comparatively good nourishment did not, however, explain away all of Judith's bad conduct; for the other Pippinger children, fed on the same fare, were model pupils in the school. There was something then in the girl's own inherited nature that made her different from her brothers and sisters and from the docile, mouse-like little girls and boys who sat beside her on the school benches.
In backwoods corners of America, where the people have been poor and benighted for several generations and where for as many generations no new blood has entered, where everybody is cousin, first, second, or third, to everybody else for miles around, the children are mostly dull of mind and scrawny of body. Not infrequently, however, there will be born a child of clear features and strong, straight body, as a reminder of earlier pioneer days when clear features and strong, straight bodies were the rule rather than the exception. Bill Pippinger had two such children, Crawford and Judith. Crawford was, like many of the good-looking children of the neighborhood, merely an empty shell. He had inherited the appearance of some pioneer ancestor without any of the qualities of initiative and energy that had made him a pioneer. Judith, however, was quite different. Sometimes when she was bringing up Roanie and Reddie from the pasture at a fast trot or driving the mules out of the cornfield with much whooping, arm-waving, and bad language, Bill, watching her dynamic, long-legged little figure, would say with a sort of restrained admiration: "Land, that little gal's got life enough for a dozen sech—too much life, too much life for a gal!"
CHAPTER II
From early babyhood Judith had shown signs of an energy that craved constant outlet. From the time that she began to creep about on an old quilt spread on the kitchen floor, she was never still except when asleep. She soon passed the boundaries of the quilt, then of the kitchen, and began bruising her temples by pitching head first from the rather high doorstep. After two or three accidents of this sort, she mastered the art of crawling down the steps backward, and could soon do it with surprising agility. She did not creep on her knees, but went on all fours like a little bear, her small haunches high in the air. Soon, with this method of locomotion, she was going all over the yard and even following her father out into the cow lot, sticking close to his heels like a small dog. After she learned to walk the farm could no longer contain her, and she was many times brought back home by neighbors who happened upon her as she strayed away along the roadside.
As she grew older, she showed a strong interest in all living things about the farm. She followed after her mother when she went to feed the chickens, slop the pigs, and milk the cows. She watched her father hook up the mules; and when he plowed trotted along behind him in the furrow for hours together. She was great friends with Minnie, the big Maltese cat, and gave an excited welcome to each of her frequent litters of kittens. Perhaps more than any other animal on the farm she loved old Bounce, the dog, a good-natured and intelligent mongrel, mostly shepherd, brindle of color and growing with age increasingly lazy of habit. She was jubilant when a hen that had stolen her nest would come proudly out from under the barn or behind the pigpen clucking to a dozen or so fluffy little yellow-legged chickens, all spotless and dainty. Once she came upon a turkey's nest in a weed-shaded corner of the rail fence and, stooping with breathless excitement, saw that the little turkeys had just that day come out of the shell. They peeped at her from under the old turkey hen, not with the bright, saucy looks of little chickens, but with shy, wild, frightened eyes, like timid little birds. Even better than the turkeys and chickens, Judith liked the little geese. They were so big and fluffy when they came out of the shell, and such a beautiful, soft green; and they waddled and bobbed their heads so quaintly, as they moved in a little, compact band over the bluegrass that they loved to eat. They were prettier still when they sailed, like a fleet of little boats at anchor, in some quiet corner of the creek, the sun flecking their green bodies with pale gold as it blinked at them through the boughs of the overhanging willow tree.
She was absorbed in all the small life that fluttered and darted and hopped and crawled about the farm. The robins and finches that sang and built their nests in the big hickory tree by the gate; the butterflies, white, yellow, and parti-colored, that fluttered among the weeds and grasses; the big dragonflies with gauzy wings iridescently green and purple in the sunlight, that darted back and forth over the brook: these little creatures, with their sweet voices, their gay colors and shy, elusive ways, entered into Judith's life and became a part of it. The grass and the bare ground, too, were alive for Judith, alive with the life of beetles, crickets, ants, and innumerable other worms and insects. The toads that hopped about in the evening were her friends; and when she happened upon a snake she did not scream and run as Lizzie May would have done, but stood leaning forward on tiptoe admiring its colors, the wonder and beauty of its pattern and the sinuous grace of its movement until it wiggled out of sight in the grass.
She loved fish, too: the long, slinky pickerel that live where the pond is full of reeds and water lilies, the whiskered catfish and the beautiful perch, banded with light and dark green, as though they had taken their colors from the sun-flecked banks along which they lived. Better than these big pond fish, because they were smaller and nearer and so more intimately hers, she liked the little "minnies" that lived in her own creek. From time to time she had been lucky enough to secure a minnow, which she would bring home triumphantly in a salmon can. She would set the can down on the doorstep, fill it up with fresh water from the cistern and sprinkle the water lavishly with bread crumbs for the minnow's refreshment. Then she would sit with the can in her lap and lovingly watch the little dark, sinuous body slipping about beneath the bread crumbs.
The next morning she would find the little fish that only yesterday had been so dark and graceful and lively, lying inert and white-bellied among the sodden bread crumbs at the top of the water.