Jerry's face assumed an expression of sullen disgruntlement. Jabez looked at him keenly out of the corner of his eye.
"Have another drink, Jerry."
Both men had another drink, and there fell another long period of silence.
"Where's the hitch, Jerry?" asked Jabez at last.
By this time the whiskey had thoroughly warmed Jerry through and through. The landscape was beginning to look blurred and far away; and he felt shut in with Jabez in a warm atmosphere of congeniality and comradeship. He began, haltingly at first, to tell his friend his troubles. Gradually his trickle of speech flowed more freely; then burst suddenly forth, like a stream that has broken a dam, and rushed in a torrent of picturesque curses on the head of Dick Whitmarsh.
Jabez laughed the loud, carefree laugh of inebriation.
"Why, Jerry, you bin a heap too backward," he cried, slapping his friend on the back till Jerry winced, "an' Dick Whitmarsh has sure got the start of you naow. The on'y thing fer you to do is to come up on him from another d'rection an' s'prise the enemy when he hain't a-lookin' fer yuh. Not all the courtin' is done in buggies, Jerry; though a feller born an' bred in Scott County might think so. It don't have to be done in buggies. An' Judy Pippinger 'specially hain't a gal to be courted in a buggy. You go to meetin' her accidentally when she's a-drivin' up the caows or a-stalkin' them turkeys over the hills an' hollers, an' I'll bet you'll ketch up with Dick in no time, even if he has got a head start. If yuh must go a-courtin', as I s'pose yuh must, yuh might as well go in fer to win. Good luck, Jerry!"
They had reached Jabez' house, a melancholy little weathered frame shanty shaded by two sorrowful hemlock trees that stood out blackly against the gray sky. Jabez leapt from the buggy.
Jerry turned the mare's head toward home. Knowing where she was going, she fell into a fast trot without any encouragement. The short winter day was already graying to a close and it was chore time. As he drove along over the half frozen ruts of the road, his imagination was aflame with the suggestions that Jabez had thrown out. The corn whiskey gave warmth and color to these imaginings.
The effect of the corn whiskey soon wore off, but not of Jabez' suggestions; and Jerry was now in no mood for delay. He had held off quite long enough, he told himself. The very next evening, as Judith was driving up Spot and Blackie, the successors of Roanie and Reddie, Jerry met her coming along the ridge path. She had on Craw's cloth cap, an old canvas coat of her father's and Craw's rubber boots. Shining out from this rough frame, her girlish charms looked all the more alluring to Jerry.