It was a dry spring that year, and Jerry had had to work hard to keep the plants alive. Again and again, after his day's work was done, he had trudged to and fro between the nearest spring and the tobacco bed carrying big buckets of water to the thirsty young plants. Jerry found to his dismay that it took a great many buckets of water to wet a nine by sixty bed. At last in late April there came several days of gently falling warm rain and the plants took on new life. By the middle of May they were lush and lusty and ready to be set when the right weather conditions arrived.
The big rain came the last week in May, bringing the much desired "season." Little showers had fallen from time to time, but they were not enough to wet the ground deeply. Jerry was beginning to grow uneasy and had been scanning the weather signs with an anxious eye for many days. On the evening of the twenty-fifth, as he drove his horses up from the field where he had been cultivating corn, the sun sank behind an opaque wall of sickly yellow cloud. Looking about Jerry saw the sky overcast in every direction with a uniform pale gray. Birds flew low under the heavy gray canopy. The whistle and rumble of a train several miles away sounded distinct through the still, brooding air; and as he walked along the top of the ridge behind the horses he heard twice the harsh cry of a woodpecker.
"We'll have a terbacker settin' rain afore mornin', Judy," he said, when she came out to help him put up the horses. "Everything says so."
Before they went to bed that night the rain began. Jerry went out and fixed the drain of the eaves trough so that the water would run into the cistern. The next morning it was still coming down in a warm, steady downpour. All day it fell in the same soft, gently-falling stream, like a blessing upon mankind, not from a self-centered Hebrew deity, but from some sweet natured and generous pagan god.
"Bejasus, this'll fetch things along, Judy," said Jerry, who was busily nailing soles on Judith's shoes beside the kitchen window. "Land, haow everything'll pick up after this rain! I sholy do love to see things grow in spring. An' about to-morrow afternoon we kin go to settin'."
The next morning dawned blue and warm, full of birdsong and the scent of wet growing things. The ground was dank with rain, but by afternoon Jerry thought it would be dry enough to begin setting. After breakfast he went to the tobacco bed to pull plants and Judith got on one of the horses and rode over to her father's to get Elmer to come and "drop." As the horse trotted along the top of the ridge and out onto the sodden "pike" full of puddles, she breathed deep of the fragrant air, felt the sun's warmth on her back and shoulders and almost fancied that she was a plant that had sucked in the life-giving rain and was preparing to raise its blossom to the sun.
She returned before long with Elmer, now grown into a loutish chunk of fourteen, all hands and feet and appetite. Elmer rode upon Pete, a young mule that Bill had bought to take the place of Bob, who had died the year before of old age. Pete was of a rich chestnut color, glossy, handsome, and liquid-eyed. He was also intelligent with the super-equine intelligence of a mule. He had a way of laying back his ears ever so slightly and looking at any one who approached him with a backward-sidewise glance of mingled playfulness and suspicion. It made Judith laugh to see him do this.
"Land, Elmer," she exclaimed, as they were putting up the horse and mule in the shed, "if that critter, Pete, hain't got the look of Uncle Sam Whitmarsh, I never seen two folks that looks alike. Uncle Sam has got jes that same way o' lookin' at you sharp an' sidewise an' yet smilin', as though he kinda suspicioned that you was a-tryin' to git the best of him, an' yet he wanted to be good friends an' have some fun with you too. An' if Uncle Sam could move his ears I'm sure he'd lay 'em back jes a little. They say animals can't smile. But if that mule hain't a-smilin' then what is he a-doin'?"
She patted his glossy neck admiringly. He flicked his ears and looked at her in his characteristic way, then poked his soft nose into her face.
"He's durn hard to ketch up in paster," grunted Elmer. "You come up alongside of him with the bridle, an' he gives you that 'ere look, an' fust thing you know he's a quarter of a mile off. My legs is run clean off since we got him."