"Ain't that a mean shame!" exclaimed Judith. "An' after all how hard you slaved to save them plants! An' we can't git plants nowhere else, cause nobody hain't got plants this year, count o' the dry spring. You had the finest bed anywheres araound."
"We'll have to put it in corn," said Jerry disgustedly. "An' the corn'll be so late the frost'll take it. If I'd a knowed, I might a saved myse'f the work o' plowin' an' harrowin' the ground. But that's haow it goes. A man works hard to do sumpin for hisself an' his fam'ly, an' then some lousy, thievin' neighbor slinks in an' gits away with it. It sholy is discouragin'."
Judith tried to console Jerry and tried for his sake to appear as indignant and disgusted as he over the loss. But it was not in her nature to take material loss so seriously; and she felt secretly relieved to think that she would not have to set any more tobacco that year. She was ashamed of this feeling, for it seemed like rank disloyalty to Jerry; but she could not help entertaining it.
Luke and Hat Wolf lived in a little ramshackle frame shanty in one of the neighboring hollows. They were a young couple not many years older than Jerry and Judith; but they had been married and had been raising tobacco on the shares for three or four years. They had a well sustained reputation for almost superhuman meanness and stinginess.
They were a pair of young giants. When they drove together in their buggy the springs sagged and passers-by felt sorry for the horse. Luke was a big, stupid looking lout, with small blue eyes and beefy jowls. He could neither read nor write; although Hat had been heard to say on different occasions that Luke could read "some kinds o' print." The kinds that he could read, however, did not include the kind universally employed.
Hat, a big, coarsely made, gipsy-like girl, was, to use her own phrase, a "great reader." She subscribed to a monthly magazine called "The Farm Wife's Friend," which cost her twenty-five cents a year. When she found the magazine in her mail box she took it home eagerly, full of delicious anticipations, and read it from the name in fancy print across the top of the first page to the last advertisement on the back sheet. It was printed in the vilest manner on the sleaziest of paper. Sometimes parts of it were so badly printed as to be illegible. It contained two or three sentimental love stories describing doings of people in high life. These stories abounded in beautiful heroines with delicate hands that had never approached a dish rag or a hoe handle, noble heroes and wicked, but fascinating villains. They opened to Hat a vista of unexplored possibilities and caused her to sigh over her own lack of opportunity.
Almost as engrossing as the stories, were little articles on how to get the best results with turnips, how to make the eyes sparkle, how to keep little chicks from getting head lice, how to remain always a mystery to your husband, how to keep sheets from fraying at the hems, how to make five hundred dollars out of a flock of fifty geese, how to tell fortunes with the tea cup, how to polish cut glass, how to keep the hands dainty and delicate, how to live so that the world is sweeter and sunnier for your presence, how to make orange marmalade out of carrots and how to treat a cow with a caked udder.
All of these "useful hints" Hat read with avidity, and many of them she tried to apply in her own household. She spent hours messing over a stew of mutton fat and cheap perfume in an attempt to make a homemade cold cream for beautifying the skin. After it had stood for a few days it turned rancid and she had to throw it out to the hogs. She became enthusiastic over the possibility of making a big income from geese, set a hundred eggs and hatched out seventy-five little geese, only to have the foxes feed fat on her flock. She mixed up the decoction to make the eyes sparkle; but it hurt her eyes and interfered with her sight. So she used it only once. She tried on Luke the receipt for remaining mysterious; but she was forced into the strong suspicion that he never even knew that anything unusual was affecting him in any way.
These failures did not, however, discourage her in the least. She read and experimented with the next month's collection with unabated enthusiasm. The magazine was her romance, her religion.
There were short poems in the paper, too. "Be a Beam of Sunshine," "Keep Smiling all the While," and "Never Let the Tear Drop Dim Your Eye," were characteristic titles. One poem, which made a deep impression on Hat, celebrated the joy of washing clothes. It described the deep satisfaction to be derived from rubbing, rinsing, bluing, and hanging out the family wash on the line. The constantly recurring refrain was, "And the Wind is Right to Dry." As Hat rubbed out her own faded cotton dresses and aprons and scrubbed manfully on the sweaty collars and wristbands of Luke's work shirts, even when she punished the washboard with his heavy denim overalls, stiffly encrusted with mud and axle grease and many other varieties of filth, and soused them up and down in the dirty, stinking, mouse-gray water, the words of this little poem lilted rhythmically through her mind, and she almost fooled herself into thinking that washing Luke's overalls was a delight. Who can say that the mail order sheet does not bring joy and comfort into the rural home? Nevertheless, Hat was glad when Luke came home one day with the information gleaned from Columbia Gibbs that overalls last twice as long if they are never allowed to see water.