She borrowed Hat's books and her copies of the "Farm Wife's Friend" and read them through. But she could not get from them the mental stimulation that they had afforded to Hat. Instead of opening to her the door of romance, they seemed only flat, silly, and unreal. She was sure that no such people had ever existed. She had never cared much for reading any of the books that had fallen in her way. She got more satisfying entertainment from drawing pictures of the dog, the cat, and the chickens in the dooryard. She tried again and again to draw the baby, but could not make the picture look like him. She drew the view from the little kitchen window as it appeared from every position in the room. With each step that she took the view was a different one. But all the pictures had one thing in common: the sweep of hilltop lining itself against the sky. She amused herself by piecing these pictures together and making the whole line of hills that bordered the hollow on the window side.
She was glad when Jerry came home at night, and ran to meet him, listening eagerly to his talk of what had happened in the field or the stripping room. She devoured greedily his tale of how Luke and Hat had got into a quarrel about which of them was to light the fire in the stripping room; and how he, coming in in the midst of the quarrel, had settled it by lighting the fire himself. But Hat and Luke had not seemed to consider it settled, for they had not spoken to each other all day long.
When Jerry came home from his trips to town to buy sugar and coffee and get the corn ground at mill, she listened with the most lively interest to his rendering of the news gathered at Peter Akers' store. Young Jim Patton's wife had left him for the fourth time after a quarrel in which it was said that he had tried to use the hay fork and she the butcher knife. Ziemer Whitmarsh, driving home from a drinking bout over near Dry Ridge, had been arrested on the triple charge of abusing his horse, using profane and obscene language, and disturbing the peace. There had been a shooting affair over at Sadieville. A nigger had been killed and two white men wounded. Nobody seemed to know just how the trouble had started. Black Joe, a half witted nigger of the neighborhood, had been caught stealing Uncle Sam Whitmarsh's chickens. And Uncle Sam, with a buggy robe clutched over the shirt and drawers in which he had nabbed the thief, had appeared at Constable Seth Boone's door at one o'clock in the morning, covering the frightened nigger with his gun.
Sometimes Luella came to spend the day with her and dandled the baby and helped Judith with the housework or with some piece of sewing. Luella was only twenty-two; but already she was taking on many of the looks and ways of an old maid. Lizzie May never came; she was entirely taken up with her own family concerns. Sometimes Hat dropped in, bringing the latest copy of the "Farm Wife's Friend" and her most recent tale of wrongs at Luke's hands, or old Aunt Selina Cobb slipped in and sat for the afternoon, patching an already much patched shirt for Uncle Jonah. Aunt Sally Whitmarsh, who lived in the nearest house on the pike, wended her way across the fields once in a while and brought up to date the news and rumors of the neighborhood from far and near; for Aunt Sally was a great hand to collect gossip.
Sometimes Judith felt a bit creepy as she looked at Aunt Sally. Could it be that this calm featured, self-contained woman who sat placidly mending drawers for Uncle Sam and telling the news as dispassionately as if she were the personal column of a country weekly, had sown the seed of insanity in more than one of her children? Judith thought of Bessie Maud over in Black Creek Hollow and wondered if it could really have come through Aunt Sally.
Once young Bob Crupper drew rein in the dooryard; and instead of hallooing from the horse's back, flung himself from the saddle, tied the horse to a fence post and came striding toward the house. He was a tall, strongly built young fellow, handsome like his father and with his father's fearless and dreamy eyes.
"Is Jerry hereabout?" he asked, standing holding the knob of the open door in his hand.
"No, he's strippin'," answered Judith, looking up from her sewing. "You'll find him in the strippin' room."
"I wanta see him 'bout buyin' that little crop I raised on Uncle Ezry's place," explained Bob. "I hain't hardly got enough to make it wuth my while to haul it, an' I'll let it go cheap. There hain't a lot of it, but what there is is durn fine terbaccer."