"Yes. He come by on that big roan mare o 'hisn. I told him he'd find you in the strippin' room."
"I wouldn't mind takin' a risk on a small crop if I cud git it reasonable," mused Jerry.
Sometimes old Jonah Cobb, bent almost double, would walk silently into the house and sit for hours. Just why he came Judith did not know, for he hardly ever opened his mouth. He had been a tenant farmer ever since any one could remember. Now in his old age he still made every year a weak attempt to raise a little tobacco. Each spring he would prepare a bed; and when the setting season came he and Aunt Selina might be seen in the first gray of the dawn trudging out to set their plants. The dusk of the long spring day would be closing in before they struggled homeward again, he plodding a few steps behind. The result of their labors never amounted to more than a mere handful of tobacco. They occupied a one-room tenant house which Hiram Stone had long allowed them to consider their own. Here they kept some chickens, half a dozen rabbits, and a few hives of bees. Of late years Uncle Jonah had devoted a good deal of his attention to the bees and had come to consider himself quite a bee man. Almost every time that he opened his mouth it was to speak of bees. He would sit in Judith's kitchen for half an hour or more without opening his lips except to spit into the woodbox, and at the end of his period of silence would say abruptly:
"Bees needs salt same's sheep or cattle. A man otter salt his bees every so often."
After another twenty minutes he would break the silence by saying:
"Sorghum makes good feed for bees in winter."
Sometimes old Amos Crupper, the father of Bob, came in after supper and spent the evening sitting by the stove talking of wars and rumors of wars. The old man was tall, large and broad-shouldered, full of health and vitality. He had a massive leonine head, covered with a shock of thick gray hair, which he held erect in soldierly fashion. His eyes were fearless and dreamy, like those of his son Bob. He always looked clean and wholesome and was circumspect about his tobacco spitting.
He was a veteran of the Civil War and loved to talk of those far off days when as a youth of twenty he had toted a musket in defiance of what was for him the right. In a deep bass voice vibrant with chest resonance he would tell again and again in the same words stories of the events of the war that had made the deepest appeal to the simple nobility of his nature: stories of romance of devotion and of heroism.
When he was not talking about the war he talked about the virtues of his dead wife. Late in life he had made a second marriage with a sister of Uncle Sam Whitmarsh, Aunt Amanda Baxter, herself a widow of long standing. He remained, however, an unwilling victim. In the neighbors' houses he talked continually about the beauty and sweetness of his first wife, alluding to her always as "My wife." He never spoke disparagingly of Aunt Amanda, but when he had occasion to mention her it was always as "That woman I'm a-livin' with naow."