Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/188

 oned Jerry away, probably for the purpose of some further communion of spirits over the bar. Still less did she observe that after Jerry's departure the two men beside the covered wagon looked several times in her direction and dropped their voices to a very low tone. The trader's wife prattled on.

Suddenly and quite without warning, the whole scene went black before her. Against this blackness certain words stood out bright red. Her ear had caught only these few words; but they made the meaning of the whole sentence just spoken by Bob Crupper quite unmistakable.

When the black melted and she could see again, she felt herself tingling all over as if pricked by a million needles. She looked sidewise at the trader's wife to see if she had heard. The woman was running on about how hard it was to keep children in garters, too busy with her own chatter to notice anything said by anybody else. Judith knew that she was spared this much at least. She got up, made a stammered excuse about something that she had forgotten to buy, and almost ran from the hateful place.

She did not go toward the town, but in the direction of the deserted back streets. Among these she walked, at first with feverish haste, stumbling over clods and stones; then more slowly, as her rage and burning sense of insult subsided into dejection and misery. As she walked, she went over certain things in her mind. She saw Bob Crupper and Luke Wolf standing in easy attitudes by the spring wagon down in Hat's hollow. Bob said something to Luke, who turned and looked at her, and the two men fell to laughing together. She remembered certain looks from Luke that she had accidentally caught while they were stripping tobacco. She could see his little pig eyes squinting at her above his fat red cheeks. She called to mind all the details of Bob's visit to the house in the hollow. She remembered other things: whispers, looks, dark sayings that she had thought nothing of at the time; but that now flashed out of the past with vivid and sinister significance. She saw again the looks of the people that she had met on the street that afternoon while walking beside Bob. They were