Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/196

 her eyes seemed as if covered by a film and her face wore a heavy, sullen expression. She avoided meeting people, answered them in monosyllables when they spoke to her, and took no interest whatever in the doings of the neighborhood. When Jerry tried to talk to her, she scarcely looked at him or answered him, until, chilled by her lack of response, he too would fall into gloomy silence. Sometimes when Jerry, in his inexperience with the washing of clothes, did something particularly clumsy and awkward, she would scold him sharply then relapse into her habitual impassivity. When the clothes were dried and gathered up, they rode home in silence, Jerry driving, Judith holding the baby on her lap.

Beat upon by the fierce heat and the hard, white light, the face of the country took on every day more of the appearance of drought. Each day vegetation shrank and the exposed surface of bare, caked earth increased. Corn dwindled and yellowed and bluegrass turned dry and brown. The alfalfa stretched its deep roots far down into the soil and managed to keep its rich dark green color, but grew never an inch. The roads lay under a thick coating of this fine powdery dust, soft as velvet to bare feet. When a wagon or buggy passed along it traveled hidden from sight by its own dust and left a diminishing trail behind like a comet. Hens held their wings out from their bodies and panted in the deepest shade of the barnyard. In the pastures cattle and sheep stood all day under trees; and even horses rarely ventured forth into the full glare of the sun. In the evening when the sun slanted low and a grateful coolness stole across the fields, all these creatures, like their human brothers, shook off the torpor of the heat and began to feel more like themselves. The hens scratched for a living among the chaff and dung. The sheep and cattle, banded together after their kind and with their heads all turned in one direction, cropped the scant bluegrass. The horses, aristocrats of the pasture, went apart by themselves, scorning the company of these humbler creatures.

The tobacco plants, owing to their sturdy weed nature, lived through the heat and drought; but they might as well have