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 and hosses is things they used up fast in war. An' terbaccer an' hosses is what we got here in Kentucky. An' everything else'll go up too: hog meat and butter and eggs."

"Yaas, an' flour an' sorghum an' coffee alongside of 'em," grunted old Jonah Cobb pessimistically. "I mind me in Civil War times—"

"Aw, don't croak, Jonah. War times is good times fer the farmer. If we kin git a good price for our terbaccer, we hain't a-goin' to kick about payin' a little extry fer a sack o' biscuit flour."

"A sound of battle is in the land and of great destruction," quoted Uncle Jabez Moorhouse. "Woe onto them, for their time is come, the time of their visitation. The earth shall be utterly emptied and utterly laid waste. Behold, Jehovah maketh the earth empty and maketh it waste and turneth it upside down and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. The earth shall stagger like a drunken man."

He loved the sound of the sonorous rhythms and rolled them on his tongue ecstatically.

"I done heard it was a-coming' this way," hazarded Gus Dibble timorously. "Did any o' you folks hear it was a-comin' this way? If it comes this way, they say we'll all hev to go into it."

Gus Dibble was a skinny, pallid fellow with very bad teeth. He had a wife and two small children and tried to raise tobacco to support them. He also had consumption, asthma, and a hernia.

"Aw, what kind of a notion hev you got, Gus?" scoffed Bob Crupper, who from association with his father had become enlightened. "Don't you know you gotta go acrost the ocean to git to where they're a-fightin'?"

"I dunno," answered Gus, humbly and vaguely. "All I know is they said it was a-comin' this way."

For Judith Blackford and the rest of the women in the solitude of their isolated shanties life moved on as stagnantly as usual, except that the heat and the scarcity of water made it somewhat more disagreeable and difficult. For them there was