Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/206

 opposite her. Uncle Sam Whitmarsh was at her right hand and Jerry at her left. Her father and Uncle Amos Crupper were at the other end of the table.

Jabez brought one of the big roasting pans and setting it down at his end of the table on top of a piece of pine board began to carve. It must have been that all the others seated there felt like herself; for they seemed rapt and taken out of themselves as though they were religious devotees assisting at some sacred rite. There was a tense look in every face and every eye gleamed and glittered. Judith thought she had never seen such a light in any eyes before. She had seen the light of love, of anger, of jealousy shining from people's eyes. But such expressions were weak and volatile compared with this. It was a look that expressed something more basic than anger, more enduring than love, more all-compelling than jealousy. The eyes were all fixed steadily upon one object, the roasting pan at Jabez' end of the table. The silence was tense with ravenous expectancy.

As each guest was served, he fell to eating, without waiting for the others. Those who were still waiting began to shift uneasily in their chairs, while their eyes ranged restlessly from the diminished hind quarter to the plates of their more fortunate neighbors.

At last everybody was eating and Jabez filled his own plate and fell upon the contents. A silence followed, broken only by the crackle of the fire and the click of the knives and forks. In a patch of sunlight on the floor the baby sat and played with a skunk skin that Jabez was saving to make into a cap.

"Ki-ki, ki-ki, nice ki-ki," he kept saying, as he stroked the soft fur. When a large cat walked out from behind the stove, purring and arching her back, he forsook the skin for the living animal.

A heaping plate of corn cakes was set at each end of the table, from which the guests helped themselves at their will. These, with the meat, formed the whole meal.

For a long time no voice spoke, no eye was lifted. There was nothing but the play of knives and forks, the sound of