Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/233

 "Four cents!" It was all she could say. She was speechless with astonishment and dismay.

"She dropped yestiddy. There wa'n't hardly no buyers there. The bottom fell out clean. If I'd a been one day earlier I'd a got nine or ten." His voice was dead and husky.

"Oh, Jerry, hain't it a shame! After all haow hard you worked an' slaved over that crop!"

"After all haow hard we both worked an' slaved," he corrected her harshly.

Suddenly he dropped to the floor beside her, and with his arms across her knees and his face laid upon his arms, broke into dry, convulsive sobs, harrowing to hear.

For a long time he shuddered and sobbed, giving way at last with a certain relief to the disappointment that had been eating his heart out through the thirty mile drive home. She stroked his hair and his cheeks, murmuring over him words of consolation.

"Never mind, Jerry, dear. Lots worse things might of happened. We kin manage along all right; an' mebbe nex' year we'll be lucky."

After the first shock, she did not feel any great bitterness of disappointment. She had never been able to take money losses very seriously. In spite of the daily object lesson offered her, she failed somehow to realize their significance.

"Oh, Judy," he quavered, when at last his storm of sobbing had spent itself. "I wanted you to have money so's you could buy things you wanted, an' the young uns could have plenty warm clothes an' new shoes. An' I hoped I'd be able to put some in the bank this year toward buyin' us a place. Naow we'll jes have to skimp along same's las' year."

He buried his face in her lap and burst into another storm of weeping.

She soothed him and at last he was quiet.

"Anyway, things can't be so terrible bad so long as we have each other, can they, Judy?" he said, slipping his arm around her waist and looking up at her with doglike eyes, pleading and questioning.