Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/245

 "I'm a-goin' to git away from that tub o' stinkin' pig guts you set in the kitchen. It kin stay there till it rots afore I'll tech hand to it."

Each word she uttered was hard and sharp, like the point of a nail. She paused not a second in her rapid walk and in a moment was gone from sight around the corner of the shed.

Jerry stood looking at the place where she had disappeared with an expression of dazed bewilderment, changing to annoyance and embarrassment. His pride suffered humiliation at this open affront from his wife before another man.

Joe came magnanimously to the rescue.

"That's jes the kind o' tantrums my woman goes into, on'y worse," he said. "An' she's allus a heap flightier when she's in the fam'ly way. But I never knowed Judy was given to them fits."

"She hain't," Jerry hastened to assure him. "I never knowed her to take on in sech a way afore. She's run guts many a time, like all the wimmin, an' never made no fuss."

"It grows on 'em," said Joe, ominously.

"Well, I s'pose we better pack it out," said Jerry, turning toward the house. "I hain't a-goin' to bother with the guts. There hain't but three four paound o' lard there at best. The pigs was too young to have much fat on their guts. We'll jes take an' heave it out back o' the shed where the hens kin peck it over."

The last sound Judith heard from the yard as she walked away was Snap fighting viciously with Joe Barnaby's dog, who had dared to approach too near to one of the blood pools.

She climbed the hill to the ridge road and walked and walked and walked. She no longer felt at all tired or sick at her stomach. A sense of burning indignation gave her power and energy. She wanted to keep on walking forever and put a longer and longer distance between herself and all that she had left behind: the hot, foul smelling kitchen with its odious tub of guts in the middle, the tub of filthy clothes, the steaming wash boiler, the screaming, insistent children, the men going smugly about with cheeks reddened by the frosty air, and