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 to tell her you'd stepped over to see Hat Wolf. She don't seem to know what to do with herse'f, poor gal. She feels dreadful about Dan."

"The more fool she. She dunno when she's well off," she answered brutally in a harsh, grating voice, and went on clearing the table, slapping the plates together viciously. Her own words shocked her; then she felt defiantly glad that she had said them.

He started, where he sat by the stove, and looked at her in astonishment. As she went on silently about her work, he kept glancing at her askance, questioningly, and with a vague uneasiness.

That spring they moved to another house close to several acres of fresh tobacco ground. Tobacco exhausts the soil in about three years and has to go through a renovating period. An old couple who aimed to raise only a patch of corn and perhaps an acre of tobacco moved into the house that they had left.

Lizzie May had taken her children and gone back to live with her father; and Jerry had thought of taking Dan's old house. But Judith did not feel that she could go to live in the house to which Dan had been brought home dead.

The house to which they moved was less than a mile from the one they left. It was built of pine boards roughly nailed together and neither sealed nor plastered. It had three bare, rooms and a rickety back porch floored with boards many of which had rotted away from the nails that once held them. When you stepped on one end of these boards, the other end flew up into the air. The house stood on the top of a rather high ridge and commanded a broad view. Near it there was neither tree nor shrub; but there was a little clump of locust trees by the horsepond. Like Dan's old house it was bare, stark, and open to the sky.

A large and very dirty family of Pattons had lived there the year before. They were probably distantly akin to Uncle Joe Patton, although both families disclaimed all relationship.