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 The men sat around the stove of an evening and told Jerry just what he ought to have done to save the horse and just what they themselves would have done if the horse had been theirs. Having exhausted this topic, they drifted to other things: the victories over the Germans, the high and ever climbing cost of flour, the scarcity of sugar, the unheard of prices that were being charged for overalls and shoes and stoves and hay forks and wire fencing.

"Waal, if we kin git forty cent a paound fer terbaccer this year, 'twon't pan out so bad," opined Uncle Sam Whitmarsh. "An' eggs an' butter is fetchin' a good price."

"You was allus a joker, Sam," said Columbia Gibbs, spitting into the woodbox. "You know dern well there hain't one of us in twenty'll git forty cent fer terbaccer. Mebbe a few lucky ones'll draw a big price; but the most of us'll be on'y too glad to drive back home with ten or twelve. An' if butter an' eggs is high, they hain't high compared with flour an' coffee. Afore the war I cud drive into taown with five, six dozen eggs an' the same number o' paounds o' butter, an' I cud git me a sack o' flour, a couple o' paounds o' sugar, a paound o' coffee an' a paper o' candy fer the young uns. Naow I take in that same lot o' butter an' eggs an' I can't hardly git me a sack o' dirty flour chuck full o' bran an' middlin's. I gotta go 'ithout the coffee an' sugar an' the young uns has gotta go 'ithout the candy."

He looked about the group clinchingly and made a feint of wiping away the streams of tobacco juice that had begun to dribble from the corners of his mouth.

"I wisht Roosevelt was back in agin," spoke up Gus Dibble. "When he was in the price o' mule colts was a heap better. One year I got fifty dollars fer a mule colt. An' las' year I didn't git but forty fer a better one out'n the same mare. I'd like to see Roosevelt back in."

Two weeks after Nip's death Uncle Amos Crupper received word that his son Bob had been killed, blown to pieces by an exploding shell.

The old man was broken by the news. Bob was his only