Life closed in on Judith after that with an iron hand. She missed sorely the children’s demands upon her, their play and prattle and movement about the place. Huldah was gone. Wade was gone. She could get no news of Creed. The things to love and hate and be jealous of seemed to have dropped out of her existence, so that the heart recoiled upon itself, the spirit wrestled blindly in darkness with an angel which was but its own self in other guise.

Day by day she turned from side to side for an exit from the fiery path she trod, and cried out to Heaven that she could not bear it—she could not stand it—there must be some way other than this!

The Lusk girls and the Turrentine twins were to have a double wedding. The preparations for this event were torture to Judith. Everybody, it seemed, could be happy but her own poor self. Even the fact that Jeff and Andy were changed, kinder to her, more considerate, better men in every way, had its own sting. If this could have been so before, the wreck of her world need not have come about.

Blatch kept rigorously to his own side of the Gulch, yet once in a while Judith met him on the highroad; and then, while he approached her with the carefullest efforts toward pleasing, he showed the effects of anxiety, the hard life, and the fact that he had begun to drink heavily—a thing he had never done before.

Spring would terminate his lease of the Turrentine farm, and then he must seek other quarters for his illicit traffic. His situation was doubled in danger by the fact that it could not be disguised how his uncle had turned upon him. Now that one did not, supposably, incur the displeasure of the Turrentines by giving information concerning Blatch and his still, the enterprise was a much safer one, and he trembled in hourly terror of its being undertaken by some needy soul. This terror gave a certain ferocity to his manner. Also the man who had come in with him to take Jim Cal’s place in the partnership was a more undesirable associate even than Buck Shalliday.

Judith watched all these things with an idle lack of interest that was strangely foreign to her vivid human temperament. As time passed and she could hear nothing from Creed Bonbright, nor of him beyond what Blatch had told her, and the connection she made between it and Iley’s report of Huldah’s marriage, the inaction of her woman’s lot was almost more than she could endure. Of an evening after her milking was over she would stand at the draw-bars under the wide, blue, twilight sky, and stare with her great, black, passionate eyes into the autumn dusk, and her whole being went forth with such an intensity of longing that it seemed some part of it must find Creed, wherever he was, and speak for her to him.

After Iley’s announcement in September Judith never approached her nor talked to her again, though the shrew was growing strangely mild and disciplined since Jim Cal had broken with Blatch Turrentine and was become a partner in his father’s affairs—a husband who is out of the good books of other people is a scold-maker with the type of woman Jim Cal had married. To go near Pendrilla and Cliantha was to be overwhelmed instantly with the joyous details of their wedding preparations. Judith flinched from bringing her troubles before such happy eyes. She had but Aunt Nancy.

It was bitter hard times at the little cabin on The Edge. Doss Provine had begun actively looking for a “second,” and his courting operations sorely interfered with the making of the small crop. Nancy took the field behind the plough; but her efforts came late and availed little. There was scarcely food for their mouths; she was continually harassed by anxiety concerning Pony, who had got to running with a bad crowd in Hepzibah. And finally the thing happened which had not been since Big Turkey Track was a mountain and Nancy Card was born in that small cabin. At her wit’s end, she took Little Buck and Breezy and went away to visit a married daughter whose husband worked in a machine-shop in a valley settlement, leaving Doss Provine to stay with his kin for the time. There was plenty at her daughter’s table, and a warm welcome awaiting her and the children; besides, the man of the house had promised to find a job for her spoiled boy, and give him the masculine oversight and discipline he needed. At Hepzibah she gathered up that rather astonished young man, exerting for once the real authority that was in her, and with him set out on this formidable journey.

Just once old Jephthah went past that closed door. Just once he looked on the little front yard spilling over its rived palings with autumn blossoms. And he came home so out of joint with life, in so altogether impossible a mood, that it was fairly unsafe to mention as innocent a matter as the time of day to him. Up to now perhaps he had not known what a very large place in his life those almost daily quarrels with his old sweetheart filled. Now the restlessness which had come with the trouble over Creed Bonbright was renewed; he wandered about aimlessly, with a good word for nothing and nobody, and opined darkly that his liver was out of order.

“Aunt Nancy told me one time that she would almost be willin’ to wed you to get a chance to give you a good course of spring medicine for that thar liver,” remarked Judith casually. And then she looked up with a wan little smile, to find an expression in her uncle’s eyes that set her wondering.

Oh, dear Heaven—was it like that? Would she grieve for Creed all her life long, till she was an old, old woman? She declared it should not be so. Love would never be within her reach—within the reach of her utmost efforts—and escape her, leave her an empty husk to be blown by the wind of years to the dust pile of death. One day in this mood she broke down and talked to the Lusk girls.

“He said he’d shore come back,” she concluded hopelessly. “Well, anyhow, he named things that would be done when he come back. I call that a promise. I keep thinking he’ll come back.”

Pendrilla sat, her great china-blue eyes fixed on Judith’s tense, pale, working face, and the big tears of pure emotional enjoyment began to slip down her pink cheeks. In the glow of Judith’s splendid, fiery nature, the two pale little sisters warmed themselves like timid children at a chance hearth. As the full, vibrant voice faltered into silence, Cliantha went forward and took her favourite position on her knees beside Judith, her arms raised and slipped around the taller girl’s waist.

“Oh,” she began, with a sort of frightened assurance. “Ef my lover had gone from me thataway, and I didn’t know whar he was at, an’ couldn’t git no news to him nor from him, I know mighty well and good what I’d do.”

“What?” whispered Judith, young lioness that she was, reduced to taking counsel from this mouse, “what would you do, Clianthy?”

“I’d make me a dumb supper and call him,” asserted the Lusk girl with tremulous resolution.

“A dumb supper!” echoed Judith, and then again, on a different key, “a dumb supper. I never studied about such as that.”

She brooded a moment on the thought, and the girls said nothing, watching her breathlessly.

“Do you reckon hit’d do me any good?” she questioned then, half-heartedly. “Why, dumb suppers always seemed to me jest happy foolishness for light-hearted gals that had sweethearts.”

“Oh, no!” disclaimed Pendrilla, joining her sister on the floor at Judith’s feet. “They ain’t nothin’ like foolishness about a shore-enough dumb supper. Why, Judith, Granny Peavey, our maw’s mother, told us oncet about a dumb supper that her and two other gals made when she was but sixteen year old, and her sweetheart away from her in Virginny, and she didn’t know whar he was at, an’ they brought her tales agin him.”

“Well?” prompted Judith feverishly. “Did it do any good? Did she find out anything?”

“Her and two others went to a desarted house at midnight—you know that’s the way, Jude.”

Judith nodded impatiently.

“They tuck ’em each some bread an’ salt, an’ a candle to put the pins in and name. They done everything backwards—ye have to do everything backwards at a dumb supper. I don’t know what happened when the candle burned down to the other girls’ pins—I forget somehow—but when the pin Granny had stuck in the candle an’ named for her lover was melted out and fell, the do’ opened and in he walked and set down beside her. They wasn’t a word said betwixt ’em. He tasted her salt, an’ he et her bread; and then he was gone like a flash! And at that very same identical time that thar young man was a-crossin’ the mountains of Virginny. It drawed him—don’t you see, Judith?—it drawed him to Granny. He came back to her, shore enough, three months after, and they was wedded. He was our grandpap, Adoniram Peavey—and every word of that’s true.”

Judith sank lower in her splint-bottomed chair, looking fixedly above the flaxen heads at her knees, out through the open door, across the chip pile, and away to the bannered splendours of the autumn slopes.

Cliantha laid her head in Judith’s lap and began to whimper.

“They’s awful things chanced at them thar dumb suppers,” she shivered. “I hearn tell of one gal that never had no true-love come, but jest a big black coffin hopped in at the do’ and bumped around to her place and stopped ’side of her. My law, I believe I’d die ef sech as that should chance whar I was at!”

Judith’s introverted gaze dropped to the girl’s face.

“I reckon that gal died,” she suggested musingly, “I don’t know as I’d care much ef the coffin come for me. Unless—he—was to come, I’d ruther it would be the coffin. Pendrilly,” with a sudden upflash of interest, “what is it that comes? Is it the man hisself—or a ghost?”

“’T ain’t a ghost—a shore-enough ha’nt,” argued Pendrilla soberly, sitting back on her heels, “not unless ’n the man’s dead, hit couldn’t be. Hit wasn’t no ha’nt of Grandpap Peavey—and yet hit wasn’t grandpap hisself. I reckon it was a sort of seemin’—jest like a vision in the Bible. Don’t you, Jude?”

“I ’low,” put in Cliantha doubtfully, “that if the right feller is close by when he’s called by a dumb supper, he comes hisself. But ef he’s away off somewhars that he cain’t git to the place, then this here seemin’ comes. An’ ef he’s dead and gone—why you’ll see his ha’nt.”

“They’s jest three of us,” whispered Pendrilla. “Three is the right number—but I know in my soul I’d be scared till I wouldn’t be no manner of use to anybody.”

“Hit’s comin’ close to Hollow Eve,” suggested Cliantha. “That’s the time to hold a dumb supper ef one ever should be held. Hit’ll work then, ef it wouldn’t on no other night of the year.”

“It has to be held in a desarted house,” Pendrilla reiterated the condition. “Ef you was to hold a dumb supper, Jude, we could go to the old Bonbright house itse’f—ef we had any way to git in.”

“I’ve got the key,” said Judith scarcely above her breath. “Creed left it with me away last April, to get things for the—for the play-party.”