They had reached Jabez' house, a melancholy little weathered frame shanty shaded by two sorrowful hemlock trees that stood out blackly against the gray sky. Jabez leapt from the buggy.
Jerry turned the mare's head toward home. Knowing where she was going, she fell into a fast trot without any encouragement. The short winter day was already graying to a close and it was chore time. As he drove along over the half frozen ruts of the road, his imagination was aflame with the suggestions that Jabez had thrown out. The corn whiskey gave warmth and color to these imaginings.
The effect of the corn whiskey soon wore off, but not of Jabez' suggestions; and Jerry was now in no mood for delay. He had held off quite long enough, he told himself. The very next evening, as Judith was driving up Spot and Blackie, the successors of Roanie and Reddie, Jerry met her coming along the ridge path. She had on Craw's cloth cap, an old canvas coat of her father's and Craw's rubber boots. Shining out from this rough frame, her girlish charms looked all the more alluring to Jerry.
"I'm a-lookin' fer our red an' white heifer. She's strayed away some place an' we hain't see hair ner hide of her since yestiddy mornin'."
"I didn't see no signs of a strange caow back yonder. But mebbe she's there. If she is she'll be in the holler by Uncle Jonah Cobb's place, 'cause you kin see all the rest from the ridge. Well, I gotta be a-gittin' on. Git along there, Blackie. It'll be dark afore I git milked. Good-by, Jerry."
"I don't reckon she's in the holler. Anyway it'd be too dark to see her agin I got there. I guess I'll go on back home."
They walked along the ridge path together behind the cows. Neither of them spoke a word. Before they reached the Pippinger barnyard, Jerry vaulted a rail fence and went off toward home across fields. Judith looking after him noticed with what agility he leapt the fence and how light and springy was his step as he strode away across the deserted corn fields. Yes, she admitted to herself, he was, as Lizzie May had said, much better looking than Dick Whitmarsh. On the whole she thought she liked him better than Dick.
The next evening he met her in the same place.
"Howdy, Jerry. You still a-searchin' for that red an' white heifer?"