"In course you're diff'rent; you're a gal."
"Well, anyway, I don't feel like one," Judy would answer unrepentantly.
If she could have put into words what she vaguely felt, she would have said that the language of the barnyard was an expression of something that was real, vital and fluid, that it was of natural and spontaneous growth, that it turned with its surroundings, that it was a part of the life that offered itself to her. The prim niceness of the twins, suitable enough to them in the world that they were making for themselves, was for her a deadening negation of life. To have to be correct and decent in her speech was the same as being forced to sit motionless on a straight-backed chair in the front room when she was consumed with a longing to run and jump and whoop and chase the dog and play at "Hide and Seek" around the barn.
Craw was at home now and able to help his father. But the plans that Bill had made in the invigorating coolness of early spring did not bear much fruit. It was one thing to plan work and quite another thing to do it when the dog days came and the sun baked the hillsides. Then as he hoed out weeds or followed the cultivator in the heat of the day, and the sweat rolled down his body in scalding streams, he felt less enthusiastic about raising a big tobacco crop. Indeed, the task of reclaiming the farm was so big and formidable that it would have discouraged a much more energetic man than Bill. It was easier to do jobs of hauling and the like, and so make enough money to pay the store bill. Bill had always been partial to jobs of hauling. This also suited Craw, whose mind was of the routine sort, incapable of planning or grasping any enterprise however small. Craw was sixteen when he left school, a big, good-looking, good-natured, well developed fellow, but slow as a tortoise. He could follow the plow or drive a team or do any simple task assigned to him, but of initiative he had none. With Craw's help Bill increased his acreage of corn considerably and hauled out his long accumulated barnyard manure onto the corn field, thus getting a much better yield. But neither of them broached the subject of raising tobacco. Craw, growing rapidly stronger and bigger, soon began to "work out," and earned his seventy-five cents a day from Uncle Ezra Pettit or old Hiram Stone or any of the neighboring tobacco planters who wanted a hand. He was a good, steady, plodding worker, and the neighbors who employed help soon learned to call upon him. Proud in the possession of money, he liked to patronize his sisters, and brought them home occasional presents of scented soap, white muslin shirtwaists and imitation jewelry for the pleasure of listening to their excited squeals of delight and feeling male and superior. Pretty soon he got to going with a girl; and after that he never brought his sisters anything.