se, as at breakfast, but she did not join
them at the table. She was scalding milk crocks and pans, her face was
red from the steam. As she bent over the sink the uprising vapor moved
her hair upon her temples like a wind.

"Ain't you goin' to eat your dinner, Ollie?" inquired Isom with
considerable lightness, perhaps inspired by the hope that she was not.

"I don't feel hungry right now," she answered, bending over her steaming
pan of crocks.

Isom did not press her on the matter. He filled up his plate again with
beans and jowl, whacking the grinning jawbone with his knife to free the
clinging shreds of meat.

Accustomed as he had been all his life to salt fare, that meal was
beyond anything in that particular of seasoning that Joe ever had
tasted. The fiery demand of his stomach for liquid dilution of his
saline repast made an early drain on his coffee; when he had swallowed
the last bean that he was able to force down, his cup was empty. He cast
his eyes about inquiringly for more.

"We only drink one cup of coffee at a meal here," explained Isom, a
rebuke in his words for the extravagance of those whose loose habits
carried them beyond that abstemious limit.

"All right; I guess I can make out on that," said Joe.

There was a pitcher of water at his hand, upon which he drew heavily,
with the entire good-will and approbation of Isom. Then he took his hat
from the floor at his feet and went out, leaving Isom hammering again at
the jowl, this time with the handle of his fork, in the hope of
dislodging a bit of gristle which clung to one end.

Joe's hope leaped ahead to supper, unjustified as the flight was by the
day's developments. Human creatures could not subsist longer than a meal
or two on such fare as that, he argued; there must be a change very
soon, of course.

It was a heavy afternoon for Joe. He was weary from the absolute lack of
nourishment when the last of the chores was done long after dusk, and
Isom announced that they would go to the house for supper.

The supper began with soup, made from the left-over beans and the
hog's jaw of dinner. There it swam, that fleshless, long-toothed,
salt-reddened bone, the most hateful piece of animal anatomy that Joe
ever fixed his hungry eyes upon. And supper ended as it began; with
soup. There was nothing else behind it, save some hard bread to soak in
it, and its only savor was salt.

Isom seemed to be satisfied with, even cheered by, his liquid
refres