Often a wind would spring up out of the west as the twilight thickened, and the young Pippingers would run in the face of it, their hair blown back, their arms waving wildly, their voices ringing shrilly into the autumn night: little Valkyries of the hills.
Once, as they were playing a ring game by the barn, a big red moon rose over the brow of the hill and showed their dancing figures silhouetted sharply in black on the barn wall. The weird little shadow figures seemed like a troop of goblin companions that had come to join their play. The more wildly they pranced and threw their arms about, the more reckless and drunken grew the little shadow creatures on the wall, stimulating them in turn to a still greater frenzy of abandon. The wind blew in their faces and brought subtle whiffs of fragrance from the big tobacco barn down the ridge. The other children soon forgot this evening; but to Judith it remained always as one of the exalted moments of her life.
When the children were called in to supper after these autumn orgies, they would come with ruddy cheeks and blazing eyes. Bill, looking about the table, would say with satisfaction: "Them young uns ain't a-lookin' poorly. Guess we won't need to call in the doctor for 'em yet a spell."
The little glass lamp would be lighted in the middle of the oilcloth-covered table; and there would be fried potatoes and a big red platter of sliced tomatoes and roastin' ears steaming hot--a delicious meal!
The winter season was not such a happy one for the Pippinger children. Usually the weather would be warm and pleasant and the roads dry up to Thanksgiving or even later. But then would come the inevitable heavy frosts, followed by thaws and the cold, dismal rains that lasted sometimes for days together. Then the young Pippingers had to stay home from school and time hung very heavy on their hands. They bickered and quarreled and yawned and stared idly out of the window at the drearily falling rain and the dismal expanse of mud that would be there till the April sun dried it up.
Sometimes when the house grew too unbearably dull and small, they threw their coats over their heads and plodded through the heavy mud to the barn to play in the corn fodder and consort with the mules and chickens. It was a great relief to their mother to get them out of the house. Around the barn, the sodden stable dung made a lake of stinking filth and the children had to step very carefully from stone to stone to avoid sinking into it. Inside it was fun for a while to jump about in the clean fodder, to curry the mules and climb on their backs, and to hunt for eggs in the loft and on the top of the beams. But they soon tired of this and trooped back to the house, bringing with them their boredom and a quantity of sticky mud which refused to wipe off on the dirty bit of folded rag carpet before the door.