She scowled darkly at the tub, her black brows drawing together. The bluish viscera, bubbling up in innumerable little rounded blobs, filled it almost to overflowing. Bloody fragments emerged along with the masses of intestines. The outside of the tub was daubed and streaked with blood. An unspeakable stench rose from it, mingled with the stale heat of the kitchen and grew every moment denser, more nauseating, more unbearable. She gagged and reeled. Then, with a quick movement of sudden determination, she threw on an old coat of Jerry's that hung beside the door and a faded cap that she wore when she milked or chored about the yard, and went out, slamming the door sharply behind her.
Going swiftly through the yard, looking neither to right nor to left, she passed the two men.
"Where you a-goin', Judy?" Jerry called after her in surprise.
"I'm a-goin' to git away from that tub o' stinkin' pig guts you set in the kitchen. It kin stay there till it rots afore I'll tech hand to it."
Each word she uttered was hard and sharp, like the point of a nail. She paused not a second in her rapid walk and in a moment was gone from sight around the corner of the shed.
Jerry stood looking at the place where she had disappeared with an expression of dazed bewilderment, changing to annoyance and embarrassment. His pride suffered humiliation at this open affront from his wife before another man.
"That's jes the kind o' tantrums my woman goes into, on'y worse," he said. "An' she's allus a heap flightier when she's in the fam'ly way. But I never knowed Judy was given to them fits."
"She hain't," Jerry hastened to assure him. "I never knowed her to take on in sech a way afore. She's run guts many a time, like all the wimmin, an' never made no fuss."
"Well, I s'pose we better pack it out," said Jerry, turning toward the house. "I hain't a-goin' to bother with the guts. There hain't but three four paound o' lard there at best. The pigs was too young to have much fat on their guts. We'll jes take an' heave it out back o' the shed where the hens kin peck it over."
The last sound Judith heard from the yard as she walked away was Snap fighting viciously with Joe Barnaby's dog, who had dared to approach too near to one of the blood pools.