The great after war pestilence called "flu" swept across Scott County that fall and winter, sparing neither the old men nor the young virgins. It knocked at many doors, and often where its knuckles had rapped the undertaker hung his bunch of crape. Sometimes the crape was a rusty black, often a rather soiled white. It took away Uncle Jonah Cobb and left Aunt Selina alone with the bees and rabbits. It took one of Joe Barnaby's children and Aunt Abigail's son, Noey, and Evalina, Aunt Maggie Slatten's second youngest girl. It took babies in arms and young men that the war had spared and women with child. It took Uncle Sam Whitmarsh away from his cheerful traffic in dogs and horses.
"It's allus this way," said Jabez Moorhouse. "War an' pestilence goes hand in hand. The bigger the war the bigger the pestilence. The Bible says them that's near at hand'll fall by the sword an' them that's afur off'll die o' the pestilence. We're a hell of a long ways off, but we're a-dyin' o' the pestilence jes the same."
He hunched his shoulders over the stove, feeling suddenly cold.
Once again winter settled down on the wind-shaken little house on the ridge. Judith, peering from the window at the mud and clouds of December, felt the old oppression sink upon her, heavier because so drearily familiar. How many years would it go on, she caught herself wondering.
It was nearly a year since the quarrel. Since then they had treated each other with the chilly politeness of strangers who do not much like each other's looks. In summer when life dragged less oppressively it was not so hard to bear. But now that winter was come her heart sank within her.
Christmas came and went and there was no change.
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It was not until after Christmas that the flu came to them. Jerry had a light attack which kept him away from the stripping room for two weeks. Then when he was almost ready to return to work, Andy got it and was followed in a few days by Billy.
"If Annie gets it, it'll likely go hard with her," said Jerry, looking anxiously at the pale, self-contained little girl who was his favorite among the children. "We can't take her to mammy's 'cause dad's got it."
"An' I can't take her to my folks, 'cause Luelly's jes a-gittin' over it."
Judith did what she could to keep Annie away from her sick brothers. But one morning about a week after Billy had been taken sick, when she went to dress the little girl she saw that her cheeks were flushed with fever.
"I knowed there was no gittin away from it," she said grimly to Jerry, as she mixed a dose of castor oil with warm coffee.
On the third day Annie was so much worse that Jerry rode over to Clayton for Dr. MacTaggert.
It was late that night when the doctor's mud-spattered Ford came panting up the long hill and stopped before their door. The little man looked haggard and hollow-eyed from his constant attendance at sickbeds and his long hours of bumping over rutted roads and up and down steep, perilous trails to the tobacco growers' lonely shanties.
"It's pneumonia," he said, as he straightened up from his examination of the child's chest.
The blood sank away from Jerry's face, leaving it a sickly gray color, and he grasped the bedpost to steady himself.
"Can't you see your shakin' the child's bed," said Judith crossly in a grating voice.
The doctor said that she would have to be watched and tended carefully both day and night. Jerry let the tobacco stripping go and stayed at home to help with the nursing. The boys were now well on the way to recovery and beginning to be fractious and noisy. The father and mother took turns at
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 nursing the little girl and trying to keep the boys quiet; and through the night one watched while the other slept.
As Judith sat by the bedside of the sick child that she had begrudged to life before it was born, her heart failed her at the thought that the little one might die. She felt that to see her die, to have her cold little dead body put into a narrow coffin and laid in the frozen ground would be more than she could bear. Her thoughts skirted these images and fled away aghast not daring to face them. Keenly she suffered with the sufferings of the child. When she anxiously watched her breathing hard she felt her own chest racked by tearing pains. She had to summon all the courage that remained to her to enable her to bear the sight and touch of the limp and wasted little body. Never had the child ............