Claude, down in the hole, brushed the sleeve of his sweater across his streaming face. “Butcher them?” he cried indignantly. “I wouldn’t butcher them if I never saw meat again.”
“You ain’t a-goin’ to let all that good hawg-meat go to wase, air you, Mr. Claude?” Mahailey pleaded. “They didn’t have no sickness nor nuthin’. Only you’ll have to git right at ’em, or the meat won’t be healthy.”
“It wouldn’t be healthy for me, anyhow. I don’t know what I will do with them, but I’m mighty sure I won’t butcher them.”
“Don’t bother him, Mahailey,” Mrs. Wheeler cautioned her. “He’s tired, and he has to fix some place for the live hogs.”
“I know he is, mam, but I could easy cut up one of them hawgs myself. I butchered my own little pig onct, in Virginia. I could save the hams, anyways, and the spare-ribs.We ain’t had no spare-ribs for ever so long.”
What with the ache in his back and his chagrin at losing the pigs, Claude was feeling desperate. “Mother,” he shouted, “if you don’t take Mahailey into the house, I’ll go crazy!”
That evening Mrs. Wheeler asked him how much the twelve hogs would have been worth in money. He looked a little startled.
“Oh, I don’t know exactly; three hundred dollars, anyway.”
“Would it really be as much as that? I don’t see how we could have prevented it, do you?” Her face looked troubled.
Claude went to bed immediately after supper, but he had no sooner stretched his aching body between the sheets than he began to feel wakeful. He was humiliated at losing the pigs, because they had been left in his charge; but for the loss in money, about which even his mother was grieved, he didn’t seem to care. He wondered whether all that winter he hadn’t
