15

then look out!"

"But she did drop," argues a persistent one. "She was
on the ground when Jake found her."

The oracle screws his yyes and squints off appraisingly:

"If Jake hadn't come along at exactly that moment, I

‘V

betchu anything I got that kil wouldn't been alive today."
Farmer Merritt himself, grave and stern, his hair grizzled
grey since the night in the bogs, puts out his jaw stubbornly:

"I don't know anything about coyotes, but I ain't goin

CV?)

to stand by and let no man say one word against my neighbor,
Jake Watson. He's a man!"

Mrs. Merritt, whose high cheek bones have recovered their
color, and whose tongue fails her not now, smiles around the
circle:

"Talking of Jake: We all got exempted because we was

’raisin' crops, so didn't have to go across the water to fight

the Germans as Jake did. If we didn't get exempted because we
was farmers, then we had squint eyes or flat feet; when Jake
went down to enlist at first they told him his feet were flat
as pancakes and that he wouldn't be no good fighting Germans,
but he kept at them and he kept at them, and he got took, and
no one thought anything more about his flat feet when he was
chasin' after Germans, and neither did them same feet bother
Jake when he was trampin' ten miles through the marshlands, with
the rain just pounding down upon him, and that baby wrapped up

snug in his old army coat and himself soaked to the bone." A .