Stud tried to straighten his back at the end of the row. The sweat poured from his temples and the grizzled creases of his stubbled cheeks. The pain went in wide, flat bands down the heavy muscles on either side of his spine. It was weakness to show this pain. One must laugh, throw down the shining tobacco hatchet beside the shagbark hickory, snatch up the heavy, brown-earthenware jug, tip it deftly over the shoulder and slosh long, cool swigs of cider down one's parched and dusty throat. "Uuufff, Uuuggg," said the big tobacco harvester, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve and spitting into the dust. "Sure tastes good, don't it?" "Fair to middling," said Gus. "It's darn good cider," said Ansel Ottermann, "even iffen it is full of rotten apples and worms and such." "Don't need to drink no more than you like," said Stud, holding the jug just out of Ansel's reach. "Is it good cider or ain't it?" "It's good cider," Ansel said. The almanac had predicted early frost that year, and although the entire family scoffed at almanac predictions Stud had cleaned and sharpened his tobacco axes, suckered his tobacco plants, cleaned out the sheds and gathered together a crew. On the stroke of six one hazy blue Indian summer morning the noisy crowd of farmers and men from Brailsford Junction began the backbreaking labor. Up one row and down the next went the sweating workers. The left hand grasped the stalk, the right sent the tobacco hatchet cleanly through the heavy-fibered stem. Flash, flash went the bright steel in the sunlight. "Great crop this year," said Vern Barton. "Just heft them stalks." "Too darned good a crop," growled Gus. "I got a crick in my back like a he-dog in April." "That's what you get gallivantin' around nights," said Stud. The men laughed. "How you do talk," said Gus. "You know I ain't took a girl into a haymow for twenty years." "How about a cornfield?" Stud asked. Laths tipped with steel were spudded through the butt ends of the stalks--five or six plants to each lath. The tobacco was then loaded upon wagons and hauled to the sheds. Men climbed nimbly among the poles hanging the heavily laden laths, tier upon tier. The hot, suffocating air was pungent with the smell of green tobacco. The thick, moss-green leaves were soft and heavy as velvet to the touch. Later they would be brown and brittle. Still later, when to the vast excitement of the countryside "case" weather began, they would be fine and pliable as thin brown leather. The swallows had gathered long weeks before, and, as though at some invisible signal sent along the thousands of miles of wire on which they were mobilized, had left over night for the south. The fields were strewn with yellowing pumpkins and swelling hubbard squashes, knobbed, burly, and deep green. The first ducks were dropping in from the north. Soon it would be time for the Rock County Fair.