When Dan got back they took turns, one going ahead and throwing out as much snow as he could, the other handling the snow that fell back.  After an hour or so of this work, Dan leaned on his shovel.

“We’ll never do it, Claude.  Two men couldn’t throw all that snow out in a week.  I’m about all in.”

“Well, you can go back to the house and sit by the fire,” Claude called fiercely.  He had taken off his coat and was working in his shirt and sweater.  The sweat was rolling from his face, his back and arms ached, and his hands, which he couldn’t keep dry, were blistered.  There were thirty-seven hogs in the hog-house.

Dan sat down in the hole.  “Maybe if I could git a drink of water, I could hold on a-ways,” he said dejectedly.

It was past noon when they got into the shed; a cloud of steam rose, and they heard grunts.  They found the pigs all lying in a heap at one end, and pulled the top ones off alive and squealing.  Twelve hogs, at the bottom of the pile, had been suffocated.  They lay there wet and black in the snow, their bodies warm and smoking, but they were dead; there was no mistaking that.

Mrs. Wheeler, in her husband’s rubber boots and an old overcoat, came down with Mahailey to view the scene of disaster.

“You ought to git right at them hawgs an’ butcher ’em today,” Mahailey called down to the men.  She was standing on the edge of the draw, in her patched jacket and ravelled hood.  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 been working himself up into a childish contempt for money-values.