The first six of these sketches were published in The Atlantic Monthly. Number seven appeared in The Reviewer. The author thanks the editors of these magazines for permission to reprint.

Copyright, 1925, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

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Copyright, 1919, 1924, by THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
Copyright, April, 1925, by THE REVIEWER

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Printed in the United States of America

I

GRANPAP accrued to me along with a farm in the Unakas. When I learned that my inheritance lay, or rather rose, in the Unakas, it at once passed from prose to poetry. My hundred hills became tipped with song, bloom calling to bloom from Three Pine Point to Sunrise Spur, and Blackcap answering from his hemlock shroud with a melodious shake that did no harm to his hidden acres of anemone and trillium. The laurel, polished as by the glance of a god, drew a richer green from its storehouse across a paltry breadth of sky, in the sun. The great chestnuts leafily defied the blight that was creeping to their hearts. And where the gray rocks pushed through the living emerald of the mountain walls, they too seemed listeningly alive, as if in wait for the key-word that would swing them open on Persia magnificent; though they needed to borrow no glamour of age from any part of the world. Unakas! Spenser, under English beeches, rustled his threefold coverlet of centuries, and began another[4] dream—dream of a region that was old to God before Helvellyn rose or the Himalayas shone as the planet’s crest.

In the wake of a Muse so sure of foot, I entered my forest a little stumblingly. The first cabin was Granpap Merlin’s. His welcoming “Howdy” only slightly interrupted his dinner of corn-pone and pickled beans. But Poesy kept at my ear, swiftly picturing me fields like blowing seas; gallant stalks with waving green arms, and tassels flowing, silver, gold, and rose, in the breath of July dawns. With a thrust into memory, she brought up a rock maize-mill of my childhood, left by the Indians in an abandoned cave; and chanted the one magic line of Lanier’s poem. As for beans, I had seen them in blossom, hiding their pinkness under round, hugging leaves, and not even their passage through a brine barrel could convert them into mere pabulum. It was a fitting meal for a mountain seer.

“Did you grow the corn that made the meal that made that pone?” I asked, building Jack’s house in the excitement of getting back to the land.

“It growed itself. I planted it.”

“And you ploughed the field that grew the corn, and so forth?”

[5]“My mule, Tim, ploughed it. I ploughed Tim.”

His face, like the broken corner of a boulder, did not tell me whether he was simply, or contemptuously, laconical.

“This seems rather high for corn land,” I said, in the tone of ownership. He must at least know that I had read the Farmers’ Bulletins.

“Wait till you see it growin’. The corn gets so onhandy big and shady in Hawk Wing Cove, you can see the lightnin’-bugs in thar by daylight. But ’tain’t easy ploughin’. Twenty-five acres of straight up and down.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of that cove. From the head of it one can see seven curves of the river.”

“If you look from the door thar, you can see the top of the ridge ’tween them two peaks.”

I looked.

“It must be glorious to make one’s bread up there.”

“I never made bread up thar but once. I baked hoecakes on a rock one day when Cyn sent me meal and water for my dinner. I hadn’t left her any stove-wood, an’ she had proper spirit, Cyn had,” he added, as if his wife’s memory must be kept clear of blemish. “But thar wa’n’t no glory in it, as I see.”

[6]“I must go there the first thing. I don’t suppose there are any snakes.”

“No, I don’t see more’n two or three rattlers a year now. Not much killin’.”

His voice, like a retired general’s, was bored but tolerant.

“Rattlesnakes? In those pastures of heaven? Did you ever kill one there?”

“One? If they’d been fence-rails I could ’a’ put a mule-proof fence around that field with all I’ve killed in it.”

I looked again at the line of pallid gold just showing between two pointed barriers. It ebbed away, more like a bridge to faith, or some such unsubstantiality, than the trampled ground where man had battled for his overlordship. I would go there, come to-morrow. And I did. But what happens in aerial gardens must have its own chapter and aureole.

II

Granpap’s toleration of me passed into liking very slowly. His stolidity often brought my imagination down as if it had struck a wall; and while I gathered up the pieces, the wall would become human and wonder[7] why I had given such an invidious thrust. Naturally the essence of comradeship eluded us for some time. But finally he understood that my assaults were harmless; that he merely happened to be on the horizon when my enthusiasm was spraying the skies; and I began to see that he was too much a part of Nature to become consciously her note-book. He wore externality as a tree wears its bark, receiving all winds with passionless impartiality; but those winds of change were his breath of life.

One day I asked him if he did not sometimes feel that he would like to live in a city.

“No,” he said, “I have to stay whar thar’s somethin’ happenin’.”

Not an eyelash of me betrayed my glee. The least sign of emotion, and the gates of confidence would be snapped and sealed.

“In a city,” he said, “you don’t have seasons—jest weather.”

In the cabin with him lived his son Sam, Sam’s wife, Coretta, and their children. Once he returned home after a night away, and was much puzzled on learning of their “goin’s-on” in his absence. Cecil having the earache, the father and mother had risen in[8] the dead of night, built a fire, and administered the usual remedy—warm rabbit’s oil poured into the ear. So far granpap understood.

“But how,” said he, “could they think the roosters were crowin’ for daylight when it was only midnight—an’ git breakfast too?”

“But, granpap,” explained Coretta, “we had been asleep for hours, and how could you ’a’ knowed the time, with the night cloudy-gray, an’ no stars, an’ the clock stopped?”

“Kain’t you feel the time?” he asked, in concerned surprise, as if she were pathetically deformed. And later he said to me: “K’rettie kain’t feel the time at all. I hope the little feller ain’t goin’ to take arter her.”

“Cecil? Oh, no! He’s a Merlin. You can count on that. Don’t you like the boy’s name, granpap?”

He slowly cut a twig from the nearest dogwood and peeled it carefully.

“You noticed I never handle his name?”

“I’ve noticed.”

“K’rettie ain’t high-stocked with brains, but she’s got enough fer a woman; an’ she’s not great on housekeepin’, but ’tain’t every man can git hold of a woman like Cyn was. I ain’t got nothin’ agin K’rettie but her[9] namin’ the boy like that. He might as well be a furriner. I counted on his bein’ named Dick,—Richard Merlin,—like my father an’ grandfather, an’ my oldest brother who was killed in the war. But this sissy name, it’s bitterer’n this dogwood. I jest ain’t a-goin’ to say it.”

He cut the twig into inch-long pieces and dropped them into his pocket to be used as a substitute for tobacco.

That afternoon I remembered that I wanted to see Coretta about making me a mattress of new splintered shucks. I did not often seek Coretta. Married at fifteen, at twenty-two she was the mother of four. If she had taken her maternal honors lightly, as a child should, I could have gone happily to and from her presence. But she was determined “to do right by the Lord’s gifts,” and her soft scramble for any crumbs of wisdom that I inadvertently dropped usually hurried my departure to a spot more suitable for meditation, where I could wonder what I had said anyhow. I should have liked to carry off Coretta’s children and free her petunia-blue eyes from clouds; but I remembered that I had once impulsively taken a broom from a child who was struggling to use it, and then found that I could not stay to do the child’s work. I really[10] had to be going. And four children might prove more embarrassing than a broom. Four futures billowing to seas, and my life already pinched for room! No; better the hurried step and remote gaze as I passed.

In the least matter of business, the Unakasian expects to be approached by polite indirection. The more you curve and circle, softly as an Indian in the enemy’s woods, casually as a sparrow hops, the surer you may be of attaining your object. A straight march to the point, and you will find yourself gesturing to empty air, so swiftly will he withdraw from negotiations; so surely your breach of manners will be punished.

In half an hour’s talk with Coretta, I came somewhat hastily to the mattress, and she sat troubled. I could safely begin on my home curve.

“His name is Richard Cecil, isn’t it? Richard is a fine old name. I suppose you’ll call him that when he is older.”

Her surprised eyes swam in the gauze-light of pathos that I had learned to ignore.

“Cecil is good enough for a little boy. But so many famous men have been named Richard.”

“What men?”

“There was Richard Lovelace.”

[11]“What did he do?”

“He wrote poetry.”

“Like you write?”

“Yes—no—not exactly,” I hastened. “And there was Richard Burbage, a great actor.”

“One o’ them movie men?”

“No, he played in great plays—not like you see nowadays. And Richard Lion-Heart, a mighty king. They buried him in that place I showed you the picture of—Westminster Abbey,” I ventured, though I had visions of his death in the arms of Saladin somewhere beyond the Balkans.

She was impressed, and I thrust on.

“And Dick Turpin,—Richard Turpin,—who was afraid of nothing.”

“Did they bury him in the Abbey, too?”

“No, but he died famously. Half of London went to his—er—funeral.”

She was silent a moment, and then said: “I’ll shore fix that bed for you as soon as Sam can shuck out the corn.”

With this grateful stab in my heart I left her; and Katy went with me to relate a story her papa had brought home. She pronounced “papa” as did all the children, like the flower, poppy, with a soft trail at the[12] end, making a dear word more dear. Katy was eleven, the daughter of Sam’s first wife.

When war stretched a hand into the Unakas, and one by one, then dozen by dozen, the young men began to disappear, the people wondered more and more what it was about. As a rule, they were not reached by the daily papers which feed us truth and bathe us in illumination; and Katy’s story showed how they had adapted the chief argument that had sifted to them.

“There was a cripple, and he was a German. He was goin’ over to Briartown, and stopped at a man’s house. The man and woman were gone to the store. The childern were cookin’ some beans for dinner. The cripple ast to stir the beans. An’ he put something into the pot. Some powder or something. The woman come home and the childern told her. The man come home and the woman told him. They took up the dinner and ast the German to set to the table. He took a chair and passed the beans. Nobody took any. Then the man said: ‘Have some beans yerself.’ But the German said he wouldn’t choose any. Then the man got his gun, and said: ‘You will eat them beans or die.’ The German took some of the beans. And in an hour his tongue was swelled out of his head.”

[13]She paused, lifting anxious eyes, to know if I thought the story was true.

“Yes, Katy,” I answered unflinchingly. Could such a climax be chance invention? A mere accident of art?

“Papa says it is true, for he found a cripple on the Briartown road one day an’ let him ride his horse for a mile. He couldn’t speak plain like papa, an’ he knows it was that German, but he don’t see how Abraham Ludd and Jim Dow let him git by.”

She was speaking of two neighbor boys in the service. One had risen to a captaincy, the other had been decorated.

“Jim Dow——”

“Captain Dow, Katy,” said I.

“He don’t write to Nellie Ludd any more.”

“Did Nellie tell you?”

“No, but she’s quit goin’ to the post-office. She’s ashamed to ast an’ git nothin’ every time.”

I wondered if that was why Nellie flitted so ghost-like about the hills, as difficult to capture as a bird fearing human hurt.

About supper-time I again called at the cabin, and as I sat by the superfluous fire, I heard Coretta say: “Granpap, please pass the sorghum to little Dick.”

[14]And granpap, like a stone image with a movable arm, passed the sorghum.

The full Southern moon was savagely vivid that evening, devouring dreams as easily as it did the clouds that saluted too familiarly; so I left the house by what Sam called the stove-wood trail, a rear way softened by a lane of shadows. What trips the eye will halt the foot; and mine poised in air for a second or less as I sighted a hemlock bough like laced jet against the moon; as if Night, in defense, had thrown a torn bit of her garment over the face of the usurper. When I touched earth again, I was on new, mysterious ground, so quickly are worlds created for us, the ramblers of the universe, tenants insatiable. The mountains sat about me, cloaked sages waiting my indiscretions. Like the roll of a hidden sea, the valleys whispered upward with the life that stirs by night, the smaller wings, that dart fearlessly when the birds are asleep; and the lithe, furry dwellers in secret that come out of the earth to thread, more graceful than swimmers, the channels of shadow. But that purring wave was only the foam-flower of a vastly bedded silence; silence in which Nature dreamed of a way to reconquer her world and rule alone; while, against that dream,[15] Beauty everywhere uncovered her soul. In behalf of man, the first to divine her, the first to adore, she arrayed her magic, invincible if so was his love. Everywhere she shone; on the laurel shedding a vapor of light, on the laps of the orange fungi with their creamy apron cascades; on the roots of trees, and the rocks that fed them endurance. Blue mosses, pale lichens, grasses with heads of mauve and pearl, gleamed in the unsubdued strips of golden light. The world of minute things pressed as hugely significant as the solar system. And as the sea, never hushed, the valley whisper reached for an intangible shore. High above me there was escape by way of a blue eternity, where two walls of cloud parted to show a chasm of sky. Lower down a mist wound reverently about a star, then crept elfishly to the most portentous peak, hanging there like a comic beard. While I waited its whim, a voice, too fervently human, came through the clump of bushes at my side. A second later, a tall figure bearing an armful of fagots was checkered disappearingly along the path toward the cabin.

The next morning when I recalled the sounds I had heard, and put them together understandingly, I had this: “K’rettie can make ’most as good headcheese as[16] ever Cyn could.” And I knew that in Merlin language granpap had said: “My son’s wife, please God, is my daughter.”

III

If tree-worship was ever the religion of any tribe, I know that I am ancestrally bound to that folk. Once an artist told me of his happy method of protecting his wife, children, and friends from the outbursts incidental to genius. He would go to the woods and beat a tree until his symptomatic rage was exhausted. As if a tree-beater and a wife-beater were not cousins german in crime! And now I was going to steep my soul more heinously. The oak boards of my cabin roof had to be reinforced. I could not spend another winter with the snows driving in on me. A “board-tree” had to be felled before the sap was up; and on one of those days which are claimed by both spring and winter, but belong to neither, I set out with granpap, the most skilful board-maker in the Unakas, to select a victim.

“Now this white oak,” said granpap, pausing by a giant that gazed reflectively over the valley, “will make as good boards as you’d want to sleep under.”

“But, granpap, don’t you see—we are interrupting him.”

[17]His eyes narrowed in the suspicious way of our first acquaintance.

“I mean he is sort of on duty here, as if the spirit of the woods needed a sentry just at this place.”

His glance became a cold squint, and I plunged for a practical argument.

“White oaks make good mast. We must think of the hogs. There’ll be three new litters to feed next winter.”

“I reckon you’re right,” he said, instantly at home. “And yander at the head of Flume Cove is a black oak that will make tollable boards if it don’t do better.”

“A black oak? With all that green moss on it? And look at the first branch. It has an elbow crooked round a bellwood. Would you divorce such a pair? What God hath joined, granpap.”

“Well, it wouldn’t make prize boards anyhow,” he said, moving on unregretfully.

Suddenly a fear gripped me. We were nearing a glen at whose door stood a tree which for me symbolized the perfect life. I had often wondered why no human being could achieve maturity so unblemished, and I never passed it without a wave of happy solemnity rolling over me. I began to talk about bee-trees, the only subject on which granpap was excitable.[18] Thickly, hurriedly, I developed a rapacious interest in the wild bee and its hidden ways. And at the precise moment when we passed the pride of my woods, granpap was singsonging the lines which an old, old man had taught his grandfather when a boy:

I had lured him safely by, and we neared the road again. His eye was on a tree with a long, perfect trunk, but which slanted from the root up, leaning over the road.

“I might do with that,” said he. “It’s dangerous thar anyway.”

“Dangerous! Don’t you see how strong it is, and how gently it leans over the road, like a great arm of blessing? I’m so used to that tree I should feel sure of accident overtaking me before I reached the village if I didn’t pass under it.”

Granpap halted. “I ain’t got time to waste corkusin’ around like this. I’ll go to the new ground and do some[19] grubbin’. Then to-morr’ I’ll git up early and find a tree.”

I was dismissed, conscience-free.

Two warm days followed. On the second, I left my desk, feeling sure that I could find a sourwood in leaf on the south side of High Point. My path lay through the glen. Nearing it, I heard alarming sounds of activity, and running past the last obscuring half-acre of rhododendrons, I looked ahead. The pride of my woods measured his long trunk on the ground, half of his broken arms digging helplessly into the earth, the other half appealing to the winds, birds, and skies, that had loved him, for some mitigation of his doom. Granpap’s beaming face shone above the bleeding stump.

“You oughter seen him fall! Just et up those little chestnuts and poplars as he went down.”

And I had thought I heard thunder. Had even speculated on the peculiar crackling quality of the vibrations.

“I don’t know how I happened to miss it when we were lookin’ around. Now we’ll get some boards.”

A tightness of the throat kept me silent. Moreover, I could not rebuke him. He was too happy. Here was material worthy of his skill.

[20]“Sam is going to help me saw the cuts and make the bolts,” he said. “Here he comes now.”

I turned away. I was the primary cause of the murder, but I could not stay to see the victim drawn and quartered.

A day or two later I had to carry a message to the board-maker. I found him a little sad.

“I’m gittin’ old,” he said. “These here boards are the sorriest I ever made.”

“But you’ve got a good pile of them, granpap.”

“Them’s my splinters,” he said, with high contempt, both for me and the boards. “That was the desaptivest tree I ever cut. I bumbed on it as fur as I could reach and it was plumb sound. But in choosin’ a board-tree you’ve got to ’low so much for what you don’t see.”

He sat down. Speech was coming on the tide of injury.

“A shore desaptive tree. Look at them cuts me and Sam made. Half a day’s work wasted in ’em.”

I looked at the great blocks and wondered how they had cunningly escaped further mutilation. And though I saw myself roofless for the next winter, I could not repress an inward bubble over the tree’s revenge.

“It had lost so many limbs when it was young and[21] pushin’ up, that it was jest the snirliest tree I ever saw.”

“Snirly, granpap?”

“Ay, it must ’a’ been an awful thrifty tree. Every time a limb broke off it plumb healed up, an’ thar’s eight and ten rings over some of the scars. Here I’ve cut it down an’ split into it jest to find a lot of knot-holes spilin’ my best boards. And it looked so purty and straight.”

He got up, adjusted his brake, which was the strong fork of a limb chained to a log, fixed his bolt upright, set his adze carefully, and with precise restraint evenly separated a smooth, shining three-foot board from the rest of the bolt. From the splitting wood came an odor that must have been the essence of the forest condensed for generations into its living vase.

But granpap was not pleased with his work.

“Did you see how tough that was? When I do git a good board I have to tear it out. But it’s nateral for the south side of a tree to be tough.”

“Don’t you mean the north side, granpap?”

“No,” he said patiently. “It’s the sun that toughens wood. You’ll see them bolts from the north side are brickle.”

[22]He balanced the board disapprovingly.

“Look how narr’ it is. By the time I’ve sapped this there won’t be enough of it left to turn a rain-drap.”

He began to chip off the inch of white sap-wood along the edge of the board.

“I could ’a’ cast out the snirly blocks, but it was the wind-shake that finally ruined me. I never counted on a wind-shake in a tree as proud as that.”

“Show me the wind-shake, granpap.”

“Look at this block, here in the crosscut, an’ you’ll see it. A wind-shake starts at the heart an’ twists round and round, gettin’ bigger and bigger an’ breakin’ the wood as it goes, till thar’s only enough left for a little narr’ board ’tween the shake-rings and the bark. Then sometimes, when the tree weaves in the wind, you can hear it cry. If I’d ’a’ listened at this tree in a high wind it couldn’t ’a’ fooled me. But they never make no sign on the outside.”

“Granpap,” I began slowly.

He looked up, met my eyes, and laid down his axe.

“Don’t you think some people are like that?”

I was trembling. If he failed me now, the line of Merlin would be extinct. There would be no more seers in the Unakas, or anywhere.

[23]“Ay,” he said. He still used the “ay” of Westmoreland and the hills of Malvern. “Ay, Cyn was like that after Ben got killed.”

He thought my silence was the silence of sympathy, and in alarm took up his axe.

“’Tain’t no use to——”

The axe finished the sentence, slicing a curl of white sap-bark. But his face was a shade grayer. The tree was avenged.

I started on, thinking of all the Cyns and Bens I had known; and of a gay friend, now fallen, who liked to assure me that “A heart is known by the autopsy.” My foot turned up a boss of sweet turf. A broken heart makes as good loam as a sound one, I thought. And I would have gone down the slope singing in the face of a looming to-morrow, if only granpap had not been standing so still.

I

BY pleasant gradations the families on my farm ceased to look upon me as a mere outsider occasionally invading my own territory. Their boundaries of courteous but impassable defense receded, until I could sit by their fires without feeling that invisible doors had been suddenly locked all about me. They welcomed me without the reserve of a key in the pocket. Coretta went so far as to say she did not care how long I “stayed in”; and Coretta’s opinions always echoed the hearth voice of the clan.

But it was because of Coretta that I sometimes looked at the horizon with the desire for flight upon me. One delight of my life in the highlands was a release from the clock. With prudent infrequency, I could make the night my own. If the soul made imperial clamor, it could be satisfied without damage to worldly schedules. But as surely as I made the star-pointed hours my mates of fortune, and saw them[25] paling off toward dawn, dropping into a sleep that I meant should last until noon, just so surely an early daylight voice would bring me tumbling from bed, and down the crumpling and confining stairs, to unbar the door and find out whose barn was burning, or whose baby was “bad off.” Sometimes Sam, more often Katy, would be smiling on the step. Coretta wanted to borrow such or such an article for breakfast. It was always something without which no mountain breakfast could proceed, and the borrower, possessed of it, would go blithely off, leaving me to a broken day.

For months I tried to lead Coretta into the habit of doing her borrowing the day before. “Come at midnight, if you wish, but leave me my mornings.”

She would promise; then it would happen again—the violent waking, with its sequence of futile hours. And she could not understand why her excuses, so confidently proffered, did not satisfy me.

“But I didn’t know the salt was out till I looked on the shelf, an’ we couldn’t eat biscuits ’thout salt in ’em.”

Or, “That man come after supper to see about sellin’ the cow, an’ we talked so late I clean forgot we didn’t have a speck o’ coffee for breakfast.”

[26]Or, “I was sure there was sody enough to put in the bread, an’ there was the box plumb empty.”

Or, “Uncle Rann got in last night. We didn’t have a dust o’ flour, an’ I couldn’t set him down to pone-bread an’ him come all the way from Madison to see us.”

Once, after a particularly disastrous offense, she showed a slight exasperation over my failure to get her point of view.

“But Sam had to git to the ploughin’ early, an’ you only had to jest set an’ write!”

That moment ended my vain rebellion. I accepted fate and Coretta; which done, it was an easy matter to become very fond of her. She had a bluebell prettiness that never failed in any light or under any stress. It seemed so fragile, that I was always expecting it to vanish, or break into an untraceable legend of itself; but it never did. One day, looking in at her kitchen door, I thought of her as the fairy slave of a witch, made to mix strange brews and perform rude incantations. She was kneeling on the floor, before a pan of hog’s feet newly scalded. A sausage-mill, screwed to the table, betrayed its unfinished work. From the stove came the hiss of a kettle of fat in danger of burning.[27] A tub in the corner held partly washed clothes, drab with grime. Children darted, dodged, and crawled. And Sam, no doubt, was momentarily expected in to a dinner yet uncooked. But Coretta lifted a face so unconsciously and incongruously pleasing in its boudoir daintiness, that I laughed aloud, and had to cover the discourtesy with sudden interest in the baby’s attempt to eat a bit of shiny matter picked from her continent of discovery, the ash-pan. Coretta snatched the baby and began to feed it in the way most fashionable where milk-bottles are unknown.

“If I could skip a year ’thout a baby, I b’lieve I could ketch up with my work,” she said.

But a cherishing squeeze of her offspring confessed immediate repentance; and I had to remain dumb before the sublimity of ignorance that accepted death and birth alike as the will of God.

Her own mind was making occult connections. “Did you see the sign in the elements last night, Mis’ Dolly?”

I had not seen.

“It was jest after the rain stopped, an’ it was awful. There was a great white cloud with red streaks like blood runnin’ through it, an’ they ’most made letters. Sam said he guessed it was Hebrew, like the Bible was[28] first wrote in, if we only had the preacher here to tell us. Nothin’ ’s goin’ to keep me from meetin’ next Sunday. I want to know if he read it an’ what it said. It may have been a warnin’ to them people to stop fightin’; but I reckon we all ort to be a little more keerful about doin’ the Lord’s will.”

I decided to defer any unorthodox suggestions, and divagated with: “What’s the matter with Irma’s nose?”

“She fell out o’ bed an’ nearly broke it. I had a time stoppin’ the blood. I was so scared at first I couldn’t remember the verse in the Bible that stops it right off, an’ I run aroun’ tryin’ everything else first. Then I got the verse right, an’ her nose never bled another drap.”

“What verse is that, Coretta?”

“The sixth verse of the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel. Irmie never fell out of bed ’fore this, an’ it was time she did. I was right glad of it after I remembered the verse and got the blood stopped.”

“Why glad, Coretta?”

“You can’t raise a child that never falls out o’ bed. They die shore. Didn’t you know that, Mis’ Dolly?”

Her face was an eager flower, but what I saw was a[29] glimpse of mediæval gates opening on time’s mossy twilights. Was it possible to pass through with Coretta, and look at the world with the eyes of a vanished age? Hitherto she had turned to me for scant crumbs of wisdom. Now she was aquiver with the reversal of our rôles.

“I’ve been afraid to tell you about sech things,” she said. “Some people jest laf at ’em. I been so sorry for you sometimes, doin’ things I knew were bad, an’ I dasen’t tell you.”

“What things, dear?”

“Oh, like sowin’ that sage in the garden. You shore have trouble if you sow sage. You have to get the bunches an’ set ’em out, or else get some strange woman ’at’s passin’ to sow it for you.”

“But isn’t that unfair to her?”

“No; she loses the trouble as soon as she crosses water. She’d only have to cross the branch by the spring an’ it ’ud be gone.”

That was the beginning of my subversion, which was soon alarmingly complete. If I had given Coretta crumbs, she now spread me a banquet. Her store of folk-wisdom fell upon me in showers that sometimes took my breath. Many of her rituals were too complex[30] for memory here to set down, but she had scores of briefer ones, such as her cure for a dog’s tendency to vagabondage. With an auger greased with ’coon-oil made from a ’coon the dog had caught, you bore a hole in the gate-post. Then cut off a bit of the dog’s tail and fasten it in the hole; but do not let him see you. If he runs away after that, you can be sure he was peekin’ from somewheres.

She invited me to be present when granpap cured his mule of the swinney. Part one: we poured cold water on the mule’s shoulder, then rubbed it with a flint-rock until it smoked. Part two: carefully directed by Coretta, we laid the rock back where we had found it, same side up, “an’ pineblank the same way.” And we did indeed cure the mule.

But her remedy for fever was perhaps the gem of her store. You take fodder that has never been wet, grasp all you can in your hand, cut it squarely off above your hand, and squarely off below. Of the remainder left in your grasp make a tea. This tea is an unfailing cure for any kind of fever.

“Why didn’t you make it for Sam last year, Coretta?” I asked.

“We didn’t have any fodder that hadn’t been rained[31] on. That’s the trouble with that cure. You can’t git fodder that hasn’t been wet. Every year I say I’ll cure a bit in the dry, but I always forgit about it till it’s too late.”

She was as learned in signs as in cures. “There,” she might say, “it’s goin’ to rain, an’ I’d laid out to wash to-morrow!”

“But the sky is clear, and there’s no wind from the west.”

“Didn’t you hear that rooster crow when he was gettin’ up into the cedar? If a rooster crows as he goes to his tree, his head’ll be wet ’fore he comes down. But maybe,” she reflected, casting no doubt on the oracle, “it’ll clear by sun-up, an’ I can wash anyhow.”

Her world of signs and portents and conjurations lay about her as familiar as her children’s faces, or the grass before her door. It touched her at every point and turn of her daily life. And then one day I impulsively clashed through it and shook its foundations. I was passing Sam’s cabin, when I saw, grouped at the roadside spring, Coretta, the children, and a young man who was holding the baby and lifting his shoe—yes, lifting his shoe to the baby’s mouth!

“Wait!” I cried, with a suddenness that made the[32] strange young man drop the shoe, though luckily he retained the baby.

Coretta began to explain. “The baby’s got the thrash, an’ I ain’t got time to take her all the way to old Uncle Dean Larky’s for him to blow in her mouth.”

“Blow in her mouth? That toothless old man!”

“He’s got the power in his breath. Jest blows in her mouth an’ says the three highest words in the Bible. But I couldn’t go so fur, an’ I’ve been watchin’ for Zeb Austin to pass. He’s black-eyed, you know.”

I saw that the young man was black-eyed—at that moment rather flashingly, hostilely black-eyed. Whether a magician benignly engaged, or a fool caught in his act, the interruption called for resentment.

Coretta was still explaining. “If a baby’s got the thrash, an’ a black-eyed man person gives her a drink out of his right shoe, it’ll cure the worst case as ever was.”

“Give me the baby,” said I.

She was handed to me. I walked off, up the hill, where I could get a view of the broad valley and a sky clear with sunlight—as clear and welcome as the dry light of science. Coretta followed.

“What’s the matter, Mis’ Dolly?”

“Lies!”

[33]“Don’t you believe it’ll cure her?”

“No.”

“Don’t you believe—any o’ them things?”

“No.”

“Give me my baby!”

The arrogant world of mind, for all its embattled glitter, surrendered to the physical fact of motherhood. I gave her the baby.

It was two weeks before I saw Coretta. The day was warm; I had been circling about a hot stove for hours, canning blueberries, and had thrown off my slippers for stockinged comfort. Coretta came into the yard just as I stepped to the door.

“Don’t move,” she called, beginning to run. “Don’t move till I git your shoes! Ever’ step you take is a step in trouble.”

Aghast, I obeyed her. When the shoes were brought, and on my feet, she looked up triumphantly. “I knew you wasn’t so unbelievin’ as you let on.”

And my surprised and chastened soul agreed.

II

One summer—it was a war summer—I thought by personal effort and example to swell the national[34] harvest. I had suggested, advised, and implored. Now I would dig and plant and water, hoping that a beneficent contagion would transform my land from a wasteful reproach to a prolific blessing. My ambitious programme was interrupted midway by a distant call that could not be denied, and I had been a forgetful time away, when I realized, with aching insurrection, that Autumn must be in the Unakas. In my weariness I thought of her as a giant matron, seated amid her peaks, with hair flowing like rivers of copper, and arms stretched out with a vast tenderness to take even me to her bosom. And I fled toward her, my heart and mind exchanging jumbled murmurs of extenuation. Did not the country need all its farmers?

Coretta and her dancing youngsters did not meet me as usual under the white oak half-way up the mountain. I asked Serena, who joined me there, concerning the omission, and from her discreet evasion I surmised that a disclosure awaited me in Coretta’s trepidant breast. It was several days in fledging. I ignored the mystery, and plunged into the ardors of conservation. It became quickly evident that my example was not to be the little candle that far rebukes a wasteful world. Coretta did not come near me; and one morning,[35] when I saw Serena approaching, her radiance visible a hundred yards away, I knew that only one thing could give such a tinge of glory to her countenance. She was coming to announce one of her sudden journeys. Yes, Len had agreed for her to visit a sister who lived sixty miles distant.

“With everything to do?” I cried.

“I can work harder after I come back. A ja’nt always helps me.”

That was true. She would look younger, by ten years, on her return.

“Can Len afford it now, Serena?”

“I told him I’d git the money from you, an’ work it out when I got back. I can put in several days ’fore fodder-pullin’. I reckon you’ll be wantin’ some help by that time,” she added, with a glance at the beans and tomatoes in piles on the kitchen porch. By that time, indeed!

Her radiance began to fade. Was it possible I could hesitate?

“I told Len you’d never refused me yit.”

With the money happily clutched, she turned a shining back upon me.

I started meekly to Coretta’s. But so many evidences[36] of neglect seen on the way brought me to her in remonstrative mood.

She was very busy sewing. The children were to have new dresses. And in harvest-time!

“I thought I should find you canning, Coretta.”

“I ain’t got no heart this year,” she said.

I tried to recall some of the mottoes of the period. Every mouthful we save, and so forth. “And your brother is over there, you know.”

She dropped her head.

“I see your beans are not picked yet.”

“I jest ain’t got no heart.”

“Is that why you didn’t keep the weeds out of my garden?”

“Yes, Mis’ Dolly.”

“But I sent you the hat.”

Her head went lower. I had, while away, spent half of a much-needed day in search of a hat that would withstand mountain wear and weather, yet be pretty enough for Coretta’s taste.

“And you let the pigs get to my potato-patch.”

She turned to the machine. Well, it was my machine. I looked at the gay pieces of gingham scattered about and resolved to be drastic.

[37]“I’m going to have the machine brought home, Coretta. You won’t have any time for sewing until you get your fruit and vegetables put up.”

She was dismayed. “Oh, I’ll never git ready!”

“Ready for what?”

“To go to the mills.”

“The mills!”

“We’re all goin’ to Georgia. Sam can git three dollars a day there. Katy can keep house an’ tend to the young-uns, an’ I’m goin’ to work, too. We can make ’tween five and six dollars a day. An’ I’ve got to have the machine. How’ll I ever git their clo’es made?”

She ran on, but I shrank aside, looking about me and counting the curly heads. Our supreme judiciary had that year annulled the law of the people for the rescue of the child in the mills.

“Coretta, you can’t take these babies——”

“Oh, I knowed you’d talk that way, but please don’t, for we’ve got to go. The tickets have come, an’ we have to use ’em inside o’ two weeks. I’m jest worn out workin’ on the farm like a man, an’ in the house, too. We’ll never git a start here.”

I had no argument against the truth. Once I had thought of making Sam the legal owner of that part[38] of the farm he was supposed to till, and had consulted the village wise man about it.

“Let me see,” he said: “Sam gets the full product of his labor now, don’t he?”

“Oh, you read the book?”

“Sure, I did! And you keep the place up? Pay for fencin’, and the like?”

I admitted it.

“And the taxes?”

“Of course.”

“And he can’t make ends meet?”

“No.”

“Well, if I was Sam, I’d injunct aginst any change that ’ud saddle me with taxes and improvements.”

So I had made no change. And I had no answer for Coretta. She was still talking.

“They’ll give us a good house at the mill, an’ furnish it too.”

“If you pay three times over in instalments.”

“When I git enough for my house, I mean to move back.”

“You’ll never get it paid for, and if you leave they’ll sell it to somebody else. They count on getting pay from three families for every set of furniture they put out,” I exaggerated stoutly.

[39]“You needn’t talk like that, Mis’ Dolly,” she said, with her face all protest. “I’ve got to go.”

“Very well.” I rose, and started out. Spying the hat that had cost me so much thought, I said: “You didn’t like the hat?”

Her face became an eager pink with satisfaction.

“Shore I liked it! Everybody says it jest suits me. I want everything like that hat!”

So my success had defeated me. She had been seduced by perfection. And I reflected, as I walked home, that even if one ended in a morass, it was something to follow the twinkling of a very little star. I had seen in Coretta the flutter of a potentiality that would one day redeem life from squalor and give the planet an unquenchable glow.

The first shock over, I could not stifle the thought that the loss of Sam would be an excellent thing for me. I could replace him with a man whose ideas of farming were not inherited from his great-grandfather: some one who would not make me poorer every year, and keep my wits exercised on the problem of his family’s support. And then, like the breaking of a soft light, the thought stole upon me that I need never again be roused from morning sleep to supply Coretta’s breakfast omissions. Let her go her way. I would not[40] expostulate; I would not persuade; I would not even be sad. My pillow should be mine henceforth.

But I took care to avoid the children. This seemed necessary to the anticipated enjoyment of that pillow. I kept away from Coretta’s cabin, and when I saw bobbing curls nearing mine through the bushes, I had sudden errands elsewhere.

III

I had begun with the beans, fearing an early frost, and remembering the many summer dawns I had preciously invested in keeping the rows clean. They hung in green multiplicity, in spite of the choking weeds that had reared their heads high, unmolested by Coretta’s hoe. In fact, there was a disconcerting abundance all about me. Having set out to be an example of thrift, opportunity hung from every bush.

In this hand-to-hand engagement, I lost sight of general aims and purposes. The fourteen points were laid by for later digestion. My New York daily, ordered for filing through a momentous period, served excellently for wrapping winter stores. I did not quite cease to look at the labor horizon for epochal phenomena; but one day, after talking with a farmer on[41] the relative value of two varieties of sweet potatoes, the Texas White and Early Beauty, I found this pencilled among my farm-notes: “The Bisbee deportation is mealy for fall use, but the Soviets are the best winter keepers.” Then I began to have misgivings; but I crushed the seditious rumbling and kept on the path indicated by the Department.

Serena returned, but went at once, as I had known she must, to the fodder-pulling, and I had only an occasional friendly hand lent me for help. I had moved my typewriter into the kitchen, thinking that odd moments might go to the making of a masterpiece; but if genius gave a surviving flutter, its tremolo was drowned by the drums and tabors of conservation pomp. To Nature’s tender surprises I became callous; and for her beauty that challenged obviously, I could say with Coretta that I had no heart.

Coretta, who knew of old that I rather liked sunsets, coming one day to borrow my last machine-needle, called my attention to an aggressively colored sky by saying it was like a pile of “greenlins an’ ’maters.” (Greenlands and tomatoes—yes.) I assented so readily that Coretta flushed with the success of her venture in poetics.

[42]When she was gone, I reflectively picked a letter from my batch of half-read mail. It began: “Your last filled me with a veritable nostalgia for your mountain. The odor of ripened grains and fruits and new-cut wood overcomes me whenever I think of it. I see great white clouds rearing their domes against a deep, blue sky; and at my feet gentians star my way to you.”

I dropped the letter. Where was Autumn? How had I lost her? Like a spear-thrust the question kept recurring until the next day, when Aunt Janey Stiles came.

IV

Aunt Janey lived over the mountain on Juniper Creek, three miles west of me, and carried all her supplies on her shoulder from the village two miles to the east. On her way out she would take eggs, butter, chickens, beans—anything exchangeable at the village store—and on her way in would carry flour, coffee, sugar, salt, soda, and lard. She had done this for forty years, and looked wiry and tenacious enough to do it for forty more. She sometimes paused for half a day, and once spent the night with me; but, unlike the neighborly highlanders, would never turn a hand to help me. She watched me work as she might have[43] attended a play, and this did not make for the smoothness of my operations; but I was always glad to see Aunt Janey. Her attainments did not include a knowledge of the alphabet, but her mind sometimes revealed a glitter that made me think her brown, withered body held an old-world spirit—Greek, perhaps—a Periclesian favorite.

“I wasn’t meanin’ to stop,” she said, as her sack slid from her shoulders; “but seein’ the big kittle smokin’ in the yard, I ’lowed you’s makin’ apple butter, an’ I like to watch it poppin’. Don’t you quit stirrin’. I’ll fetch me a cheer from the kitchen. The sun’s as soft as an old blanket to-day.”

She returned with the chair, and continued: “You’ve got to watch apple butter closer’n a creepin’ baby if anybody’s goin’ to eat it.”

Did she know that I had burned up one kettleful? Though I had tried to remove all trace of it, there might be a treacherous odor in the air.

“That’s so, Aunt Janey,” I said; “but I’m going to take time to empty this anyway.” And I took up a tub of apple-parings. I could utilize those parings in three ways, and for that triple reason I wished them to disappear quickly.

[44]“They’re tellin’ all around that you’re powerful agin wastin’ stuff,” said Aunt Janey when I had returned, in a tone so intentionally colorless that I became suspicious and defensive.

“I am. And I could have carried those parings to Sam’s hogs; but Sam would be lazier to-morrow than he is to-day. And I could have made vinegar out of them; but I’d have had to take Len from the field to bring back the barrel that Serena borrowed last year. And I could make jelly. But with all those fine jelly apples lying around in bushels on the ground, why should I save parings?”

“You forgot beer,” said Aunt Janey.

“Beer?” I faltered.

I had elderberry wine, and blackberry cordial, and peaches brandied in brown sugar as dietetic allurements, but had made no provision for beer.

“Best beer you ever drunk by a hickory fire in the dead o’ Jinniwary. Stir, gal, stir!”

I stirred. “But I don’t drink beer,” said I brightening, “and nobody ought to now.”

“You don’t eat pickle either—tomato-pickle, cabbage-pickle, beet-pickle, pickylilly, onion-pickle, pickle everything. An’ you kain’t eat much p’sarves, but I noticed[45] you had ’most all sorts when I looked over your stock.”

“But the plain fruits and vegetables—everybody likes them.”

“You’re a leetle short on some of ’em, ain’t you? Had a nice lot o’ beans to spile on you, didn’t you?”

I had buried the contents of twelve large jars in the garden after dark, hoping that my influence as a conserver would not be diminished. How did she know? I looked up from my stirring and met a glance of Aspasian dubiety. She didn’t know. She had been guessing. But my start had betrayed me. As soon as I was caught, she became sincerely consoling.

“Tut, gal, beans are always hard for a beginner. It was that run you took off at night, I reckon. I knowed when I passed you’d be in the night with it; an’ I knowed they’d spile, you was so flustered. It takes a ca’m sperret to put up beans to stay. Leather breeches is safer.”

She took up her sack.

“There’s a powerful lot o’ wild grapes this year.”

“Is there?” I said, so dispiritedly that she put down her sack.

“Biggest and juiciest I ever seen. A body ought to[46] put up a lot o’ grapes. They’re so tonicky. An’ they make the nicest jelly there is for the sick. Tarty like. Apple jelly’s too tame for a stomach ’at’s off a bit. Not speakin’ agin yourn, seein’ you got such a power of it. An’ namin’ the sick, ain’t you never thought o’ puttin’ up mullin? There’s enough for Europe an’ Ameriky too in your new ground, an’ it’ll shore cure that winter cough people has—cure it right now. If you don’t mean to break off at all, if you ain’t goin’ to stop anywheres, if I’s you I’d fix up some good yarb medicines. You can send them to the soldiers. There’s shumake for a swelled throat, an’ boneset for the ager, an’ pokeweed for rheumatiz, an’ spignet for consumption, an’ a lot more I’ll show you if you go home with me some time. Things to he’p folks, ’stead of a lot of stuff to chuck up the stomach an’ make ’em sicker. S’pose you go home with me right now.”

“With so much to do?” I said. “Oh, I couldn’t!”

“There’ll always be something to do, gal. If we lived till we finished up, the world ud be full of Methuselys, an’ no room for the young folks. Nobody finishes. They got to break off.”

She shouldered her sack and started, pausing a rod away for one more barb.

[47]“You goin’ to gether yer sunflower-seed? I’ve hearn they eat ’em in Rooshia.”

Aunt Janey was right: I had the uncomfortable habit of hanging on for a finish that the gods would never uncover. And what could I do about it? There was one answer—Serena. She could break off without a qualm. She could sing the doxology while doing it, and give the Amen a sprightly reverberation.

Without daring to pause, I started off, stepping as briskly as Aunt Janey, but in the opposite direction. I would get Serena to come and clear away every sign of conservation, and I would walk on the mountains while she was doing it. If only I might find her in the disengaged period she would be sure to observe between fodder-pulling and sorghum-making!

As I neared Len’s cabin the odor of boiling syrup told me I was too late. I arrived and looked drearily on the scene. A shouting boy was busily driving the oxen that turned the cane-mill, which was spouting with juice. More juice foamed in the boiler on the furnace. Len, his seven children, three neighbors, and their children, were officiating in various or the same parts. Serena was skimming the boiling syrup. All the country round acknowledged her as the queen of “lassy-makers.”[48] She turned a heated face to me just long enough to say with the most cheerful of smiles: “They don’t give me time to make my beds.”

I was turning away, when Len stopped me.

“We’ve taken off one biler, an’ I put a few ’lasses for you in that jug. Reenie, git the jug!”

“I don’t want them,” I said, near to tears, and trapped in the vernacular.

Len was puzzled.

“But you’re welcome to the ’lasses. I’ll bring ’em up to you.”

“Not a spoonful, thank you, Len,” I called, already vanishing and hastening my steps unconsciously until I found myself running—running up-hill. I did not turn on the trail toward home, but went out to Three Pine Point, where one could see the river miles away, smooth, effortless, winding to some hidden land, safe and far from the malefic spirit of industry. I dropped to the brown pine-needles. Quickly the woods set their magical currents flowing, and that sensation as of smiling veins crept over me.

Then I saw Nellie Ludd, or part of her. One could get only partial glimpses of Nellie in the woods—an upreaching arm, a strip of skirt, the sheen of her head.[49] No, she was not golden-haired, or green-kirtled, and she did not lead the fancy back to Tempe and the vales of Arcady. Her dress was dingy brown in hue, and of cloth woven on her mother’s loom, but fashioned by herself as fittingly to her grace as fur to the marten or feathers to the swallow. Her eyes, if ever you met them, you would find to be honey-brown, like the first falling leaves. Her hair was the color of darkly shining smoke, and seemingly as loath to stay put. And the world she led the fancy to was a world which none of us have seen, but to which all secretly intend to go; a world whose picture every man holds in his heart, but will not look at in the light lest his neighbor come upon him suddenly. For, though we may have learned to love our neighbor as ourself, we have not yet learned to trust him.

It was a gracious chance that brought me to the Point just as Nellie was leaving it. “Breaking off” was no longer difficult. That sputtering kettle—how remote and absurd it seemed!

Descending late in the afternoon, my hills seemed to shine upon me, reflecting happy restoration. I passed by the pasture ridge where the silence was tapped by the falling chestnuts, and felt no impulse to[50] defeat the squirrels and gophers of their prize. A bellwood crowned with purple bushels of grapes stirred no acquisitive instinct. I went calmly through the orchard, picking my way over the fallen fruit that no hand would rescue from decay; looked unwistfully at the pumpkins, cushaws, and “candy-roasters” that would feed nothing but the frost; and from my cabin step smiled at the flaming wing of a young maple that was like a vivid aspiration airily detaching itself from the clutch of utility and the lures of bounty.

When I went in, Serena herself could not have cast a more contented eye about my kitchen, turbulent with unfinished tasks. The autumnal spirit had effectually bathed my lacerations. The box on which conveniently rested my little typewriter was invitingly near. I sank, a willing non-resistant, into a chair, and my hands mechanically sought the keys of the machine. For a few minutes I seemed to be having a pleasant time, with consciousness unaroused to the issue. Then I took out the sheet and read:

“This is how they feel,” thought I, as I drowned in placidity without a bubble struggling overhead. “This is why protracted meetings are held in autumn. Ah, I will call my poem ‘The Season of Piety.’”

I began to feel like the good wife of a deacon. Nay, I was the deacon himself, and blushed in his elderly trousers.

With her usual ghostly suddenness, Katy appeared.

“Mommy’s got the milkweed in her breast agin, an’ the baby’s all broke out; she’s afraid it’s the measles an’ we’ll all take ’em.”

I rose. Certainly they would all take them. The season of piety was ended.

[52]Both cases were happily light, and when Coretta looked up from her pillow and said, “We ain’t goin’ away. I’ve been thinkin’ what it ud be like to git sick away from home an’ everybody,” I did not feel that a slight reproof would be cruel.

“Stay? With nothing laid in for the winter?”

“But you’ve put up such a lot.”

My heart, which had softened at sight of her young cheek tracked red with the whimsical fever, felt a stony relapse.

“You know, Coretta, I have had to consider other plans.”

She was terrified, but unbelieving. The heavens could not really fall.

“You wouldn’t let us stay?”

“On one condition, perhaps.”

Her face shone with relief. She had met conditions before, and melted through them.

“What’s that, Mis’ Dolly?”

“You’ll never wake me up again to borrow something for breakfast?”

“No, I shore won’t.”

“Cross your heart?”

“Cross my heart.”

[53]“Swear to God?”

“Swear to God.”

I looked down at the lovely face, contented with the thought of being sick and at home, and my smile undid me.

“Swear to God,” she repeated feebly, “unless, o’ course, we’re jest smack out o’ stuff.”

I

SHE was not an unalloyed joy that first year of our friendship. Her imperturbability did not always seem as a restful evergreen wall, in whose shadow I could sit until perplexities lost their heat. At times it was a “no thoroughfare” with the meadows of desire gleaming beyond.

I called one day and found her churning by the spring, a pleasing picture, too, under the trees. Her rounded, youngish figure gave no hint of her seven-fold maternity, and however ragged the rest of her family might be, she always magically managed to be neat. She was singing leisurely and churning in rhythm—a most undomestic performance; but my eye was not Mrs. Poyser’s, and if it had been, it could not have embarrassed Serena.

“I’m takin’ my time,” she said, “fer this is my last churnin’ fer a good spell, I reckon.”

[55]“Your last? Why, is the cow sick?—dead? And you have just bought her?” I asked, my concern sharpened perhaps by the thought of a very inconvenient loan that had gone abysmally into her purchase.

“She got so many sweet apples last night she’s foundered herself—clear light ruined, granpap says.”

“Surely you didn’t turn her into the orchard?”

“Why, a few apples wouldn’t hurt her. But there was a whole passel on the ground that I couldn’t see fer the weeds an’ briers. An’ she got ’em.”

“But I lent Ben my scythe to cut those briers.”

“His poppie needed him in the field, an’ he couldn’t git the time right off. When he did, we couldn’t find that scythe nowheres. I hate it about the cow,” she assured me cheerfully; “but it had to happen, I reckon.”

I looked about me. At that moment I could see nothing artistic in Ned’s half of a shirt looped about one shoulder; there was only pathos in little Lissie’s naked, buttonless back; and I could not placidly think of Len, as I had passed him a few moments before, showing ankles as sockless as ever was Simpson. But perhaps it was the thought of that loan, with its indefinite time extension, that made me wish to set a shade of anxiety on Serena’s unclouded brow. At any rate, I[56] began to sermonize on the merits of discontent and the virtue of ambition.

Her face brimmed with astonishment that finally broke into speech: “But I’ve four beds, and bread on my table! What more do I want?”

What more could I say? So man, in some grateful season, may look up to the seated gods: “I’ve four religions and a bumper crop; what more do I want?” And what can the seated gods do but smile patiently?

I retreated, seeking my usual solace after all defeats—the unreproachful woods. Near a small clearing, in the quiet shield of some bushes, I overheard the latter end of an argument. One voice was Len’s, the other a neighbor’s.

“A tater’s a tater, anyhow,” the neighbor was affirming.

“You might as well say a woman’s a woman,” came the retort from Len.

“Well, ain’t she?” said the neighbor.

“Lord, no!” said Len, with contempt freely flowing.

“Oh, course there ain’t nobody like Reenie. Pity the Lord didn’t think o’ makin’ her fer Adam. We’d all be in Eden yit, loaferin’ by the river of life, ’stead o’ diggin’ taters out o’ rocks.”

[57]“When you’re spilin’ to talk about a woman, Dan Goforth, you needn’t travel furder’n your own doorstep,” answered Len, his voice, like drawling fire, creeping on without pause. “Reenie mayn’t be stout enough to wear out a hoe-handle, but she’s never jowerin’ when I come in, ’n’ there’s always a clean place in the house big enough fer me to set my cheer down in, I ain’t layin’ up much more’n debts, but they’s easy carried when nobody’s naggin’ yer strenth out, a woman’s smile ain’t no oak-tree in harvest-time, but it’s jest as good to set by, my coat’s raggeder’n yourn, but I’d ruther Reenie ’ud lose her needle onct on a while than her temper all the time, neighbors can go by my house day or night an’ never hear no fire aspittin’, which kain’t be said o’ yourn, an’ you scootle from here, Dan Goforth; don’t you tech nary nuther tater in this patch!”

The neighbor scootled, backward it seemed, to the road. I took the trouble myself to go down to a trail and come up casually from another direction, in full view of Len. He was working mightily, digging up a hill with two strokes of his hoe.

“Dan gone?” I asked indifferently.

“Ay, he lit out. Old Nance wanted him, I reckon.[58] He dassen’t stay a minute after she fixes the clock fer him.”

“That’s a kind of trouble you and Reenie don’t have.”

“You’ve said it now. Reenie don’t keep no time on me. If I want to drap over the mountain to see if I can git old man Diller’s mule fer extry ploughin’, ’cause the crab-grass is elbowin’ along the ground ’most rootin’ up my corn, an’ tells Reenie I’ll be back by twelve, an’ I find the old man spilin’ a ox-yoke, an’ I shapes it up fer him an’ stays to dinner, an’ comes back by the meetin’-house where they’s puttin’ in the new windows an’ not gittin’ ’em plumb, an’ I stays till sundown settin’ ’em in so they won’t make everybody ’at passes think he’s gone cross-eyed, an’ I remembers we’ve got no coffee, so I slips round by the store an’ stays till dark talkin’ with Tim Frizbie about the best way to grow fat corn an’ lean cobs, ’cause I know you want me to git all the new idies I can, an’ when I strikes Granny Groom’s place she’s at the gate wantin’ me to talk to her Lizy’s girl who’s fixin’ to leave an’ strollop over the country, an’ I says to that girl when you’re at home you’re eatin’ welcome bread, and when you’re out in the world you don’t know what you’re[59] eatin’, an’ a lot more that was aplenty, an’s I pass Mis’ Woodlow’s, who’s got a powerful bad risin’, I thinks I’ll stop an’ see if her jaw’s broke yit, an’ I finds ol’ Jim so out o’ heart about her, I stays to help him put over a couple o’ hours, an’ when I walks in home about midnight, Reenie she’s gone to bed sensible, an’ says there’s bread an’ beans in the cupboard. Now that’s what I call some comfort to a man, to know he can take what happens ’long the road, an’ know his wife ain’t frettin’ till her stomach’s gone an’ she’s as lean as a splinter like ol’ Nance Goforth.”

“You nearly got what you wanted when you married, didn’t you, Len?”

“Well, I reckon, but I didn’t know it from the start-off. Reenie was powerful to be agoin’, an’ I couldn’t git used to draggin’ off every Saturday night to stay till Monday mornin’. But I felt different about it after I’d nearly killed her an’ the baby.”

“Gracious, was it that bad?”

“I didn’t do it a-purpose. It was back in Madison, where I married Reenie, an’ jest two days ’fore Christmas. She’d put in to go to her pap’s, an’ I thought I’d git up a nice lot o’ wood, make me a big fire, an’ have my Christmas at home. I’d told her I thought she’d[60] feel different about stayin’ in her own house after she’d got a little ’un in it, but she ’lowed her sight an’ hearin’ was as good as ’fore she had a baby, an’ she could enjoy usin’ ’em just the same. So I got out by good daylight an’ went up the hill above the house to cut a big, dead chestnut that I was tired o’ lookin’ at; then I means to slip over to By Kenny’s an’ git him an’ his wife to come over fer Christmas ’fore Reenie got away. There’d come a skift o’ snow a few days back, bare enough to make the ground gray, then a little warm rain, an’ on top o’ that a freeze that stung yer eyeballs, an’ you never saw anything as slick as that hill was ’fore the sun riz that mornin’. When my chestnut fell she crackled off every limb agin the hard ground clean as a sled-runner. Boys, if she didn’t shoot off, makin’ smoke out o’ that frost! I saw she was pinted fer our little shack an’ I tries to yell to Reenie to git out, but I never made more’n a peep like a chicken. When the log struck, it shaved by the corner o’ the house an’ took the chimbly. Boys, it made bug-bites o’ that chimbly! I knowed Reenie was settin’ by the fire with the baby, an’ I’d killed ’em both. I felt ’most froze to the ground, an’ I thought if Reenie was only livin’ I’d let her do her own ’druthers the rest of[61] her days. An’ when I got down to the house an’ sees her an’ the baby not hurt, with the rocks all piled around ’em, I says to myself I ain’t ever goin’ back on what I promised her unbeknownst. An’ I ain’t.”

“What was she doing?”

“She was jest settin’ there.”

“What did she say?”

“She ’lowed we’d got to go to pap’s fer Christmas. An’ we did.”

II

I stood on the doorstep one morning, balancing destiny. Should I take the downward road to the post-office, and thereby connect with the distant maelstrom called progress, or should I choose the upward trail to the still crests of content?

Serena, happening designedly by, saved me the wrench of decision.

“If you want any strawberries this year,” she said, “you’d better go before the Mossy Creek folks have rumpaged over Old Cloud field. They slip up from the west side an’ don’t leave a berry for manners. I’m goin’ now. I always go once.”

I provided buckets and cups, as expected, and we[62] started. The high ridge field where the berries rambled had its name from an Indian, Old Cloud, who, it was said, had lived there behind the cloud that always rested on the ridge before so many of the peaks had been stripped of their pine and poplar and balsam that had held the clouds entangled and the sky so close. After it had passed to the settlers it had taken forty years of ignorant and monotonous tillage to reduce the rich soil to a half-wild pasture enjoying the freedom of exhaustion.

I had been under roof for three days, and the spring air produced the usual inebriation. Several times I left Serena far behind, but she always caught up, and we reached the top of the ridge together. Here, panting, I dropped to a bed of cinquefoil, while Serena stood unheated and smiling.

“Did you ever run, Serena?” I asked.

“I always take the gait I can keep,” she said, her glance already roving the ground for berries. “The other side o’ that gully’s red with ’em. We’ve got ahead o’ Mossy Creek this time.”

I was looking at the world which the lifted horizon had given me. North by east the Great Smokies drew their lilac-blue veil over impenetrable wildernesses of[63] laurel. I could see the round dome of Clingman, and turned quickly from the onslaught of a remembered day when my body was wrapped in the odor of its fir-trees and its heathery mosses cooled my feet. South lay the Nantahalas, source of clear waters. West—but what were names before that array of peaks like characters in creation’s alphabet, whose key was kept in another star? They rose in every form, curved, swaying, rounded, a loaf, a spear, shadowed and unshadowed, their splotches of green, gold, and hemlock-black flowing into blue, where distance balked the eyes and imagination stepped the crests alone. It seemed easier to follow than to stay behind with feet clinging to earth. Affinity lay with the sky.

Serena was steadily picking berries.

“But, Serena,” I called, “just see!”

“I come here once a year,” she said, standing up, “an’ I never take my look till I’ve filled my bucket.” And she was on her knees again.

Rebuke number two, I thought, and set to work. Avoiding Serena’s discovered province, I crossed to the next dip of the slope, and there the field was covered with morning-glories, still radiantly open. All hues were there, from the purple of night to snow without tint,[64] and the clusters of berries under them seemed in sanctuary. I plucked them away, feeling like a ravager of shrines. A breeze flowed over the field, and every color quivered dazzlingly. It was plainly a protest. I gave up my robberies and passed to another part of the field, where rapine seemed legitimate. Here the rank grass of yesteryears was deeply rooted and matted, and I sank adventurously in the tripping tangles. The slope was steeper, too, and I slipped, slid, and stumbled from patch to patch before theft was well begun, losing half my captures in the struggle. It was tinglingly arduous, however, and I continued a happy game of profit and loss until I scrambled from a gully into whose depths I had followed my rolling bucket, and confronted Serena. She looked as if she had coolly swum the lake of color behind us; but her fresh apron was unstained, while mine was a splash of coral. I advised her to return. The picking was better above.

“I know it is,” she answered, “but them mornin’-glories keep me fluttery, lookin’ at me all the time. I got to fill my bucket first. I promised Len all he could eat in a pie, an’ it takes a big one fer ten of us. Granpap’s stayin’ at our house now. But we’d better move furder over, out o’ this soddy grass. They’s rattlers here.”

[65]With her word we saw him. He was partly coiled not more than three feet from Serena’s undulating gingham. The black diamonds shining on his amber skin assured me of his variety—the kind that, as natives tell me, Indians will not kill because “he gives a man a chance.” Certainly he was giving us a chance. His eyes seemed half-shut, but not sleepy, as if he did not need his full power of vision to comprehend our insignificant world. His poised head was motionless. Only his tail quivered, not yet erected for his gentlemanly warning. He glistened with newness, and was evidently a youngish snake, with dreams of knighthood still unbattered. His parents had bequeathed him none of the hatred that belongs to a defeated race. Serena seemed as motionless as he. I took her hand, drawing her a few paces back, and we stood watching. Sir Rattle slowly uncoiled, quivered throughout his variegated length, and moved indifferently from us, disappearing in the clumps of grass.

“Well,” said a pale Serena, “I feel like I did after I was baptized. The preacher, he was old man Diller, put his hand on my shoulder an’ said, ‘Love the Lord, my sister’; but I was so full o’ lovin’ everything and everybody I couldn’t think about the Lord. Do you[66] reckon snakes have brothers and sisters that they know about? Think o’ that feller throwin’ away sech a chance to git even!” She could not stop talking any more than I could begin. “Let’s get to the top o’ the field where it’s cooler. It’s got so hot I’m afeard a shower’s comin’.”

By the time we reached the top we knew that the shower was to be a heavy one. There was a cave over the ridge on the Mossy Creek side, where we could take shelter. But we would wait a little for what the heavens could show us. The doors of the sky were to be thrown open. There would be no reservation of magic. Earth knew it by the quick wind that pressed every grass-blade to the ground and made the strawberry-blossoms look like little white, whipped flags; and by the grove of tall, young poplars that bent like maidens, their interlaced branches resting, a silver roof, on their curved shoulders. The lightning rippled, and earth was a golden rose spreading her mountain petals. It was the signal for the assembling of the dragons. They came swelling from the west, pulling one great paw after another from behind the walls of distance and puffing black breath half across the sky. The lightning again, and this time earth was a golden butterfly under the[67] paws of the dragons. Then the conflict began, the beasts mingled, and the sound of their bones massively breaking struck and shook the ground under our feet. A gray sea rose vertically on the horizon and marched upon us. We fled, blinded, to the cave, tearing off our aprons to protect our buckets.

Even here Serena did not pant or gasp.

“How dry it is!” she said, examining the berries. “They’re not hurt. My, you didn’t cap yourn!”

“But I’d never fill my bucket if I stopped to cap them.”

“You don’t stop. You leave the cap on the vine. It’s as quick done as not. Now it’ll take you longer to cap than it did to pick. O’ course you didn’t know. Some folks knows one thing and some another,” she added kindly. “Ain’t it a thick rain? But we got a good place. Some say this cave’s ha’nted, an’ won’t come anigh it. Uncle Sim Goforth died here, but he was a good man an’ wouldn’t harm nobody if he did come back.”

“How did he happen to die here?”

“They killed him. It was in time o’ the war way back. Folks are better now. They say they’re doin’ awful over the sea, but they’d never be so mean as[68] they were to Uncle Sim. He hid here, an’ brought his wife an’ childern. But they found him.”

“Was he a Unionist or Confederate?”

“I never could make out ’tween ’em. The Unionists, they wanted to free the black people, but the Unionists here in the mountains didn’t favor ’em. So I never could git it clear. Anyway, Uncle Sim was a good man. I’ve heard granpap tell about him many a night. The men, when they found him, cut down a tree an’ hewed out some puncheons fer a coffin, an’ made Uncle Sim sit on it an’ play his fiddle. He could play the best that ever was, an’ they say he played up fine that night. They kept him playin’ till near daylight; then they shot him, an’ his wife an’ childern lookin’ right on. I used to cry, hearin’ granpap tell it, out in Madison, but it don’t make me feel bad now, ’cause I know folks are better than what they were them days.”

Such naïveté was possible in the period of our national innocence, before “the boys” began to drift back home with certain truths on their tongue.

“Looky! the rain’s stopped quicker’n it come. We can go right back, fer the ridge dreens off soon as the water strikes it. Ain’t it cool, an’ the air like gold!”

She tried to catch a handful of it to show me its[69] quality. We went back, and in a minute, as she said, our buckets were full, though we lost a few seconds while I learned of Serena how to cap and pick at the same time. Then we started along the ridge to the gap where we had entered the field. Walking back, I lingered to pluck a giant white trillium that shone from the fringe of wood. No loss to the forest; there were thousands more lighting up the cove farther down. As I came out of the wood, the air over the field seemed visibly to precipitate some of its gold. A swarm—no, the word is too heavy for anything so delicately bodied—a band of butterflies, moving in a slow wave over the ridge, had at that moment broken into myriads of distinct flakes—a shattered blaze. Nearer, their gold became tinily specked, and showed flashes and fringes of pearl; the silver-bordered fritillaries, perhaps, or some kin of theirs. I started to call Serena, but paused softly, for she was gazing over the mountains, having her “look.” I was left to the butterflies. Were they as unconscious of their grubby origin as they seemed, holding no memory of a life bounded by a sassafras twig, or of the cove behind us where a violet leaf may have been both food and heaven?

The butterfly ought to be the symbol on every[70] Christian’s flag. It is the perfect pietist. Its confidence in the Infinite is as patent as its wings. Serena, amid that airy fluttering, seemed, in her own shining way, the sovereign of the band. Deep as piety was her trust in the morrow. Food would come to her, raiment would be found.

The butterflies floated past, becoming a dim, coppery tremble in the shade of the valley. Serena was still gazing in the distance. At last I said that we must be going; Len was expecting his pie.

“These berries ain’t goin’ into a pie,” she answered. “They’re worth more than a pie’ll come to. They’re goin’ into jam.”

Was Serena taking forethought? No; I could trust her lighted face and wet eyes. She was still piously improvident.

III

Once more it was May, and early morning. I was out before breakfast, gathering sticks for my hearth-fire. There had been showers in the night, and an inch of new grass trembled over the ground. I tugged at a pile of brush made by my oldest apple-tree, which had fallen in a winter storm. The limbs, and even the million[71] twigs, were all gray and green and slate-blue in their wrappings of moss, and in among them, like a burning heart, sat a cardinal.

“You ought to be singing from a tree-top,” said I.

“But I’m getting my breakfast. This is the cafeteria of Wingland. Are you going to demolish it?”

“Indeed, no!” I answered, picking up some peripheral sticks and leaving his stronghold unshaken.

To thank me, he hopped to the top of the pile, and, right in my face, sang his most shamelessly seductive song. Serena put her head out of the kitchen window to listen. He paused, and deserted me for a tree-top. But sweet was air and earth. Delight summoned an antithesis. I thought of forgotten pains, some monitions of the night before. Suppose I were to die, and never again stand in that dip of the mountain when it was a brimming bowl of springtime? Perhaps there was no other planet where I might gather in my arms such beautiful gray and green and slate-blue fagots. I turned to go in, and met rebuke in the eyes of my Chicago guest.

“I wonder if you are going to tell me that your woman does not know how to pick up brush.”

My woman! If Serena heard that!

[72]“And after last night! Did you take your medicine?”

Verily I had. She was unconvinced.

“The bottle seems full.”

“Oh, I took it from the cardinal’s throat,” said I, surrendering.

She laughed, for there was sweetness in her, and we went in to breakfast. I had prepared it before going out, leaving Serena on guard. She was with me, not so much for the help she gave, as to save the feelings of my guest.

“Do you have much of this soggy weather?” said Chicago, airily tolerant, as we took our seats.

“Why, I’ve never noticed.”

“We shore do,” said Serena, with gloom that was ludicrously alien to her face. “It’s li’ble to rain now fer two weeks steady.”

“But I had decided not to go home to-day,” cried the guest, almost resentfully declining the hot biscuit Serena urged upon her. “Two weeks! Do you mean two weeks?”

“I’ve known it to hang wet fer a month.”

“Why, Serena!”

“Showery like. You know it’s so, Mis’ Dolly.”

“Well, we’re going to have perfect weather now.[73] Tender, bright, with maybe a bit of dew in the air. Stay, and I promise you a miracle among springs.” I held up a glass of strawberry jam. “The kind of a spring that produced this.” And I offered her the food of heaven.

“Thanks, but I’ve cut out sweets.”

I caught my breath, and looked at Serena, in whose eye sparkled a triumph that said plainly: “Now you see!”

My guest did not notice that I sat dumb, bewildered, bereft. She was talking.

“No, I think, my dear, that if you wish to memorialize a passing folk, you will find material more worthy of your pen in the twilight of the bourgeoisie. They have lived in the main line of evolution, and will leave their touch on the race. Faint it may be, but indelible. In art, in literature, perhaps in certain predilections of character and temperament, it will be possible to trace them. These mountain people will not have even a fossilized survival. They live in a cul-de-sac, a pocket of society, so to speak. Your mind has an epic cast, and will never fit into its limits.”

There was more; then Serena’s voice glided into the monologue.

[74]“Mis’ Dolly, I don’t like to tell you, seein’ you were ailin’ last night, but Johnny Diller went by here this mornin’, an’ he said Mis’ Ludd’s little Marthy wasn’t expected to keep breath in her till sundown.”

“I must go,” said I, getting up.

“I don’t approve of it,” said my friend.

“I must. You don’t understand——”

“Please don’t tell me that again, my dear.”

“But you don’t!”

“Your hat’s on the porch,” said Serena.

“You can’t leave to-day, Marie, because I haven’t time to tell you good-by now,” I said, and hurried away.

Home again at ten in the evening, I found Serena sitting by a bright kitchen fire humming “Old Time Religion.”

“Is Miss Brooks asleep?” I asked.

“I reckon she is. She said she was goin’ to take a sleeper.”

“She’s gone?”

Serena’s affirming nod did not interrupt her tune.

“Please stop that humming, Serena, and tell me what you did the minute my back was turned.”

“Nothin’ at all. That was the matter, maybe.”

[75]“You didn’t do anything for her?”

“I fixed her a snack to eat on the train.”

“Oh, thank you! It was a nice one, wasn’t it?”

“I give her some pickled beets, an’ turnip-kraut, an’ ’tater salad made with that blackberry vinegar.”

I dizzily recalled a remark of Len’s. “That blackberry vinegar ’ud pickle a horseshoe.”

“Serena,” I began faintly.

She had crossed to a shelf and was looking fondly at a jar of strawberry jam.

My voice died away; I could not reproach her.

Sweets, my friend had called it. And, my God, it was May morning on a mountain-top!

I

HE was passing my cabin late at night, and unexpectedly found me sitting on the moonlit doorstep. I was not longing for conversation, but Sam’s voice, as mere sound, was no more interruptive than purling water or a cajoling minor wind. It mellowed its way over uncouth words in a manner that seemed to be its owner’s gentle amends for using anything in your presence so angular and knotty as the language of man.

“I thought,” he said, “maybe I could ketch that coon what uses over in Grape Vine Cove; but my dog Buck got onter a fox-trail, an’ coon wasn’t nothin’ to him after that. I knowed that fox ’ud take him to Katter Knob, so I let him go on by hissef an’ I shammucked along toward home.”

There was no hint in his easy air that he had broken my rule against hunting in springtime. Any Merlin would violate any rule occasionally, as a matter of self-respect; and of all the Merlins, Sam was the least[77] capable of inferior misgiving. His whole mental interior was as bare of obeisance as an iceberg of things that grow.

“I could ’a’ chivvied that fox out if I had gone after him; but if a man don’t sleep he’s weak at the plough-handles. Yore work first, Mis’ Dolly.”

But a falling moon was marking 1 A. M.

“That fox-hide would ’a’ brought me four dollars, an’ Krettie keeps pesterin’ me fer a pair o’ shoes. My head might as well be under the forestick. But she’ll jest have to make out.”

This was clearly an impeachment, but I made no defense, and he passed to a topic with, presumably, no implications.

“Yer company comin’ to-morr’, I reckon?”

“Yes, Sam.”

“So ye’re enjoyin’ yersef to-night.”

I opposed another silence to his deduction.

“That makes me think now—’f I have to meet the train an’ haul ’em up, I kain’t plough to-morr’.”

“But, Sam, you don’t have to go till four o’clock.”

“Ay, but they’s a little work to do on my wagon ’fore I go down. I kain’t take any resk with friends o’ yorn.”

[78]I could always get interested in the way that Sam made use of yer, yore, yorn, you, and ye. Yorn, with an inflection that enlarged the n, was an avowal of separateness as severing as the water that washed Pilate’s hands.

Having arranged for his morning sleep, he merged away, pausing on an edge of moonlight to say: “Ain’t the whipper-wills awhirlin’ to-night? Looks like they ain’t goin’ to sleep at all.”

“Whirling, Sam?”

“Ay, you know ever’ time they say whipper-will they whirl round on the limb. Whirl thersevs right round.”

“What a foolish habit!”

“Well, the whipper-will ain’t a much smart bird.”

He flowed into the shadows and left me to ponder my newly acquired bird-lore. It was the kind of information which Sam frequently distributed, and with no remonstrance from me. He was too sure and final; and withal too quieting to the intellect. One doesn’t demur to the south wind, or try to put it right.

“I reckon I ain’t a much smart bird,” I said, thinking many times I had stepped aside for the unstemmed passage of Sam’s incredibly liquid voice.

The next day brought my friend, Lucie Harvey, and[79] her husband, whom I knew only through her raptures. They were happy additions to my tiny camp, and at the end of their three days’ visit romantically voted to make a bed in the barn and release my room, thus making an indefinite stay possible. We were verbally completing the plan when Sam appeared.

“I knocked off ploughin’.” he said, “to take yer trunks down.”

“Oh, we’re not going,” said Lucie.

“When I brought ye up, ye ’lowed ye’d be ready to go back this evenin’ an’ I’ve come fer ye.”

“Why, we’ll let you know when we want to go.”

“I’ve come out o’ the plough to take ye.”

“Sorry, my man,” said the bridegroom, “but it’s your mistake. We’ll let you know when we’re ready for you.”

“You goin’ to live in the barn?”

“There!” said Lucie, “he knew all about it!”

They turned away for the walk which Sam had momentarily delayed. I heard Lucie say, “How did he know?” and I might have followed to tell her that Sam always knew; but at that moment I was struck motionless by hearing Ned Harvey drop the word “Imbecile!”

[80]Sam, very likely, did not know its meaning, but the tone as it floated back was unmistakable.

“I’m sorry you knocked off ploughing, Sam,” I said, my eyes slinking.

“Oh, I left Ben at it. Len said he could spare him.”

“That means Len is doing double work, so Ben can help you out.”

“He’p me out? They’s yore friends, not mine. I like Mis’ Harvey though. She’s mighty nice.”

“Mr. Harvey, too.”

He looked toward Harvey, who was wearing a hunting-jacket very handsomely.

“Well, as to that, he wears a fine huntin’-jacket, but I’ve seen folks wearin’ good clo’s that had to hunt up the nest-eggs to fry if company dropped by to dinner.”

A pensive shade came into his eyes as they continued to follow the vanishing figure of Harvey. “I always thought I’d like a huntin’-jacket,” he said; and as he walked away, something in his bearing told me that he was imaginarily clothed as his heart desired. There had been no resentment in his voice. Perhaps he had taken no notice of that terrible word. And gradually I forgot that it had been uttered.

[81]

II

A few days later Sam passed through my yard, where Ned Harvey was warmly engaged in persuading me not to have my crimson clover turned under, but to hog it off. He had carried some of my farm books to the barn, and the phrase “hog it off” had him in its power. Lucie’s eyes approved shiningly.

“And you know, Dolly,” she said, “after all, Ned is a realtor, not a farmer.”

“But, Mis’ Harvey,” said Sam, “we don’t fatten hogs round here in the spring; an’ clover makes soft meat—sorter like bear’s meat. An’ that makes me think now—hain’t ye heard about that bear runnin’ on Pitcher Mountain? Hit come down from Smoky.”

“You’ve bears here?” asked Ned, turning a captured ear.

“Oh, ay, they’s a few left. They come down from the bear-ground on Smoky oncet in a while. It’s only eleven miles straight through to Pitcher. If I can git Tom Bowles to plough fer me, I’m goin’ to have a look at this feller.”

He passed on, leaving Harvey intently gazing at nothing. His bride caught his arm.

[82]“You are not going, Ned?”

“Not without your consent, Lucie. It’s an opportunity, of course. I have never shot a bear.”

His thoughts wandered. We could see that he was already back at home telling the boys about it.

“If only you would be very, very careful, dear!”

“Oh, that’s all right, thank you, darling!” And he set off after Sam. When he returned, he was enthusiastic about his guide. “I like him! He hung back at first, and I finally found that Bowles wouldn’t plough for him without the money; so I paid him ten dollars in advance. That’s all he is charging to take me. We shall be gone only three or four days. He knows all the trails; and we can get our bacon and meal at a little store on Siler’s creek, and not have to carry a heavy pack from here.”

“If only you had an intelligent companion!” said Lucie with foreboding.

“Oh, Sam’s a fine fellow! And he knows a lot of old songs. You know I want to make a collection.”

“Do get ‘London City’ for me if you can,” I said. “He will never give me more than a snatch of it.

[83]I am sure it has been sung under the very bonnet of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, ‘City’ not ‘town’; ‘merchant,’ not ‘soldier’ or ‘sailor.’”

“It’s a link,” said Harvey. “Think of it! This remote spot where nothing ever happened, and old London! I’ll get it for you.”

I wasn’t hopeful, knowing Sam’s disposition to sing only at his own instance; but I could not discourage any one so gallantly sure as Harvey.

The next twenty-four hours were spent by the bear-hunters in making ready. I asked Sam where he intended to get a bear-dog, and was surprised to hear that they had decided not to take one.

“One o’ them big dogs’ll eat three men’s rations,” said Sam. “We’d have to carry a heap more stuff, an’ pay five dollars fer the hire of him, too. Anyways, if we took a bear-dog, he’d git all the credit for the killin’, when like as not he’d be back in camp eatin’ up our victuals.”

“It’s settled, Sam,” said Harvey. “A gun’s the clean thing.”

“I knowed you wanted to shoot bear, not claw ’em out like Jed Weaver does.”

As preparations went on, Lucie shrank to a wife’s[84] place in the background; but near the starting-moment she slipped a pair of her husband’s best silk socks into his kit.

“They will rest your feet, dear,” she said, suppressing a crinkly catch in her voice.

The kiss she received was absent-mindedly given; but when a hundred yards on his way, Harvey turned thoughtfully and waved a marital hand broadly rearward.

The fifth morning thereafter, Lucie, who had been on watch at the curve of the road, came running in.

“Dolly,” she cried, “I thought tramps never got up here!”

“They don’t,” I said.

“But look!”

She turned again and gazed out; then stood framed in eerie silence. I saw, and she saw, that it was Ned. He came up with an unrelaxing smile, but looking as if he had not slept since his departure. Certainly he had not shaved, though I had seen him carefully pack his safety razor, and remembered his remark that even in the woods a man could be a gentleman. He had on Sam’s ragged coat, and under it we had glimpses of Sam’s still more ragged, and once blue, cotton shirt. His head was bare.

[85]Lucie was white-lipped and wide-eyed. “Did the bears—” she began.

“No, Lucie, the bears did not get me,” he said; and preceded her to the barn.

Two or three hours afterward she returned to tell me that Ned was sleeping and did not wish to be awakened until next morning. He appeared at breakfast, neat and smiling, but his face was still marked by experience.

“He has suffered,” said Lucie, helping his plate with tender liberality.

“Oh, it was nothing,” said Ned. “Sam took a bad cold, and seemed threatened with pneumonia. As my clothes were warmer than his, of course I exchanged with him.”

“Your best silk socks, too?” cried Lucie.

“Certainly. He had none.”

Then he told us about it. “We climbed steadily, and the second day reached a height of four thousand feet or more. There was a fierce wind, and it was bitter cold. We had to keep a fire at night, and as Sam was not well, I attended to that, which cut out my sleep. Don’t moan like that, please, dearest. I am glad I went. I feel better prepared for many things. I really do.”

[86]And truly he did seem to have added to his stature. He had been very likable; but now I began to admire him.

“I didn’t get a bear, but I made some notes. You know I have always been interested in forest life. I ought to have been a woodsman.”

“I hope you won’t have to limp very long,” said Lucie; and a slight silence followed.

“Did Sam sing for you?” she continued, her usual discernment failing.

“Yes—a little—one song.”

“Oh, I hope you took it down!”

“It was very cold, Lucie. I did no unnecessary writing.”

“But you remember it?”

“I shall never forget it,” he said, and, to my ears, his voice held a slight acridity. I was glad when Lucie fell into her sweetest manner and they went off together.

As I moved about the deserted table, I noticed a note-book lying on the floor. The floor being frequently a repository for my own note-books, I picked this one up, to see what subject had lost my devotion. On the first page I read: “Night of the 15th: very cold; no sleep. 16th: very cold; no sleep. 17th: very cold; no[87] sleep.” The rest was blank. I laid the book on the floor, a little under Harvey’s chair. Then I went to find Sam.

III

“How is your cold, Sam?” I asked.

He laughed his most purling-water laugh. “I cured that when I was crossin’ Siler’s creek comin’ home. There’s lots o’ sickness’ll leave you when you cross water. Hit takes right off.”

“Sam, do you know that Tom Bowles has not been near the place? There isn’t a furrow ploughed in that field.”

“Ay, I know it. I was so busy the day we went off, I forgot to tell you about that. Mr. Harvey bein’ yore friend, I wanted to do ever’thing I could to he’p him; but I said to myself that what you wanted ought to come first, so I went to that field an’ I looked all over it. I went cleverly all over it. An’ I saw ’twa’n’t no use to throw away ten dollars on Tom Bowles, fer that ground wouldn’t bring corn. Yer best chance is to wait until fall, an’ put it in rye. It’ll shore bring rye.”

“But when I wanted you to put it in rye last fall, you said I ought to wait until spring and plant corn.”

[88]“I ain’t fergittin’ that, but last fall I hadn’t gone well over it like I ought.”

“It’s not too late for corn now, if you’ll set to ploughing at once.”

“I’d do it, Mis’ Dolly; I’d be willin’ to do jest as you say, even agin yer own intrust, which is what corn ’ud be in that ground; but I’ve got to go to Carson to-morr’ an’ git my front tooth put in. It’s been out six months now, an’ I’ve got the money in my pocket.”

“Couldn’t you wait a few days, Sam?”

“Why, I put it to you now, if you had a front tooth out, wouldn’t you git one in the first chance? I’ve got my clo’s, an’ the money, an’ it’s mighty hard to git ever’thing together at oncet.”

At last he had mentioned the clothes; so, without repulse, might I.

“Your jacket is a good fit, Sam.”

“How do you think it suits me, Mis’ Dolly?”

“I think you wear it about as well as Mr. Harvey did.”

“It set smart round the shoulders on him.”

“Smart on you too, Sam.”

“It looks better with the cap.” He put on the cap for proof. “I let Mr. Harvey keep his pants an’ leggin’s.[89] That chap from Asheville left me his, an’ I thought they’s better’n Harvey’s. Jest let me walk off.”

He walked off, and I duly and sincerely admired.

“You reckon,” he said, coming back, “if you saw me as fur off as that black oak on the hill yander, an’ I had my back to you, an’ you didn’t know I had these clo’s, you reckon you’d take me fer Harvey?”

I assured him I would.

“He’s a well-set-up man, Harvey.”

It was time to hit the nail. “Sam, I want the truth. Was there a bear on Pitcher Mountain?”

“Yes, there was—three year ago. I saw it myself, after it ’uz dead.”

“Go on. Make a clean breast of it.”

“There, I knowed you’d be right on me. All right, I’ll tell you ever’thing. I meant to all the time. But ’fore I begin, I want you to tell me what’s an impersile?”

“An impersile? Oh—ah—an imbecile is a sort of fool.”

“I reckoned it was about that,” he said; and, too late, I remembered.

“I won’t keep back a dod-blessed thing, Mis’ Dolly.[90] You know how my dog Buck acts when they’s a fox usin’ around. He’ll lay on the hearth-rock thinkin’ how he’s goin’ to git that fox. An’ ’long about two o’clock I have to git up an’ let him out. Then he goes to Len’s an’ rumbles on the door till Len gits up an’ lets his dog out, an’ Buck takes him off to hunt that fox. He’ll keep that up fer weeks if it takes weeks to git him. It was jest thataway with me. I had to study out how I was goin’ to git Harvey. He was a friend o’ yorn, stayin’ in yore barn, an’ I couldn’t go over there an’ lammux him. I’m a peaceable man anyhow, an’ that ain’t my way.”

“I know it isn’t, Sam, and I am surprised that you couldn’t overlook one thoughtless word, where no harm was meant.”

“Yer goin’ too fast now. I did overlook, come time. You know the Bible says that the birds may light on your head, but ye needn’t let ’em make a nest in yer hair. That means ’at hard words may drap on you, but ye needn’t harbor ’em in yer heart. When that word kep’ a-stickin’, I knowed I had to git it out, and I did. I feel all right now, an’ I’ll do any favor fer Mr. Harvey if he’ll come an’ ast me right. I’ll drive him down to the depot if he’ll ast me, though I told Krettie[91] I’d never do it, an’ I said I’d make him push his trunks down hissef in a wheelbarr’.”

Concern must have risen to my face, for he became regally assuring.

“Don’t you worry a bit now. I thought it all out, an’ I ’lowed I could git along ’thout doin’ him any harm. Overlook it! Ain’t I showed that plain? Didn’t I knock off ploughin’ in the middle o’ April an’ the dogwoods a-buddin’ jest to take him bear-huntin’? He was bound to go. He was wuss’n a hen that’s goin’ to set, eggs er no eggs.”

“Oh, Sam, you know you started it yourself!”

“I jest talked a little, as is common. It’s a man’s nater to drap his talk aroun’ without lookin’ to see whose head is hot. Shorely to goodness, yer not goin’ to blame that on me!”

“Well, what happened? You’ve got his gun, his jacket, his cap, and his shirt.”

“An’ his safety razor,” added Sam, “an’ these here.” He pulled tenderly at a pocket of the jacket and gave me a shining glimpse of the silk socks. “I put ’em on oncet. Boys! Slipper-ellum ain’t nothin’!” Then he began his story.

[92]

IV

“I didn’t take my gun, ’cause I was only goin’ along to ’comerdate Harvey; an’ the trigger o’ mine was busted. I didn’t take Buck nuther, fer we might ’a’ run across a bear, an’ Buck’s so swell-headed, he thinks he can wipe up anything, an’ a bear would ’a’ chawed him to a dish-rag. I couldn’t take any resk with him, fer Tim Reeves wrote me from Tennessee that he’d give me fifty dollars fer him when he comes back, he’s so hot fer fox. That first day me an’ Harvey travelled like brothers, an’ I got him a good ways along ’thout makin’ him feel the road. I carried his gun fer him, so he could walk faster, an’ he was likin’ me first-rate. At night I made a fine fire an’ he put his feet toward it an’ went to sleep. Next mornin’ he got up an’ et nine slices o’ bacon an’ a meal-pone I cooked on a rock. I pushed him to eat, tellin’ him we had a terrible climb afore us. He laffed at me, an’ says ‘Bring on yer mountains, Sam.’ An’ I brought ’em. By night we’s in a mile o’ the top o’ Smoky.”

“But you were going to Pitcher Mountain!”

“Aye, we started there, but when we passed Jed Weaver’s, which is the last house, I said I’d go in an’[93] git me a little new terbacker, ’cause Jed raises it an’ it ’ud be neighborly to ast fer some. When I come out, I told Harvey that Jed said the bear on Pitcher had been killed an’ Mose Ashe had the hide. Which wuz ever’ word so. It ’uz the biggest bear in the memory o’ man, I told him; an’ that ’uz the truth too, fer I seen it myself. Harvey’s lip fell till I was sorry fer him, an’ I said I was willin’ to go on to the bear-ground on Smoky, if he thought he could hold out. I said I wouldn’t drive him, it wuz his trip anyway; an’ he said he was feelin’ better ever’ minute, that climbin’ agreed with him, an’ he looked like it did. I told him if he wanted to go on, it was lucky he took me with him, fer it was give up that I knowed the trails better’n anybody that had ever gone inter the bear-ground. Ain’t that so, Mis’ Dolly?”

“That’s what I’ve heard, Sam.”

“I spent a year in the woods after my first wife died. I thought it was the best chance I’d ever git, an’ I took it. So I said to Harvey: ‘Knowledge has got to be paid fer. It’s the custom.’ An’ he says: ‘Oh, anything, Sam!’ An’ I says: ‘What about yer gun?’ ‘Oh, my gun?’ says he, a little set back, fer it was fire-new, as you can see.”

[94]His glance fondled the gleaming barrel of the gun which was leaning against a tree near us.

“I told Harvey I wasn’t feelin’ very well myself, an’ it might be better fer me to go home anyhow; but if we traded, I wouldn’t think o’ takin’ the gun till we got back home, an’ he could carry it from there on, ’cause we’s gittin’ inter a country where we might come on something wuth a bullet any minute. An’ he said: ‘All right, it’s a bargain. Move, partner.’

“So we climbed hard all day, an’ by night, as I told you, we’s well up Smoky, an’ the coldest wind ablowin’ that ever made an i-shickle out of a man’s gizzard. We drew up at a spring, an’ I says: ‘We’ll stay right here, fer there ain’t no water higher up.’ He was puffin’ some, an’ he says: ‘How fur are we from the bear-ground?’ I says: ‘It’s all around us. We’re right in it.’ He whitened a little an’ gripped his gun, an’ I explained o’ course we weren’t in the ackchal la’r’l thicket where the bears denned, an’ where they tromp roads in the brush big enough fer a horse to walk through. I told him we hadn’t got to the stair-steps in the cliffs where they climbed in an’ out o’ their dens; but they used the neighborhood fer roamin’ an’ fer gittin’ water. I reckoned he wouldn’t want to go on an’[95] knock at their doors till mornin’, after he’d had a good rest, an’ we’d keep a big fire all night so’s they wouldn’t bother us.

“I said I’d cook supper if he’d make the fire; an’ he started to git up some wood; but it was slow work ’cause he’d keep the gun in one hand an’ pull an’ drag at the brush with the other. When I’d rested good I went an’ he’ped, fer I was sorry fer him, an’ was pushin’ hungry. When I’d cooked supper, an’ he’d et enough to make him feel sort o’ cocky, an’ I’d got up a good lot o’ logs to last all night, he said he guessed he’d turn in so’s to git a good sleep an’ be ready fer the battle in the mornin’. An’ I said I b’lieved I would too. He got purty still at that, an’ watched me fixin’ my bed. It was so dod-a’mighty cold I got me a lot o’ fir-boughs an’ piled ’em high as my head. Then I began to crawl inter the middle of ’em.

“‘Looky here, Sam,’ says Harvey, ‘I never heard of a guide crawlin’ off to sleep when the camp needed watchin’.’—‘I ain’t no guide,’ I says; ‘I’m a friend what’s a long way from home jest to ’comerdate ye.’ An’ I went in.

“Then I put my head out an’ says, frien’ly as could be: ‘You turn in too. That fire’ll burn ha’f the night,[96] the wind’ll keep it up. An’ long about one o’clock I’ll crawl out an’ throw on some more logs. Ef you hear a noise, jest lay still, ’cause it’ll only be me astirrin’. Bears,’ I says, ‘come up sly.’

“I reckon he’s a little stubborn by nater, ’cause he wouldn’t turn in at all. I looked out after a bit an’ saw he’d took off his cap an’ tied his muffler round his head, so I ast him if he wouldn’t let me have his cap. My hat was full o’ holes an’ seemed to draw the wind. I was all right, I said, ’cept the top o’ my head was freezin’ off. He handed me his cap then, slow-like, an’ never said I was welcome, ner nothin’. But I’d made up my mind I was goin’ to overlook ever’thing, jest as you say. I had some sleep after I got the cap, an’ when I looked out ’round midnight, he was settin’ there holdin’ his gun, an’ had a big fire that he’ped warm the whole place. I slept like I was in my own bed. Oncet I woke up thinkin’ I heard Krettie a-snorin’; then I remembered where I was an’ knew it was the wind thrashin’ about.

“An’ you ought to ’a’ seen the stars a-shinin’. When they’d wink, I’d almost jump, they seemed so close an’ knowin’. I’d been thinkin’ about leavin’ Harvey up there, an’ tellin’ him to foller one o’ the branches down[97] the mountain, an’ I thought maybe I’d put him on one that ’ud bring him out about twenty miles from home. But lookin’ at them stars, I made up my mind to stand by him an’ bring him clean in to Mis’ Harvey.

“Next mornin’ he went to the spring, but he said it was so cold he guessed he wouldn’t wash. Then he looked at hissef in a little glass he took out o’ his kit. You know he’s one o’ them reddish men that have to keep the razor goin’ ever’ day ef they keep ahead o’ ther beard, an’ we’d been out two nights. After he’d looked, he said he guessed he’d heat some water in our tin cup an’ shave. But the wind was blowin’ so aggervatin’ hard he got nettleish, an’ I said he might cut hissef even if it was a safety, an’ bears had an awful scent fer blood.

“‘We’s huntin’ bears,’ I said, ‘an’ don’t want ’em huntin’ us.’ He says, ‘You mean it well enough, Sam, but they’s nothin’ in it.’ However, it was gittin’ late, an’ he guessed he wouldn’t shave till night. He put the razor back in its little box, an’ drapped it inter his jacket pocket. But I’d clear forgot I’d seen him put it there when he was rakin’ his kit fer it that night. I told him I ’lowed he’d drapped it up by the spring[98] that mornin’ an’ I’d climb all the way back fer it if he wanted me to.”

“Why didn’t he look in his pockets?”

“’Cause I had the jacket then, an’ I didn’t think about it. I told him when he handed it to me that he’d better look in the pockets, there might be somethin’ in ’em he wanted; an’ he said they wasn’t nothin’ there, an’ if they was, I might as well take it now as later; only he said it rougher, like men’ll talk in the woods. ‘Not a dern thing in ’em,’ he says, if you’ll excuse me, Mis’ Dolly, an’ jest as good as told me to keep it if there wuz. I found the razor after I’d got home, an’ by all rights it’s mine. But Harvey can have it if he’ll come an’ ast fer it, though he’s got another one mighty nigh as good.”

He interrupted his story to say that I needn’t be lookin’ at him like that; he never forgot Harvey was a friend of mine, and he tried to do his best by him even with “influenzy comin’ on.”

“But you didn’t have influenza, Sam.”

“You don’t know how near I come to it, though. That very mornin’ after sleepin’ in the fir-boughs, I got up sneezin’ awful an’ my backbone creepin’. In the night my ol’ hat had blowed clear away, an’ I[99] said to Harvey I reckoned he wouldn’t be usin’ the cap an’ muffler both at oncet, an’ I’d wear whichever he didn’t want. He says: ‘That’s kind of you, Sam.’

“He had took off the muffler when he thought he was goin’ to shave, an’ the next minute his ears looked so brickle I could ’a’ knocked ’em off with a stick. So he had put it back on. I told him the cap didn’t have any ear-pieces, an’ I could stand the wind better’n he could. I said mighty few bear-hunters ever got out o’ the la’r’l and in home with anything on their heads at all; that Jed Weaver always went into the woods bareheaded, ’cause he said it cost too much to put hats an’ caps on the la’r’l; an’ Harvey says: ‘Oh, jest keep it, Sam, an’ let’s go.’ I told him we’d scrummish around the mountain toward the sun, an’ maybe I could shake off my chill. But it stuck to me, an’ after a while I said I’d have to stop an’ build a fire.

“He got frustered then, an’ said he’d come fer bear, an’ he was goin’ to have one if he had to go on by hissef. I told him I’d go with him, even if it meant pneumony. Then he got frien’ly an’ said it wasn’t goin’ to be that bad. We’d git our bear an’ go down ’fore night. An’ he was all fer goin’ inter the la’r’l.

“I went a little furder with him, an’ then I stopped[100] all in a shiver an’ told him he must remember I didn’t have on warm clo’s like he had, though I had the same sort o’ skin; an’ I said if I drapped an’ died up there, fer him to hit Siler’s creek an’ foller it down to the settlement.

“‘How ’m I goin’ ter hit Siler’s creek?’ says he. Not a bit o’ feelin’ fer me. Jest thinkin’ how he was goin’ to git down. I come near tellin’ him right then that we’s ten miles west o’ the bear-ground an’ I didn’t aim to go there with a man ’at couldn’t shoot a buzzard off a washtub.”

“What do you mean, Sam?”

“Why, shorely yo don’t think I’d go right where the bears wuz without a bear-dog! We’s in a bear-ground all right, like I told Harvey, only it ’us the old one, the one they used years ago ’fore the people drove ’em furder back. I knowed Harvey couldn’t shoot, an’ I had to study out how to take him bear-huntin’ without gittin’ him chawed to death. ’Course the bears do stray ’round there oncet in a while, an’ we might ’a’ come on one any time.

“Right after Harvey showed me so plain how little feelin’ he had, I thought I heard a bear growl off in the thicket, an’ I told him to git ready. I said as I had[101] no gun, I’d climb a tree an’ he could shoot if we got a sight o’ the feller. He ast me if a man could shoot a bear from a tree, an’ I told him yes, but it was mighty hard to climb one with a gun in yer hand. He said as I was feelin’ so bad maybe we’d better start down an’ he’d come back next year an’ git his bear. I told him I wasn’t goin’ to spile his trip, an’ I b’lieved I could stick it out if I only had a warm shirt an’ jacket.

“About that time I crossed a bear’s trail, shore as you live. I’d seen the swipe a bear makes too often not to know it. Harvey he leaned over an’ whispered: ‘Which way’s he goin’, Sam?’ An’ I showed him how it was goin’ down. ‘It’s below us, Harvey,’ I says, ‘an’ the track ain’t an hour old. The wind ain’t blowed it dry.’ My heart was jumpin’ like it’d break through, an’ I thought to myself, ain’t I the one fool fer bein’ here without a bear-dog an’ with a man ’at kain’t shoot.

“Harvey says sudden: ‘How can we git down from here, Sam?’ An’ I told him there was another trail furder round the mountain that ’ud take us down to Siler’s creek. It would mean a sight more walkin’, but I thought I could make it if it wasn’t fer my chill. He says, ‘All right! Strip!’ an’ took off his coat an’ shirt.[102] I give him mine, an’ after that little talk about the pockets, I got inter his clo’s an’ we started. I knew I could find the head o’ Siler’s creek an’ could make it down by keeping in sound o’ the water. Harvey would ’a’ been a lost man if he hadn’t been with a feller that knowed the country like I did. But he never let on that he wuz owin’ me anything. Jed Weaver had told me that old trail had got so thicketty a man would have to tie his eyeballs in if he come down it an’ didn’t lose ’em. An’ that is what it wuz. When we come out at Harney’s Bald, our fingers wuz bleedin’, an’ Harvey said he guessed if that thicket was ’tween us an’ the bear there wasn’t any more danger, an’ he throwed down the gun. I had to carry it from there on, which wasn’t the bargain at all. But I shot three squirrels, an’ Harvey seemed kinder peeved ’stead o’ bein’ glad I had something fer my trouble.

“That night it was awful cold agin, fer we come out in a northy cove about sundown an’ wuz too tired to go on. Harvey said he wouldn’t make a fire if he froze to death; so I got wood an’ cooked the squirrels, an’ was jest as brotherly as I could be. After supper he fell on the ground an’ went right to sleep. I covered him with balsam, ’cause I wasn’t goin’ to bring a[103] friend o’ yorn back sick. In the mornin’ he woke up groanin’ an’ said his bones had hurt him so he hadn’t shet his eyes all night. I got him out an’ hurried him along all day. We had gone so fur around that bear, we had to camp out an extry night. I found a purty good campin’-place, but my feet was rubbed sore. Harvey was a-limpin’. He said it was a long trip to make on firecoals. I told him to keep in good heart, that he’d be with Mis’ Harvey next day, an’ she’d pet him up nice. But I couldn’t cheer him up noway, an’ he never said nothin’ all the time I was gittin’ wood an’ cookin’ supper.

“After we’d et, him asayin’ nothin’, I pulled off my boots, an’ he says: ‘Lord, man, don’t you wear socks?’ I said not in the woods. Mutton taller is better’n socks in the woods any day. An’ I took out a little piece o’ taller I had in my pack an’ rubbed my feet with it. Then I turned ’em to the fire an’ it eased ’em up fine. I told him I was sorry I didn’t have enough taller to divide, but I only had enough left to rub my feet with in the mornin’ ’fore we started, an’ as he had socks an’ I didn’t, I needed the taller wuss’n he did. He took off his boots an’ wrapped his feet in his muffler. A baby ought ’a’ knowed better, but I didn’t say[104] anything. I was wore out thinkin’ fer him at ever’ turn. He looked so beat though, layin’ there in my ol’ clo’s, I thinks I’ll sing a little fer him. The first day we’s a-climbin’ he kept pesterin’ me to sing, an’ me ha’f out o’ breath, luggin’ pack an’ gun. I b’lieve in suitin’ a song to the time, an’ settin’ there, with my feet a-warmin’, I got to thinkin’ how fine it was out in the wild woods like that, an’ only one night from home too; an’ ’most ’fore I knowed it I was singin’ ‘Free a Little Bird.’ It goes this a-way:

“The verses are all jest alike ’cept the tree is different ever’ time. That little bird builds its nest in nineteen trees ’fore the song is done; an’ it’s ’lowable fer you to put in more if you want to an’ can think of ’em. I thought of a lot—the mulberry, the sourwood, the weepin’ willer, an’ so many more I was nigh an’[105] hour gittin’ through. Harvey never said a word when I stopped; he was awake though, fer I seen him move. But I didn’t expect anything from him. The first day we’s out it wuz ‘Thank ’e, Sam,’ all the time. But after we got inter the deep woods where I was his rale dependance, I never heard it oncet.

“Next mornin’ his feet wuz so sore he couldn’t let his boots tech ’em. ‘Sam,’ he says, ‘what’ll ye take fer that taller?’ I told him I wasn’t tradin’ it; if he needed it wuss’n I did, he was welcome. I could make out ef I had a pair o’ easy socks. ‘Yer ain’t used them silk ones yit, have ye?’ I says. He took ’em out of his kit an’ handed ’em to me ’thout openin’ his mouth; though I told him over agin that he was welcome to the taller. But these furriners ain’t got much manners anyhow, if you notice ’em close.

“He said he hadn’t shet his eyes, an’ he’d nearly froze, like as if I ought to ’a’ set up an’ kept the fire goin’. I was glad enough to git him in home that mornin’; an’ when he wants a friend to go bear-huntin’ with him agin, he’ll have to look furder’n me. We ain’t quarrelled though. That needn’t worry ye a bit. When I left him yisterday he says, ‘Sam, yer a ’tellergent feller,’ an’ he stuck out his hand.”

[106]“You took it, Sam?”

“Oh, ay, I took it. But,” he added—for in those days in Unakasia every man was his own Shakespeare—“I knew he was jest aflowerin’ me.”

I

THE Kanes were a deserving family, tainted with inarticulate ambition. I was glad to have them as rather distant neighbors instead of “share-croppers.” Evvie, the oldest child, possessed beauty of the appealing sort that stirs even the hurried passer-by with a feeling of responsibility. As a tenant’s daughter she would have troubled my sleep. Her mother was a Merlin and usually stopped to see me when on her way to visit some member of the clan. “Hypnotic,” though an intolerably cheapened word, must be used in describing the effect that my typewriter seemed to have on Mrs. Kane. I did not understand this until the day that she brought Evvie with her.

“She hain’t strong, Evvie. I kain’t git her to stay with a hoe long ’nough fer me to go in an’ git the dinner. I say to her, ‘Evvie, you take my place an’ let me go in,’ an’ she’ll try fer a bit, but her poppie’ll[108] see her drappin’ back an’ gittin’ her breath hard, an’ he’ll say, ‘You run ’long now, Evvie, an’ he’p yer mother,’ an’ in she’ll come. So I’ve got in the way o’ lettin’ her git the dinner by herse’f an’ I stay with the hoe.”

“But she can’t be more than ten,” I said.

“She’s twelve, an’ that’s nigh to a woman. Cleve Saunders kain’t pass our place now ’thout peekin’ fer Evvie.”

I expected Evvie to drop her head or wriggle behind a chair; but her chiselled chin was high, and her eyes darkened as easily as twilight water. She was the traditional woman accepting her rôle.

Mrs. Kane’s glance swerved again to the typewriter, and her heart tumbled out as she said: “I been thinkin’ maybe you could learn Evvie to write on that.”

“If she is so much help to you,” I answered, snatching at the first defense, “why not keep her at home until she is married?”

“That’s jest the trouble—her marryin’. She’ll disapp’int any boy ’round here. They all expect a woman to take a hand in makin’ the livin’, through crap-time anyway. An’ Evvie kain’t hold out. If she could learn to work on that, an’ git a job in town, like as not some[109] boy out there ’ud take a notion to her, an’ town boys don’t want their wives to work. ’Tain’t expected of ’em to do more’n the cookin’ an’ housework an’ sewin’, an’ that ’ud be easy for Evvie.”

Evvie had stepped into the yard. It was a habit with her, I found, to vanish as if for charming asides with herself and to reappear with no sign of absence upon her. I reminded her mother that there might be children to care for in addition to the occupations mentioned.

“’Course there would, but she’d have them anywheres, an’ she’d better have ’em where life’s easier’n it is here.”

“No doubt. What is her school grade?”

“She’s got to the fourth reader. But she ain’t peart in her books, though she’s so smart-lookin’.”

Three years glowed in respite, and my voice warmed in reply.

“Bring her to me when she finishes the seventh grade, and I’ll see.”

The mother’s face grew long. “She ain’t fitten’ fer school,” she said. “She’s had to quit, ’count o’ that wheezin’ ’at ketches her when she climbs up the mountain. Her poppie had to meet her half-way down ever’[110] day an’ carry her up on his back. She’s too big fer that now, an’ he says he reckons she knows enough. He’s awful proud o’ Evvie. An’ she’s as smart as Annie Dills who learned to write on one o’ them things an’s makin’ twelve dollars a week in Asheville.”

I held out that skill on the machine would be useless without a little schooling behind it. Evvie, who had shown no interest in her future, revealed no disappointment. She was a flower and had implicit faith in the sun. But there was a touch of desperation in Mrs. Kane’s voice as she took her leave. I tried to believe with Evvie in the reliability of sunshine.

A year later Evvie was “talkin’ to” Cleve Saunders. He was a good boy who had here and there learned the carpenter’s trade. Occasionally he would go to Asheville to work on a job, and then a weekly letter would come to Evvie. I approved of Cleve, but Evvie was only thirteen, and though vividly and perfectly moulded as a woman, she was small for her years. I protested to Mrs. Kane.

“I ain’t goin’ to let her git married ’fore she’s fifteen,” the mother assured me. “Not if I can he’p it. Ef she had some work to keep her mind on——”

“I’ve a friend,” I said, as I stepped between Mrs.[111] Kane and my typewriter, “who would like a helper with her children. It would be a good home for Evvie and she would have nothing to do but play.”

“You mean anybody’d pay her jest fer playin’?”

“With children. And Evvie is fine with her little brothers and sisters.” (I’ll make Sue Waters take her, said I to myself.)

“Where’d the place be?”

“It’s on a big farm near Knoxville.”

“It’ll cost a heap to go, an’ we ain’t got nary calf we can sell now.”

“My friend will send the money for her fare, and Evvie can pay it back if she stays.”

Mrs. Kane, thin and worn, threw up her head with almost as fine an air as Evvie herself.

“Ef she don’t stay, I’ll pay it back ef it takes ever’ egg fer a year,” she said.

We thought it settled; but before I could sufficiently browbeat Sue Waters, Evvie’s mother came to me with a face grayer and more pinched than ever.

“I reckon,” she said, “Evvie kain’t go till next year. I shore thought I was through with babies, but there’s another acomin’, an’ Evvie’s all the he’p I’ve got.”

[112]Now, during preparations for Evvie’s setting forth, I had seen more of her than usual, and had detected signs of a quick temper that gave me uneasy visions of her amid the Waters brood. Also I feared that her ideas of fraternité et égalité, which were as natural to her as the ground under her feet, might give some trouble. If little Margaret Waters should receive a piano for her birthday, Evvie would expect the same or “just as good.” Sue Waters, having taken her degree in the right subjects, would of course comprehend, but could hardly supply the piano. My relief was almost as deep as my concern when Mrs. Kane made her joyless announcement.

“Perhaps it is better to wait,” said I. “Evvie will be older and larger by a year.”

“I dunno as that’s better,” said the mother. “She’s a woman to the bone, an’ a year’ll seem a long time.”

Before the year was half out I left the mountains and was gone for several months. As soon as conditions in the Kane home permitted, I arranged by correspondence for Evvie’s going away. She was to write to Mrs. Waters when she was ready, and the money for her fare would be sent to her. As the train taking me home pulled into the village, I thought of Evvie,[113] supposing her to be with Mrs. Waters, and I felt that I had helped to rob the hills of a flower that should belong to them utterly.

A woman sharing my seat had been giving me the news. I did not hear much of it, but finally caught the words “An’ Evvie got married.”

I jumped unmannerly, as if I would snatch the child to dry land. Then I made my conscience comfortable.

“Cleve will take good care of her,” I said.

“’Tain’t Cleve,” replied the woman. “It’s that young feller from Mossy Creek—Judd Mason.”

II

I had heard of him: a mountain buck; very big, very good-looking. He never worked except to make a little corn that he could turn into whiskey. As soon as I saw Evvie I asked her how she had happened to marry Judd.

“I was goin’ to the post-office,” she said, “with a letter to Mis’ Waters, tellin’ her to send the money an’ I’d come right on, when I met Judd an’ he walked along the road with me an’ begged me not to send the letter. He said I’d find it hard out there with strange folks who wouldn’t keer nothin’ fer me, an’ I’d better[114] let him look after me right. I was kinder afraid to go so fur from home, an’ Judd—he talked good.”

“Where was Cleve?” I asked.

“He was over in Asheville workin’. He was goin’ to meet me an’ put me on the Knoxville train. He lost his job, goin’ to the train fer a week. I wrote to tell him I wasn’t comin’, but Judd lost the letter an’ forgot to tell me about it. Cleve got another job though. Anybody’ll give Cleve work.”

“And Judd has been as good as his talk, I suppose?”

Evvie swung her head to one side as if she forbade it to droop.

“It’ll be all right soon as we git to ourse’vs. We’re livin’ with poppie an’ mommie now, an’ they’s so many young-uns at home Judd gits pouty sometimes. I kain’t fix good things to eat where they’s so many, an’ Judd’ll leave the table when he don’t like what’s on it.”

Notwithstanding Evvie’s hopes, it was nearly a year before they got to “therse’vs.” Her parents, with a home already overflowing with small, unprofitable humanity, would have sheltered the young pair and their expected baby indefinitely and without a murmur, preferring to break their already bowed backs than breach the highland custom of welcome for all;[115] but Judd was growing restless for his old occupation, and Evvie wanted her baby to be born in her own home.

So she said; but I knew that she was frightened, and would have chosen to stay with her mother if she could have given up the hopes she had built on getting Judd to herself.

Mrs. Kane, with her heart breaking over Evvie, took what relief she could from the exodus.

“I could stand Judd,” she told me, “ef it wasn’t fer his poutin’. The Merlins don’t pout. We git mad and blow off, and that’s all of it. Judd’ll hang on an’ pout till my bones git sore. I was gittin’ so edgy it’s jest as well they’re gone.”

I went once to see Evvie after she had moved. There was a trail down the western side of the ridge on which I lived that would bring me to Judd’s cabin at the end of four miles; and there was a wagon-road down the eastern side which would take me eleven miles around the foot of the ridge. I chose the trail and went down alone.

On the ridge top the sun had seemed to be of eternal brightness; but I descended strangely into an unlit world. The intervale below me was much narrower[116] than the usual valley where a settlement lies; and it was almost cut in halves by a huge spur that, at its foot, was bounded on either side by a stream of water. The two streams, Nighthawk Branch and Mossy Creek, united at the toe of the spur. I took the trail up Mossy Creek, as I had been told to do, and walked along in sound of the water, but getting no glimpse of it through the smothering laurel. It was the first time that water running behind green leaves had left me untouched by a mysterious joy; the first time that I had ever thought of the laurel as sombre. Its dark radiance seemed like a challenge from Nature ready to spring and regain an inimical kingdom. I was half in sympathy with the Highlander who regarded it merely as a thing to fight or let contemptuously alone. My old admiration for the Greeks came rushing back. What a redoubtable imagination it was that, in the credulous youth and fear-time of the world, could draw all terror from the forest and people it with creatures of play and light!

The trail led me into a cove, away from the quavering incantation of the water, but the laurel went darkly with me, heavily mingled with kalmia that choked the trees and wrenched at their life with its curling arms.

“The shack’s on northy land,” Mrs. Kane had said[117] to me, “an’ the la’r’l is so blustery it ’ud tangle a wild hog.”

I knew why the original settler had chosen such a spot, in spite of his aversion to “thicketty patches.” In the stifling coves it would take a most resolute official to find a hidden “still.” This made the place equally desirable in the eyes of the latest tenant, Judd. I had known Evvie only on sunny hilltops, and I wondered what “living under the mountain,” as the natives put it, had done to her spirit. I recalled Mrs. Kane’s remark after a first visit to Evvie. “Seemed like I had to keep wipin’ at the shadders all the time I’s there.” Evvie must be very tired, I thought, of wiping at the shadows.

The trees rose more freely and I came to a clearing. On a hill opposite me, which faced the east, was a cornfield, two or three acres in size. This, thanks to a low gap in the near-by ridge, received a few hours of morning sunlight. In the hollow below stood the shack where Evvie lived. I found her in bed with one of Judd’s sisters in sullen attendance.

“She’s in bed ’bout ever’ other day,” the sister said, “an’ Judd’s always havin’ to come over the branch fer one of us to wait on her.”

“I can git up to-morr’ sure,” said Evvie, but the[118] faint remark only sent her attendant’s nose a little higher.

Evvie was strange to see. Her eyes, dark and burning, clung devouringly to a face that had already lost all flesh.

“Where is Judd?” I asked.

The sister was silent, but Evvie flushed and said he had gone to try to kill her a squirrel. “I ain’t eat nothin’ all day,” she said. “I been thinkin’ ’bout the devil tryin’ to ketch Amos Britton one night last week.”

I thought her delirious, but her companion gloatingly explained that the devil had indeed made an effort to capture Amos alive.

“It’s ’cause he killed Wes Baxter in a fight a year ago, an’ ain’t never said he was sorry. He went huntin’ with Jim Webster Thursday night, an’ something took after ’em, they couldn’t tell what. Jim got away an’ run home, but Amos got behind a tree to shoot it, an’ it knocked his gun down an’ run him round an’ round the tree fer hours. Then all at onct daylight was comin’ in, an’ the thing wa’n’t there. Amos says it run on two feet, near as he could make out, an’ kep’ flappin’ a tail. He’s so skeered he ain’t been out of his house sence he got home.”

[119]“Do you reckon it ’uz the devil, Mis’ Dolly?” asked Evvie, as if sanity hung on my answer.

“Not at all, Evvie. The man was drunk probably.”

“No, he wa’n’t drunk,” interposed the sister. “It run him round an’ round the tree, an’ he could feel its breath on his neck, hot as fire.”

I moved toward the water-bucket, and courtesy demanded that she should go to the spring for fresh water. With her disappearance the room lost its spirit of combat. With swimming head and drowning struggle—how far were we from the Greeks and the bright gods of the woods?—I did what I could to reassure Evvie.

“I ain’t afeard when Judd’s here,” she said. “Judd ain’t afeard of anything. He’ll stay at home more when the baby’s here. Don’t men always think a lot o’ their babies, Mis’ Dolly?”

I lied vigorously, and Evvie was smiling when the sister-in-law returned. And she was smiling when I left, for I had promised that her mother would come next day to stay for a week.

I reached home about dark, saddled a mule and rode to the Kane farm. From there I went to see Jane Drake. Yes, Jane would take care of the Kane household—but[120] “not more’n till Saturday ’count o’ meetin’ at Stecoa”—and let Mrs. Kane go to Evvie.

This done, I returned to nursing my canteloupe patch on the ridge, which that one year was a delicious success. But even under the spell of so rare a triumph, life was hardly tolerable on my peaks, with Evvie awaiting her fate in the shadows below. So I ordered the small telescope that I had wanted for a decade. Though treated later with superior scorn by my astronomer friends, it did serve as a transport to regions where nothing mattered. And when I resumed earthly relationships Evvie’s boy was two weeks old.

In the more remote hollows of the mountains birth goes the indifferent way of nature: gliding as the seasons for the most part, but too often ruthless, confounding as storm. Evvie, so fragile and so young, barely lived. I went once more to the shack, going down the mountain with Mrs. Kane and little Tommie, taking old Bill, the mule, to help us climb back. Mrs. Mason, senior, met us at the door. When the customary greetings were over—greetings that never, under any circumstances, are hurried in the mountains—the mother-in-law put in her very just complaint.

“Law, I’m glad ye got here! I kain’t spen’ my time[121] waitin’ on a girl ’at won’t try to set up, an’ her baby two weeks old. Won’t eat nothin’ nuther, makes no difference what I fix. I baked her some light bread, an’ put ’lasses on it, an’ some butter I brought from home, an’ she won’t tech it. She’ll not git well till she tries to, an’ I kain’t wait round fer her to make up her mind. All my own work’s to do, an’ I got to be at it. You know how it is, Mis’ Kane. You kain’t stay here all the time no more’n I can.”

As on my first visit, I asked “Where is Judd?” and I received the same information. “He’s gone out to kill a squirrel.”

Evvie, who was lying with her eyes shut, said with startling vigor: “He’s been gone since yisterday.”

Judd’s mother looked toward the bed, and her eyes snapped. “You kain’t expect a man to lay round home ferever waitin’ fer a woman to git up. I’ve had ten young-uns an’ I never stayed in bed more’n nine days with ary one of ’em. In two weeks I was out in the crap, if it was crap-time, doin’ my part.”

There was a big crack in the cabin near Evvie’s bed. Her eyes sought the opening in a manner that told me she often found mental escape that way. It was obvious that her last hope was crushed. The baby had come,[122] but had wrought no miracle. She knew, and all present there knew, that Judd was out on a bootlegging adventure; but it was not to be admitted in look or speech.

Evvie gazed through the crack, seeing nothing but the face of a hill that seemed about to fall on to the cabin. She stared as if her eyes would tunnel through it, and a delirious flare came over her face.

“Take that hill away, mommie,” she said, in a fret.

Mrs. Kane surprised me. “I kain’t take hit away, Evvie—but I can take you over hit,” she said, making aspirates in her clear determination.

“Can you set up on ol’ Bill? Tommie’ll ride behind you an’ hold you on. I’ll tote the baby, Mis’ Dolly’ll lead Bill, an’ we’ll get you home.”

Evvie hardly knew there was a baby, but she caught at the word home—“Oh, mommie, I can set up!”

“Set up an’ ride a mule!” cried Mrs. Mason. “An’ me here niggerin’ fer ye, an’ ye makin’ out ye couldn’t move!”

I made no protest; for I recalled an incident of the days before Evvie’s marriage. She was ill, and her mother had sent hurriedly for me. I went, accompanied by a friend from the region of grand opera and fever-thermometers, who happened to be in the highlands.[123] She applied her thermometer and found that Evvie’s fever was running high. We fumbled about with improvised ministrations until Evvie asked for a “flitter.” Mrs. Kane was mainly worried because the child had eaten nothing since the day before, and when I saw her face light up at Evvie’s request, I hastily withdrew with my friend.

“Why did you leave?” she asked. “The child may be killed. Her mother may be ignorant enough to give her that fritter, or whatever she calls it.”

“Yes, she is going to get the flitter, and that is why I left. I had to take your disruptive civilized mind off the current. I want Evvie to live.”

The next day my friend returned to the patient, expecting, I am sure, to find a house in mourning. Evvie was sitting on the porch stringing beans. Mrs. Kane’s face was luminous.

“Evvie got better right away,” she explained, “soon as she et them three flitters I give her.”

Remembering that result, and seeing the glaze of resolution on her mother’s face, I meekly became a party to the process of getting Evvie out of the hollow. We formed under Mrs. Kane’s direction: I first, leading the mule, and Evvie in the saddle, leaning back on[124] Tommie’s shoulder, quite safe with his strong little arms about her waist. Mrs. Kane followed, carrying the baby. And so Evvie came home.

III

Evvie did not lie in bed long after returning to her mother’s house. She sat in shadowy corners, unseeing, uncaring. Milk sometimes would be swallowed when brought to her; but eating required impossible effort.

“She don’t hardly know me,” said her mother. “Sometimes I’m ’most afeard of her. She might turn an’ claw me with them hands like chicken feet. She’s jest yeller skin an’ bones, like a quare little old woman.”

Judd did not come near her, and we heard of no inquiries on his part. But Cleve came out from Asheville and walked under my apple-trees.

“I can’t fight Judd,” he said. “He’s a heavyweight and I’m not. And I won’t gun him. But I know where his blockade still is.”

“Oh, Cleve, would you tell?”

“No, but it’s hard not to. He’d go to jail, an’ she could get her divorce.”

“And he would be out again in six months, to go gunning for you. He wouldn’t have your scruples. Besides,[125] Cleve, if Evvie were free, you couldn’t take on a burden like that.”

“Burden! Mis’ Dolly, I’d be willin’ to carry Evvie with one arm and do my work with the other. You don’t know how a man feels when there ain’t but one woman fer him an’ another man’s got her—a man ’at wouldn’t pull her out o’ the fire! But I’m goin’ back to Asheville, an’ I won’t try to see her. Here’s my pocketbook. I want you to lend her father some money, and pay yerse’f out o’ this.”

He dropped the pocketbook and went, with his face oddly reddened after being so white. Evvie’s doctor from Carson was paid; the parcel-post brought oranges, lettuce, and such to the Kanes’ scant winter table. Gradually Evvie began to eat the food that interested her because it was unusual. Her eyes grew gentler and her glance rested intelligently on people and things. She would smile as her father told some pitiful joke, trying to ignore the fact that his daughter wasn’t “jest right.”

The growing baby exhibited Merlin traits which made him a favorite. One day Evvie’s wandering eyes fell upon him as he lay in my lap. Her glance stopped and became uneasy.

“Is that mommie’s baby?” she said.

[126]“No, he’s your very own, Evvie, and as fine as they are made. Look! He has your big eyes, and just see how heavy! Let him lie on your lap a minute and you’ll find out.”

I started to lift him to her, but her look turned to swift terror and she shrank away. It was the beginning of health, however. A day or two afterward she asked me how long it would be before she died, and I knew she had begun to think about living.

“That depends on yourself, Evvie.”

“Could I live if I wanted to?” she asked, with incredulous hope.

“You could be well in two months.”

“After ever’thing?”

“Every single thing.”

“Mommie don’t want me home with a baby.”

“Your mother wouldn’t give up Bennie if Judd came with ten sheriffs to take him.”

“Could Judd take him?” she asked, with vehemence that was full of promise.

“You left Judd, you know, and the law might let the father have the child.”

“When he was so mean to me?”

“Oh! You think he was mean?”

[127]“He’d leave me in that holler by myse’f an’ stay out all night huntin’.”

“The law might think a wife ought to have the courage to put up with that.”

“He knocked me inter the briars when I tried to foller him.”

“M-m-m! How long was that,” said I, touching the baby, “before your young man got here?”

“’Bout a month. I told him I’s afeard to stay in the shack, an’ he said I wanted to foller him ’cause I thought he was goin’ to Lizzie Bowles.”

It was joy to me to see her eyes flood burningly with temper.

“That’s where he was goin’, too! He used to talk to her ’fore we’s married, an’ she’d jest come back from the cotton-mills in South C’lina with two silk dresses. They’d got up a big dance an’ I knowed Judd was agoin’. An’ he knocked me inter the briars by the trail round the corn patch.”

“The law might consider that,” I said. “Don’t worry about losing your baby. But first make sure that you want him.”

“I b’lieve I could hold him a bit now if you’ll set him here.”

[128]I laid the baby in her lap and slipped out to tell Mrs. Kane. In six weeks Evvie was helping her mother with the housework. Spring came, and I bribed her to work in the garden by supplying the preposterously growing Bennie with clothes. By June she was again intrenched in her loveliness; not quite so plump, but round enough, and with her old wild-rose color. By and by she was duly divorced. Judd, in South Carolina, made no protest. Evvie’s perilous excursion seemed over, with no obvious reminder save the incredible baby.

She wore the fashionable knee dress, and with her hair in unfashionable braids down her back seemed to be the child-sister of the youngster that scrambled about her.

“Your little brother will soon be big enough to go to school with you,” said the new County Commissioner on his rounds, hoping to be pleasant.

Evvie stood mute and fiery red. “Don’t tell him the baby’s mine, mommie,” she whispered later to her mother. It must have seemed strange to her—that bubbling other existence around her feet—and a little embarrassment was, I thought, quite proper.

With autumn and corn-gathering Judd returned. It was a good season in the woods for the blockaders, and Judd had probably made arrangements in the “South”[129] for profitable sales. He announced that he was buying calves for the winter and wanted to lay in a supply of feed for them. I never heard of his purchasing any calves, but he went about getting a little corn here and there at the cheap harvest price. Perhaps some one told him that his boy was a lad to be proud of, for he came one day to see him. I had walked over to the Kanes with Cleve, and we were about to take our leave. Evvie shook hands with Judd quite prettily.

“Golly, Evvie, you’ve come back hard!” he said. “Let’s set on the porch.”

He had forgotten his son, but Evvie brought him out, and Judd had difficulty in maintaining indifference. He looked about and saw Cleve.

“Hello, Cleve I This chap kinder takes my eye.”

“I reckon,” said Cleve, “he ain’t so fine as Lizzie Bowles’s boy.”

“That kid ain’t none o’ mine,” said Judd, too quickly.

“Lizzie’ll give you a chance to swear to that, anyhow.”

“What yer warmin’ chair-bottoms round here fer, Cleve Saunders?”

“He’s here,” said Evvie, her cheeks pink-spotted, “’cause he’s the best friend the baby’s got.”

“I’m the kid’s father, don’t you fergit, an’ I’ve got[130] some rights. That divorce judge didn’t put no paper ’twixt me an’ the kid.”

“You can see him whenever you want to,” said Evvie, “so long as you don’t make trouble fer anybody that’s been as good to us as Cleve.”

Their eyes met and battled—no doubt reminiscently—and Judd capitulated. “All right,” he said.

From that time Evvie was sorely troubled by his visits. “I wouldn’t mind his comin’,” she said, “if he didn’t keep aggervatin’ me to live with him.”

“Why don’t you take Cleve, Evvie, and end the bother?”

“I don’t want to marry,” she said, with a shudder that was a broadside of confession. I was cheered. At least she would never be reconquered by Judd.

But the situation was pressing to a change; and finally it came. Judd was captured by Federal deputies. I went to Sam for particulars.

“They took him red-handed, stirrin’ the mash,” said Sam. “He fit like a bear, an’ kicked the officer in the mouth. It’ll mean the Pen, shore, an’ Evvie’ll be shet of him fer a while.”

“Won’t somebody bond him out?”

“His own folks don’t think ’nough of him fer that.[131] I hearn his own father say he wa’n’t wuth a June bug with a catbird after it. Nobody’s goin’ to risk losin’ a farm fer that thing.”

I went home reassured. If Cleve would only pick up and woo furiously, instead of wistfully accepting mere smiles from Evvie, he could win, I felt, long before Judd’s reappearance.

The sight of Evvie hurrying toward me gave me no uneasiness. She was lugging the baby, in too much haste to let him toddle.

“Mis’ Dolly,” she began, “Judd’s the baby’s poppie, an’ he’s took. Nobody’ll go on his bond, an’ ever’body’s talkin’ hard against him, an’ him Bennie’s poppie. I been thinkin’ of that trouble ’way back, an’ it wasn’t all his fault.”

“You fell into the briars, I suppose?”

“No, but I was aggervatin’ him. I hated Lizzie Bowles an’ her silk dresses, an’ when he swore an’ told me to go back, I picked up a rock an’ if he hadn’t jumped I’d a broke his head with it. I was ashamed to tell you then. I was wild mad, an’ he ought to ’a’ throwed me inter the briars. I wasn’t any he’p to him in the field, an’ when I got sick I wasn’t any he’p in the house, like his mother said. I didn’t do my part at all.”

[132]“You did all you could, Evvie,” I said, with no effect on the tide pouring from her heart.

“An’ way back, when we’s livin’ with mommie, I was aggervatin’. At first when he’d pout an’ wouldn’t come to the table, I’d slip out with something fer him to eat, an’ beg till he’d take it, but once when we had company an’ he’d made me ashamed ’cause he went to the barn an’ wouldn’t come to breakfast, I got me a bundle o’ blade-fodder an’ took it to him. I told him if he wanted to live with the steers he could eat with ’em too. I was shore mean. An’, Mis’ Dolly, I want you to go to Carson jail an’ see Judd, an’ tell him when he comes back from the Pen I’ll be ready an’ we’ll begin all over. He’ll know I’ll keep my word.”

It was useless to remind her of pain that she could not recall; but I spoke of her father and mother. Would she break their hearts again?

“But look at Bennie!” she cried. “He’s gettin’ more like his father ever’ day. If I’m hard on Judd now, how can I look at my baby? Ever’body’s against him. You’re hard as the others. Won’t you go, Mis’ Dolly?”

“No, I won’t. You don’t know what you are doing.”

“Then I’ll have to git somebody else to go.”

Her message went to Judd by some busybody, and[133] I wired to Asheville for Cleve. When he arrived on the next train I was at the station. “The thing to do, Cleve,” I said, “is to bail him out and let him come home.”

Cleve, knowing so well the Evvie that eluded him, saw the point at once. He also saw that neither he nor I should figure as bondsman.

“It’ll be hard work,” he said, “but I’ll find somebody.”

And over the country he went, picking out men whom he knew to be secret abetters of Judd, and working on their fear of his turning informer. The amount of bail was made up, and Judd was free. Evvie thought that he would come directly to her, but first he went to Mossy Creek to see “the boys.” They got up a dance, and it would have seemed ungrateful of Judd not to remain for it. When he reached Evvie his face was still slightly swollen from drink and revelry, but his spirits were riding high. Friends had gathered at the Kanes’ for the evening, and Judd began to recount his triumphs in jail.

“They made me president o’ their club soon’s I got there, an’ kicked the other feller out. We had some reg’lations, you bet! Ever’ feller that come into jail had to[134] pay fifty cents fer terbacker; if he didn’t we flogged him. They wouldn’t let us have whiskey, an’ that was tough, you bet! We’d have court, an’ try the fellers, an’ it was a purty good life if we’d had more to eat. They’s all sorry to see me go, an’ I promised to smuggle in some hot stuff to ’em if there was any way. Mebbe I can work it with a mulatter girl ’at cooks fer ’em—right purty—color of a hick’ry leaf ’fore frost—she’ll he’p me, you bet! I’ll try it to-morr’ when me an’ Evvie go to Carson to hitch up. Some quare, ain’t it, marryin’ yer own wife? An’ what about yer kid goin’ on two at yer weddin’?”

Choking and helpless, I slipped away from the sound of his voice. Sam, walking home by my road, began to talk.

“Reckon you noticed Evvie in that corner while Judd was talkin’. Ef you’d a cut off her head at the neck it wouldn’t ’a’ bled a drap.”

I could not answer, and hurried on, finding Cleve on my doorstep. I took him into the house, my tears of rage and failure dropping; but when the full light of the lamp fell upon his face I thought no more of my own misery.

“There’s twelve hours yet, Cleve,” I said. “Evvie is not an utter fool.”

[135]But he wouldn’t speak. For over an hour he sat by my fire, a humped reproach. I exhausted every consolation, even to telling him that she wasn’t worth it. Then he lifted his eyes, full of such mourning scorn that I became as silent as himself. There was a tap at the door, slight enough to be Evvie’s. I asked Cleve to go up-stairs, saying that I would call him if he was wanted. When he was gone I opened the door and heard Evvie’s voice.

“They’s so many at our house to-night. Ever’ bed’s full. I thought I’d come here to sleep. You don’t keer, do you?”

“I’m glad to see you, Evvie. Come, warm a little, and jump into bed. You’ve been running.”

“Yes, I was afraid—but—I had to come.”

Her little body was quivering. I sat her down, but did not dare to give a sign of sympathy that might plunge her into hysteria. I took up a book and sat reading until she became very still. We were in the kitchen, which was large and possessed a big, ugly fireplace. At the right of the fireplace, in the corner, ran a short flight of stairs, and under the stairs was a closet with an opening for a half-door. This opening was simply curtained.

[136]I had held my book for ten minutes or more, when we heard sounds of talk and laughter from the road. I recognized Judd’s voice, and a loud knock followed. Instantly Evvie rose, stooped, and, darting like a bee, vanished behind the little curtain of the closet. There was hardly room for her among the pans and old ovens, but she scuttled her way, and there was silence. Then I opened the outer door and saw Judd with several companions.

“Me an’ the boys are lookin’ fer Evvie. We started to have a reel at bedtime an’ found she’d gone. I ’lowed right away she’d skipped over here, bein’ she’s crazy ’bout you. Reckon I skeered her a little talkin’ so much ’bout them jail fellers; but I’ll make it all right. I’m goin’ to be square with Evvie this time.”

He began to peek around me.

“Why—ain’t she here? She gone to bed?”

“No, Judd. Did you stop at Len’s?”

“We hollered, an’ she wasn’t there.”

“You’d better go on to Sam’s then,” I urged, following, or rather leading him away. “Take the short trail by the hemlocks.”

When they were certainly gone I went in. Cleve and Evvie were sitting by the fire. Her arms were around[137] his neck and she was crying steadily. Cleve’s arms were determinedly in the right place. The next day they took the early train for Carson, and by noon were safely married.

Yesterday Evvie’s mother said to me: “You ought to go over to Asheville, Mis’ Dolly, jest to see how Evvie keeps that little house primped up. They’s water in it, hot an’ cold, an’ ever’thing, like I always wanted her to have. I reckon she’s ’bout fergot that shack in the holler.”

I tell myself that it is as well with Evvie as life permits it to be with the most of us; but she is now only eighteen, chiselled in beauty and colored with youth; and I try not to wonder what would happen if she should ever fall in love.

I

IT was mostly during my first two years on the farm that things happened. Unfamiliarity sharpened events into adventure. Later the unusual gradually flattened into matter of course. For this reason I am glad that I looked over my wild-hog claim during the first year of possession, a time when I fed on explorer’s elixir, and knew not plain bread and meat.

I can still see Sam, a clear-cut figure, swinging from an overhead bough which he had grasped just in time to save himself from the plunging, foam-scattering boar that in another second would have had his life. But the beginning of the day was calm enough. For some time I had heard talk of my claim as a fund-producing property which, if looked after as it should be, would enable me to buy out the County Bank as soon as I chose. My predecessor had imported a few Berkshires and Poland Chinas to mix with the wild breed, and the result, Len assured me, was “the best mixtry in the mountains.”[139] Quality had been improved without unfitting the hogs for hardy life on the ridges. Acorns were abundant; sprouting chestnuts could be uprooted until late in the spring. By taking the hogs in midwinter, before the mast began to grow scant, one could find them fairly fat, and two or three weeks in the pen, with plenty of corn to crunch, would make the meat sweet and marketable. Whenever things looked expensively blue on the farm there was always some one to remind me cheerfully of my wild hogs that could be “fotched in an’ cashed quick as nothin’.”

We were having some bright, windless days in January, and Len said to me wistfully: “Ain’t this the hog-huntin’ time, though?”

I was getting close to the wall as to ways and means, so I answered: “Very well, Len. Tell Sam about it and get ready for a round-up to-morrow.”

He was delighted. “I jest been achin’ to git into the woods,” he said. “There’ll be a lot o’ young-uns to mark. ’Course you know what yer mark is, Mis’ Dolly?” I didn’t, and he apologized for my ignorance in a matter so vital. “A woman kain’t be expected to know ever’thing ’bout the hog business. Yer mark is an undercrap in the right year an’ two main smart slits in the[140] top o’ the left. Ag Snead’s got a mark nearly like yorn, only they’s a slit in the right an’ a crap too. It’s a top slit, an’ ever’ hog that’s got the top o’ his year torn off ol’ Ag drives in fer his’n. An’ they’s mainly yorn, Mis’ Dolly.”

“But how do they get their ears torn off?”

“Dogs. We have to ketch ’em with a dog, an’ he gits ’em by the year. Sometimes a blame hog’ll leave part of his year with the dog an’ go on. I’ve hearn ol’ Ag’ll sic his dogs onto yore mark, hopin’ to tear a year off an’ claim the hog, an’ I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“That’s rascality, Len, and Mr. Snead is a deacon.”

“Law, when a man goes hog-huntin’ he puts his ’ligion in the cupboard, so it won’t git hurt while he’s out.”

“Those hogs are mine. I’m going to have a talk with neighbor Snead.”

Len was startled. “Lord-a-mercy! This here’s a country where you kain’t call a man a hog-thief an’ git home by sundown.”

“I won’t call him a thief.”

“No, I reckon you’ll jest inquire ef he’s got any o’ yore hogs in his pen.”

Noting that I duly crumpled, he became protective as usual.

[141]“You see, Mis’ Dolly, they ain’t any way to ’proach a man on sech a subject, less’n yer carryin’ a good gun.”

“We’ll meet at Sam’s,” he told me, “round about ’fore good daylight. There’ll be pap an’ my Ben, an’ we’ll take Burl ’cause he’s got a big dog.”

Burl was a cousin of Coretta’s, staying at Sam’s and trying, with fluctuating success, to court Len’s oldest girl. “A good hog-hunt,” said Len, “will show ef he’s any account, him an’ that dog o’ hisn.”

I managed to reach Sam’s the next morning while the smoky lamp was still burning on the kitchen table. As I approached I heard voices, zestful and happy, but when I appeared in the door there was surprise, then a troubled silence.

“You needn’t been afeard I wouldn’t git ’em off early,” said Coretta. “I been up sence three o’clock, an’ Len an’ Ben come at four. We’d done breakfast, an’ was jest chowin’ till light broke.”

“I’m not hurrying you. I was only afraid that I wouldn’t be in time myself.”

“You’re not going?” all questioned at once, and plunged into talk of the cliffs that I would tumble over, the thickets I couldn’t crawl through, and the “straight-ups”[142] I couldn’t climb. I did not doubt their concern for me, but felt that more was behind their opposition than desire for my safety. In some subterranean way they knew that crafty hints had reached me of their having now and then spirited hogs to neighborly markets, forgetting to share the proceeds with the owner; they knew too, by the same invisible channels, that the tainting insinuations had been indignantly discouraged; yet they suspected me of wanting to keep on their track. After getting up at an heroic hour to prove my full comradeship, it was depressing to run against suspicion, as cold in my confident face as the frosty air of the dawn. But I innocently urged that I was bound for the hunt, that our lives were of equal value, and I would share all risks. After some minutes of talk—genuine even as it veiled the core of discussion—the springs of good humor began to flow, doubt was put to cover, and we were on the road.

Serena was with us. She had come with Len to the meet, and I had heard him insisting on her accompanying me. “You won’t have to go fur,” he said. “She’ll turn back ’fore we git to Broke Yoke Gap.”

Granpap also was of the party. “He kain’t run,” said Len, “but he’ll he’p us more’n you’d think. He caught[143] a big feller last year all by hisse’f, ’cept what little ol’ Bub could do.”

“All right, granpap,” I said, feeling gay and generous as the sun began to warm our mountain, “you can have all you catch to-day. I won’t take any toll from you.”

There was no answer—no thanks. Everybody looked straight into the woods, ostensibly concerned with nothing but sighting a hog; and I knew thereby that my words had been taken seriously.

II

“We ought to git Red Granny to-day,” said Sam, examining the ground where the smoking leaves had been stirred. “Here’s her consarned ol’ broke-toed track. An’ here’s a lot o’ littler tracks. She’s been in an’ tolled out some more o’ our shotes. I bet if we hurried up we’d come right on her.”

“Let’s hurry then,” I urged; for I knew about the old sow called Red Granny, that for three years had proved uncapturable. She kept her inaccessible house on the side of a rough mountain, making her way to it through a great pile of rock by a passage yet undiscovered.[144] Though a good breeder, filling the woods with sandy-haired pigs, she also seemed able to teach them the secret of escape. Bub, who was an old dog, could hardly be made to run a red pig unless it was on his own side of the mountain.

“’Tain’t no use to trail Red Granny,” said Len. “Ol’ Bub leads the dogs, an’ he won’t run thataway. I put him on her trail onct an’ he was out all night. When he come in next day he was too ’shamed to look at me.”

“Well, let’s get somewhere,” I said, feeling the cold in spite of the sun. Then I found I had made a mistake. The first part of hog-hunting is deliberation. There was a long discussion as to the most fruitful direction.

Finally little Ross, who had followed Serena, said, “Let’s go to the sow’s oak,” and to my amazement everybody agreed. “I bet that spotted sow is there with some little pigs, an’ poppie promised me one,” said Ross.

The sow’s oak was a giant tree with a large hollow at the butt, big enough to furnish good shelter for a litter. For years it had been a favorite bedding-place. To find it we had to descend into a cove where there was a clear spring. All stopped for water, though everybody had taken a drink just before leaving Sam’s. The[145] Highlander can go without a meal or two with no inconvenience, but he drinks water in season and out of season. After leaving the spring we passed around the curving side of a hill and came in sight of the tree.

“Sst!” said Sam. “I see her. She’s in there, an’ she’s got pigs. Don’t crowd her now. Keep the dogs back. We don’t want her to git tore, an’ her a-sucklin’ pigs. Y’all stand out here in a circle like, so she kain’t git through if she runs, and I’ll ease up behind the tree. When ye see me bounce ’round to the front to grab her leg, ever’body an’ the dogs bear right in.”

He made a wide circuit and came up behind the tree, but before he reached it Burl’s dog, Bugle, who was new at the game, gave a yelp and the sow sprang out. About a dozen tiny pigs, black-spotted and with delicate pink noses, followed her. All three of the dogs rushed forward and yapped in her face. She bristled to fight, then turned and dashed in the opposite direction, flashing by Sam and leaving him to look foolish, with a knotted rope in his hands. The dogs flew after the sow and the men followed the dogs. Little Ross began to scramble after the terrified, squealing pigs.

“Go after the one with the black spot on its year,” said Serena. “It’s the purtiest.” Ross tumbled after the[146] one she pointed out and secured it. Serena took it into her apron. By that time not a pig was to be seen or heard. They were all under the leaves, behind logs, anywhere they could secrete their quivering bodies. In the distance we could hear the cry of the dogs and shouts of the men. Then the yelping ceased, and we heard the wild squeals of the captive. When we reached the spot the men were looking down on the struggling sow. She was tied by one hind leg, and the other end of the rope was made fast to a young tree.

“She’ll keep all right,” said granpap, examining the knots critically. “Reckon anybody’ll find her here ’fore we git back? The woods air full o’ hunters.”

“Hunters and stealers,” said Len indignantly. “But we kain’t he’p it. We got to go on.”

“She’ll drive in easy,” said Serena. “It’s that sow you brought in last year, an’ I gentled her with slop fer a month.” She put the little pig down by his mother, who became very still as he lifted a nudging nose to her. I wanted to return and find the other pigs, but was swiftly talked down.

“They’ll find the sow ef she’ll squeal loud enough,” said Sam. “They won’t run fur anyhow, an’ we’ll look ’em out as we go home.”

[147]The men had discovered some signs which they were sure would lead to a fine bunch of shotes. “An’ shotes pay,” they said. “Anybody’ll buy a shote.”

The “signs” took us by a very rough way through a damp hollow. Serena declared it was so “blustery” she couldn’t stand it, and persuaded me to turn up the slope and walk along the ridge, leaving the men to push their way below. “They always scour that holler,” she said, “but they’ve never brought a pig out of it.” In half an hour the men came up defeated. Some pigs had been found, but they proved to be in Ag Snead’s mark.

“I’ll tell ye what let’s do,” said Len. “We’ll go to Raven Den side to find that big b’ar hog that’s tuskin’ our gentles ever’ time they go to the woods.”

“B’ar hog” was euphemistic usage, in my presence, for boar. It was humorously incorrect, being similar in sound to the abbreviation for barrow.

“I’m afraid o’ that feller,” said young Ben. “I seen him onct. He suits me where he is.”

“Let’s go fer him,” said Burl. “That sounds like a hunt.”

“I’m ready,” said Sam. “That feller’s too mean to let live. I’ve had to sew up two shotes this week that come in all cut up.”

[148]We were moving slowly along the ridge, and little Ross, who had been running ahead, came flying back to say that he had found a hog sound asleep. We rushed forward and came upon a fine sow lying dead. Len pointed to a bullet-hole in her forehead.

“Is it ours?” I asked, for my mind was set on revenue and this was a dismal beginning. So far we had to our credit only a half-tame sow that would probably have come in of her own accord when food grew scarce—and this. Len flicked the exposed ear of the sow. “You see the undercrap,” he said. Then he pulled the other ear from under her head. “An’ there’s the two slits. It’s a ten-dollar bill you got layin’ there.”

“Ay,” said Sam, “she’s worth ten dollars more yisterday than to-day.”

“Yisterday!” said Len. “She’s shot early this mornin’. She ain’t froze yit, an’ last night would ’a’ froze fire. Whoever shot her is in the woods now, an’ he better not come shammuckin’ where I can see him. I’d have my say.”

“You ain’t goin’ to talk into a gun, Len,” said Serena. “Wha’d you promise me about this hog business?”

[149]“Shucks, Reenie, I ain’t broke no promise yit.”

“Y’ain’t goin’ to nuther. Ol’ Ag’s got more bullets. Reckon I’m goin’ to chance comin’ on you layin’ in the woods like this here sow?”

“Why,” I asked, at last getting in my burning question, “did they shoot the poor thing and leave her here?”

“Oh, she looked slick an’ fine a hundred yards off, but when they shot her an’ come up close they seen she was goin’ to litter an’ wasn’t fit fer meat.”

“What about a stomach that can eat a hog right off the mast?” said Sam. “Ag Snead ain’t more’n ha’f human anyway.”

“’Twa’n’t Ag,” said granpap. “It ’ud take two men to git this hog in home, an’ ol’ Ag is secrety. He wouldn’t want a partner in this kind o’ work. It’s the Copp boys more’n likely.”

“There’s ol’ Aggervation now,” called Ben. We looked ahead and saw a man approaching. It was Agnashus Snead. A boy, big-limbed and nearly grown, walked beside him.

“That’s his nephew, Ted Shoals,” said Len. “’Course they done it! Now watch Ag, the ol’ devil! You’d think he was jest from prayer-meetin’.”

[150]“Howdy, folks,” Snead called to us. He was about seventy, with cool, pink cheeks, and white hair that still kept a youthful ripple. His eyes were golden brown and young as a boy’s. I found myself introduced, and shook hands with him almost eagerly. Oh, no, he couldn’t have done it!

“Any luck?” he asked, and Len pointed to the dead hog. The old man was properly shocked. “They’s some rotten folks in this kentry,” he said, “ef a man knowed where to find ’em.”

“Right, there is,” said Len, “an’ I b’lieve I’d know ’em ef I seen ’em.” His black eyes looked kindlingly into the brown eyes of Snead. Serena pushed in. “Your luck’s all right, Uncle Ag. The boys jest now found a bunch o’ yore shotes down in that holler.”

“Reckon they didn’t have no years tore off?” he asked, repaying Len’s thrust. But no fight was precipitated because he accompanied his question with the frankest of smiles. Serena had often told me that you could say anything in the mountains if you took care to say it laughing.

“No,” put in Sam, with a grin equally disarming, “but if I’s as mean as some folks I’d whacked off their years ragged-like, an’ druv ’em in home.” The laugh[151] went round. Both parties had spoken their minds. Old Ag bent over and touched the bullet-hole.

“Them Copp boys air in the woods to-day.”

We knew what he meant, but if the Copp boys should ever get him cornered not one of us could swear that he had accused them.

“Their gun makes the same kind of a hole yorn does, I reckon,” said Len, with a steady look at Snead’s rifle.

This was going too far. Snead rose up and looked about. He would be two against five, with maybe a woman to claw him from the back. A tolerant smile spread over his face. “It shore does,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, boys. I kain’t take my shotes in with jest Ted here to he’p me. S’pose I hunt with you to-day, an’ you he’p me to-morr’.”

Asking a favor was more disarming than laughter. This was a neighborly appeal, and Len was first, last, and always, a good neighbor. In two minutes we were all on our way to the haunt of the big b’ar hog, leaving the embryo feud, for a time at least, to smother under amenities.

[152]

III

Serena had slyly given me several opportunities to turn back with her. At last she openly rebelled. “Ef yer goin’ down in them rocks,” she said, “I’m goin’ to make a fire on the ridge an’ set here till ye git back, if ye ever do git back.”

“Stay if you want to,” Len told her, “an’ keep Ross to he’p ye pick up brush. Ef we roust that b’ar there’d best be nobody round that kain’t hop quick.”

The entire party gave me a look which was a plain request that I keep Serena company. I was half angered. “Come on,” I said, taking the lead along the ridge. “I hope you’ll enjoy yourself, Serena.”

They stood dubiously, then came on with a shout.

“Yer like my first wife,” said Snead, striding alongside of me. “Nothin’ could head her. You’ve heard ’bout the man that had had three wives an’ when he prayed he would say: ‘God bless Patch, an’ Piece-patch, but dern ol’ Tear-all.’ Now I say it back’ards. My first un wuz Tear-all, an’ I’d ruther have her back than any of ’em. There wuzn’t any government them days. Ever’ feller had his own still ef he wanted one, an’ tended to his own business. Governments hadn’t[153] come inter fashion. I’d say to my wife, ‘Serry, I’d like to cut up fer a week an’ lay drunk,’ an’ she’d say: ‘Go it, Ag, I’ll ’tend to the crap.’ An’ when I got through I’d let her have her turn ef she wanted it, and she generally did. When she wuz dyin’ she says ‘Ag, you’ve been square. You’ve come as you wanted an’ gone as you wanted, an’ so’ve I, bless Jesus.’ ‘Yes, Serry,’ I says, ‘you’ve never been tied to the meat-skillet or wash-pot.’ She laffed then an’ says: ‘I reckon you knowed that string would ’a’ broke anyhow, Ag.’ When she wuz dead I wuz fool enough to think my luck wouldn’t turn, an’ I married agin in about six weeks. Lord, Lord, she cleaned an’ she cooked an’ she mended till I begged her to let up an’ go huntin’ with me. I wuz so lonesome I purty near cried, an’ all she done wuz to git down on her marr’s an’ pray fer my soul. ‘O Lord,’ she says, ‘I’ll take keer o’ his pore neglected body ef you’ll jest save his soul.’ Well, I set in then an’ made her glad to git out. I set down an’ cussed her steady fer two days. She was ready to go the first day, but said she couldn’t till she got ever’thing done. She left my clothes all fixed an’ the house like pie, an’ enough cooked to keep me fer a week, an’ me cussin’ her in a solid streak. She had the grit, but it wuz turned[154] the wrong way fer me. It gives me the all-gonest, lonesome feeling now to think of how she worked an’ worked, an’ all I wanted wuz company. ’Twa’n’t long till she married Ham Copp an’ I reckon he suited her, fer they’re livin’ together yit. It’s her two boys what’s been so near that dead sow back yander, no matter what Len Merlin’s got in his head about it. You kain’t blame the boys, they been brought up so religious. I think a heap of religion, but you got to keep it in bounds er it’s like fire an’ water; it’ll eat ye up. The Copp boys don’t want to be et up, an’ when they gets out they make t’other way, toward the devil. I’m a deacon, an’ pay my dues, but nobody can say I treat my religion too familiar.”

Sam called us to halt, and we paused in a body to look searchingly down over the cliffs where boulders struggled brokenly and trees and saplings scrambled for distorted life.

“He’s down there, boys. I’ll take Bub an’ Bugle, an’ pap to carry the rope, an’ when we find where he is, y’all stretch ’round above us, an’ I’ll go in an’ sic up the dogs. Len, you hold Buck. He’s my dog, an’ I ain’t savin’ him, but bein’ a fox-dog he’s better fer the run, of it comes to runnin’. They’s the masterest ivy thicket[155] ’bout a quarter furder, an’ ef we roust him out he’s liable to make fer it.”

We began the descent, and as I stumbled laboriously downward I thought of Serena sitting by her fire, no doubt singing one of the many ballads which she had learned from her grandmother, and which had probably been sung by a score of generations before her without ever losing its essence in print. I stifled a lyrical regret and clung resolutely to my commercial mood. About thirty yards from the top we scattered and took our stations as Sam directed.

“Ef he breaks out, beat the bushes an’ make a noise like the whole Cher’kee nation full of corn-juice.”

Sam then went farther down, and was beginning to peer cautiously about for the boar when Len cried out: “Hold on! There he is! At the top!”

We looked up and saw the boar above us, monstrously outlined at the top of the ridge. He was huge and black, and my startled eyes magnified him to a fearsome thing. I found out later that he was not of inordinate size. He was poking a nose that seemed several feet long over the verge of a sheer cliff. There were simultaneous howls from the three dogs. The boar’s bristles rose like black Lombardy poplars; and as[156] he flung himself around, his tusks, whiter than the whitest cloud, seemed to circle the heavens. He shot along the ridge, Buck plunging after him.

“Foller him, fellers,” shouted Sam. “I’ll take Bub an’ Bugle an’ make fer the thicket. That’s where he’s goin’.”

Len, Burl, Ted, and Ben began to leap up the mountainside and were soon racing along the ridge trail. I could be of no use in heading off the boar, and after one staggered look upward at the almost vertical slope I decided to follow Sam and granpap. Snead was of the same mind, and we struggled along, swinging from bushes and scrambling over boulders until we arrived at the ivy thicket, which was not ivy at all, but a mass of twisted kalmia from which several great chestnut trees rose in triumph. From somewhere in the tangled interior I could hear Sam’s voice constantly repeating a formula, “Sic ’im, Bub! Sic, sic, sic!”—not loud but in a steady tone, half pleading, half commanding.

Snead crawled into the thicket, and in about ten minutes was back again.

“Sam’s standin’ to his waist in a sink-hole,” he said, “an’ skeered white-eyed. But he ain’t in no danger, the ivy’s so thick round the sink-hole. Bub nor Bugle[157] won’t take holt o’ that thing. They prance all round him, much as the ivy’ll let ’em, an’ keep out o’ the way o’ his tusks, an’ that’s all. We got to have a dog that’ll take holt. Sam says fer me to send Ben down the mountain Pizen Branch way an’ git Jake Sutton’s ol’ dog, Drum. Drum’ll bring him out ef anything will.”

“There’s Buck.”

“Shucks, ef Bub won’t take holt we needn’t wait on Buck.”

“What’s granpap doing?”

“Nothin’ but squattin’ in the bottom o’ that sink-hole wishin’ he’s in prayer-meetin’.”

Snead made his way up to the circle of silent watchers, and Ben was soon flying down the mountain Pizen Branch way. In ten minutes he would be at the foot, but he would have to return slowly by a winding trail, and it would be nearly an hour before Drum could be one of us. In the meantime Sam, with the two dogs, endeavored to keep the boar entertained. Suddenly there was a shriek. A dark body was thrown into the air and fell on top of a thick bunch of “ivy.” “The blood jest sprinkled,” said Sam afterward.

“He’s killed my dog,” shouted Burl from the hillside. But Bugle had received only a skin wound and,[158] scrambling down, crept with viscerated courage to his master. Sam kept on incessantly with the formula, “Sic ’im, Bub! Sic, sic, sic!” and finally called to Len: “Send Buck in here ’less ye want me to git tore up. Bub’s winded.”

From somewhere up the hill Len unloosed Buck, who rushed for the thicket. His entrance was Wagnerian, with a sound that reached the spheres. I had crept forward until I could get black glimpses of the boar as he whirled about, charging at the agile Bub and missing him by a hair’s breadth. With the entrance of Buck he decided to run, and dashed along the “tunnel” that in happier days he had worn to his hiding-place. The dogs tumbled over each other and were slower in getting out. Sam appeared and shouted to the watchers above: “Tear along up there! Ef he gits round the mountain we might as well go home.”

I was at granpap’s heels and going fine, when he fell. He wasn’t seriously hurt, but sat on a rock rubbing his ankle, and I was astounded at the imprecations which he dropped on that “b’ar devil.” It meant more to him than being out of the race. Life had beaten him and gone on, and he knew it. “Reckon they’ll say I done it a-purpose,” he said forlornly.

[159]“Oh, no, they won’t. Sam himself couldn’t have jumped that rock.”

“I’ll set here till the pain gits meller.”

We waited, and the tumult died away and with it my hope of witnessing the capture. After a little we heard a sort of scrambling in the bushes.

“That’s Ag,” said granpap. “He’d git out o’ the run ef he had to break his neck fer it.”

A moment passed and Snead joined us, slightly limping.

“I was jumpin’ a blame rock, an’ it tumbled me off,” he said. “What’s the matter with the ol’ man?”

“Not a durn thing,” said granpap. “I jest ’lowed I’d drap out.”

To show his scorn of subterfuge, he got up and took a few firm steps, then sat down, white with pain but grinning with triumph.

“I’d give my coat an’ shirt to go with the boys,” said Snead. “Ef I hadn’t struck on that sore knee I could ’a’ kept up all right.”

“Reckon I couldn’t,” said granpap. “When I got old I knowed it. Time ain’t slipped nothin’ on me.”

“Well, I ain’t give in yit,” Snead asserted, his yellow-brown eyes shimmering. “These woods’ll be my back[160] yard as long as I’m topside o’ earth, an’ when I’m under it I’ll rattle the dirt ef I can.”

“I’d do a lot myself,” said granpap, “ef I could do it with my tongue.”

Snead’s retort was lost in the returning tumult. The racers were coming back with a rush that made us think of scurrying to refuge. Sam afterward related what had happened.

“When I got out of the thicket,” he said, “I started over the rocks like a jumpin’ spider. Thet ol’ devil went straight like he was goin’ round the mountain, but the dogs kept bearin’ down on his upper side an’ brought him up under a cliff that he hadn’t counted on meetin’. He had to turn on ’em then, but they wouldn’t rush in an’ he wouldn’t rush out. The foam was flyin’ an’ Buck was all bloody. Them tusks had scraped some sense into him, an’ he was standin’ off, yappin’ an’ yowin’. Little ol’ Bub was jumpin’ up an’ down an’ wantin’ like fire to go in, but he knowed better. ‘All we can do,’ I says to Len when the boys come up, ‘is to hold the feller here till Ben comes with ol’ Drum.’ An’ about that time the b’ar decided to come out an’ give them dogs a skeer. You run me in here, he thinks, an’ by golly I’ll run ye out. An’ he lit fer ’em. You[161] never seen dogs so skeert. An’ that’s why we all come back. ’Cause that thing wanted to. He jest rid the saplin’s after them dogs. It was the masterest sight, him goin’ over ever’thing like he had wings in his insides.”

He was “riding the saplings” when we saw him, but we had no time for leisurely observation. We were in the most open strip of the brush and this was the highway for the chase. The dogs seemed divided between fear and shame. They rushed forward with their tongues out, but every few rods would fling their heads back as if to turn on their pursuer; then at sight of him they would give an apparently dying screech and flee forward again.

“Scroonch up to that poplar,” called Snead, “an’ they’ll pass us.” The poplar was an immense one, five feet through at the butt, and was only three or four yards from us; but we had barely time to cross the distance and crowd against the tree before the wild runners flew by. I felt that the earth must be moving; that the whole mountain was a penumbration of that black, vaulting body; the air ought to bleed, torn by those merciless tusks.

They passed out of sight, to our left; and very soon,[162] on our right, we saw Sam. His shoes were ripped open, and his overalls, in strips from his knees down, revealed legs and ankles scratched and bloody. In his hard-set face I scarcely recognized the softly placating features of Sam. As he passed us he was muttering something about old Drum. “Ef ol’ Drum’ll ever git here!” A few minutes later Len and Ted came up.

“Where’s Burl?” asked granpap.

“Back yander, tendin’ that no-’count dog o’ hisn.”

They hurried on, and Len called over his shoulder: “Come on, pap, with yer rope. I hear Ben an’ ol’ Drum. We’ll git him now.”

We listened, and a long, deep, fresh-sounding bay echoed through the woods. Granpap grabbed his rope, dropping his lameness and twenty years of his age. “Smoke yer heels, boys,” he said; and like boys we followed. “He’s bayed agin,” said granpap, as we neared a discord of indescribable sounds. Soon we saw the boar, on top of a lichen-covered boulder, sitting on his haunches, his eyes, like two little black stars, pouring vitriol that ought to have made the forest crumple. The rock itself, with its green, black, and creamy spots and veinlike roots climbing over it, seemed a part of the creature’s body, making a monster as superior to[163] attack as granite, as formidable as if Nature had condensed her forces into his resisting form. The yapping dogs at the base of the rock, and the men with their ceaseless “sic, sic,” were as negligible as squeaking gnats.

Sam was the only one with any apparent dignity. He had yielded to fatigue, and lay motionless on the ground, probably forty feet from me and an equal distance from the group about the rock.

A long musical sound came from old Drum. It was not loud, but of a sure timbre that made the woods quiver. The boar threw up his head and his sides thumped. From my safe distance I fancied a trembling among all the little ruffled scales of the lichens. Suddenly Ben’s young voice called out from somewhere above the rock “Go it, Drum, sic ’im, sic ’im!” and Drum’s huge yellow body vaulted from the slope to the upper edge of the boulder. At that instant the boar shot into the air, curved downward, and struck the ground near the men, scattering them to cover. He rolled for a second, like a knotted ball, then found his four feet properly under him and made straight for Sam.

For a second I felt blinded by a swirling black cloud,[164] then stood clear-sighted in a small but painfully vivid human world. Nature with her everlasting forces retreated and consciousness was trivially reabsorbed in the by-product, humanity. I could even see Coretta, a pale widow, in the country store with a basket of eggs, insisting on an exchange of black percale; and myself distractedly guiding the destinies of her fatherless young.

But Sam was quicker than the boar. With one motion he leaped three feet from the ground, and with arms abnormally long seized the limb of a tree that stretched above him, drawing his body up accordion-fashion and hanging there like a half-opened jackknife. The boar dashed under him and on toward me. I resigned life resentfully. My passion for union with earth was spent. There was nothing but ignominy in being trampled into the ground and muddily tusked.

Drum saved me. I saw him at the boar’s side trying to reach his ear. The boar whirled in defense, and Len cried: “Run, God A’mighty, run!” I supposed he meant me, but I couldn’t move. I had to see whether Drum got that ear or not. My arm was grabbed and I was viciously shaken. “Ain’t you got a bit o’ sense?” That didn’t seem to matter, but when I had been pulled[165] to safety I managed to say: “Thank you, Len, I guess I’ll—faint.” Which I did, but it was not a desperate lapse. I was up in a few minutes, watching the game between Drum and the boar, and commenting on it in a meekly diminished voice.

It was worth seeing. Drum clearly understood his difficulty. He was to get his teeth into the boar’s ear and keep his own body safely guarded from the tossing tusks. They shuttled back and forth, for every time that Drum was near getting a hold the boar would whirl in an effort to drive his tusk into the dog, and this would cause a face-about for both of them. I did not see how the game of wits and muscle could end except by the exhaustion of one or the other; and the boar was doubtless using his last strength. It seemed shockingly unfair for Drum to come so fresh to the contest.

“Be right still; be right still,” Len would say, though nobody needed the adjuration, all being tense and motionless. “Drum’s gittin’ him winded. He’ll land in a minute. Be right still.”

I understood what he meant by “landing” when Drum finally sailed upward and dropped down on the boar’s back just behind his ears.

[166]“He’s got him!” shouted Sam. “Git yer sticks, ever’body. I’ll grab his leg. Y’all be ready to come in, er he’ll tear me up ef Drum’s holt breaks.”

But this time Drum held on, and the boar spun round and round helplessly. It seemed death to approach him, but Sam got behind a rock, lay down, and reached out a long arm, ready to grab a flying hind leg if it should come near.

“Len, you an’ pap git the noose over his nose. Where’s that Burl? Let him an’ Ben hold my legs.” But Burl called from a prudent distance: “He ain’t winded yit. You’d all better keep out.”

“Dern yer white skin,” said Sam, “git back to yer dry-goods box in Asheville. Ben, you an’ Ted ketch holt o’ my legs.” They obeyed, bracing their feet against the rock, getting ready, it appeared, to pull Sam in two. Len, holding a big club, took the dangerous position of granpap’s guard in his attempts to noose the boar. Snead was to tie another rope about the leg if Sam succeeded in grabbing it.

There was a ragged, throaty shout. Sam had him. Snead, too reckless, rushed in on the wrong side and had to rush out again.

“Tie him, kain’t you?” puffed Sam. “I ain’t no[167] snake, I kain’t live in two pieces!” Snead made another rush and got the rope securely tied. This freed Sam, who made a grab for the other hapless hind leg of the boar, and the two were then made fast together. The animal, crazed by the outrage, tossed his tusks in a last desperation, and Drum’s hold broke. The dog was thrown ten feet, just as granpap, by a miraculous move, got the noose around the boar’s nose above his tusks.

“Pap’s done it!” cried Len. And “Pap’s got him!” echoed Sam. “Me fer granpap!” shouted Ben. “Smart fer ol’ bones,” said Snead; and “Hurrah, granpap!” said I, to be with the tide.

“I couldn’t ’a’ beat it,” said Burl, and Len turned on him. “Ef you want to marry my girl, you’ll have to carry a better gun’n I do.”

“You got to pay fer my dog,” said Burl, backing off.

“When hell cools butter,” said Len. “Shet yer mouth ef you can do it with them tight breeches on.” Then his angry spurt was over. “You goin’ to he’p carry this thing in home?”

Burl came trippingly forward and looked at the boar. Forefeet and back were tied, and a long pole thrust under them. Safely trussed, but the tusks looked alive.[168] “I’ll he’p at his hind feet,” said Burl, and laughter rolled over him.

“You walk ahead to keep the bears an’ Injuns off us,” said Len. “Ben, you an’ Sam git aholt the hind end o’ that pole. Me an’ Ted’ll take the front.”

They took off their jackets and, doubling them up, placed them between their shoulders and the pole.

“Won’t it hurt him?” I asked, as they swung their load.

“Hurt that feller? I jest wish we could,” said Sam.

I remembered that the creature was revenue and hardened my heart. We ought to get twenty-five dollars, at least, for him, half of which would be mine, the other half going to Sam and Len.

As it was easier to keep around the side of the hill with their heavy load, and come into the trail lower down, I said that I would go up to the ridge and get Serena. I should be glad to be out of sight of the pathetic monster swinging in torture from the pole.

I got up the hill, and at some distance caught sight of Serena’s fire. She was placidly singing, in utter detachment from little Ross, who was “playing horse” up and down the ridge. The song was her favorite ballad about the cruelty of sundering true lovers. She liked[169] to repeat it; and though she usually began singing in a robust major key, with each repetition her tone would become more plaintive. She was now at her happiest, in an unbearably wailing minor. The girl, persecuted by obdurate parents, had wandered from home

And her lover, being at that very moment on that clear, broad river, and passing that very tree,

“He ran, he r—a—n, he ran unto her,”

and picking up the same silver dagger, he “percht it through his weeping heart,” and Serena sang to the world:

“Serena,” said I gently, “wouldn’t you just as soon say ‘pierced’ as ‘percht’?”

[170]“That wouldn’t be doin’ right by granmommie. She always sung it thataway, an’ she was a hundred and three when she died, an’ died in her cheer. She knowed what she’s about to the last minute. She sung it ‘percht,’ an’ I wouldn’t change it noways. My, but you look like you’d been bee-huntin’ in a locus’ patch!”

“I’ve had a good time, Serena.”

“So’ve I,” she said, getting up. “An’ I didn’t resk my life fer it nuther.”

We were to meet the men at the place where the spotted sow lay tied. Serena and I arrived first by a few minutes, as the men travelled slowly with their burden, and stopped frequently to “change the bone.” We found the sow quiet and sullen. There was only the one pig with her.

“We must find the other pigs,” I said to the men, when they came up blowing and put their load down.

“We kain’t do that. It’s turnin’ colder, an’ it’ll be night now ’fore we git in home with this chap.”

“But they’re so little! They’ll starve!”

“Oh, half of ’em’ll scratch through alive. Let’s go fer water, boys.”

Everybody but myself went round the side of the[171] hill to the spring. I stayed to ponder on the extravagant method of bringing in wild hogs. The thought of those ten or more little black-and-pink creatures shivering in the woods until starvation released them was more than I could passively bear. I looked at the rope, and found it tied in what to me was an unalterable knot. But I could cut it by laying it against a rock and rubbing it with the sharp edge of another rock. I found the stones I wanted and set to work, making the rope as ragged as possible. When the stringy ends dropped no one would have suspected that the rope had been cut. The sow rushed off with her little pig following, and they were soon out of sight. Then I found that I too was longing for water, and hurried to the spring. I knew I should find the others lingering, each wanting to get in one more comment on the inexhaustible subject of the capture.

“We’d better git back,” said Len at last. “Pap, you can drive the sow in. Thanks to gracious, we don’t have to carry her.”

It was an angry and bewildered group that paused at the spot where the sow had been tied.

“Dern her sides, wha’d she mean by layin’ here all day an’ breakin’ the rope at the last minute?” said[172] Sam. “It wuz a good rope too. There wuzn’t a weak spot in it.”

“I reckon it wuz a good rope,” complained Len. “That young-un got holt o’ my plough-lines. I wouldn’t ’a’ give ’em fer that ol’ sow.”

“Ain’t it a cussin’ shame now Mis’ Dolly won’t git nothin’? Ha’f that sow would ’a’ been hern. ’Course the b’ar is pap’s. It wuz pap ’at got in the throw that tied him.”

It was a moment before I got the full meaning of Sam’s words, and when I did my astounded silence seemed to create a slight embarrassment.

“Pap’ll give her a part,” said Len, “ef she wants to take it. Mebbe she didn’t ’zackly mean what she told him ’bout havin’ what he could ketch. It’ll disappint pap, but we ain’t goin’ to have no hard feelin’ ’bout an ol’ b’ar hog.”

“I’m shore glad,” said Sam, “that she saw pap ketch him, an’s got her own eyes fer it. I wouldn’t take a throwed-away dish-rag off’n her underhand. Ez fer her not meanin’ what she said, her word’s as good in the woods as ’tis in the meetin’-house. Ever’body’ll tell ye that. ’Tain’t jest me a-talkin’.”

My inward tumult subsided. There was no profit in[173] rebellion when the elements were against me. I looked at granpap, silent and apart, chewing his bit of dogwood.

“What about it, granpap?”

“What y’all say’s good enough fer me.”

No help there, so I yielded with a gaiety that left them slightly puzzled, not understanding the lubricant value of a good laugh at oneself.

“The victory is yours, granpap. Let’s get him home.”

There was a buzz of spirited talk, all to show granpap that he was to be congratulated. When we started again Snead proposed going by Abe Siler’s.

“He’ll buy that feller right off the pole, an’ we’ll save time by drappin’ him there. Abe’s wantin’ to git a hog to pen right now, an’ he’ll give you six dollars fer that b’ar.”

“Six dollars!” I exclaimed. “Three weeks with all the corn he wants, and he’ll weigh out forty dollars’ worth of meat!”

“It ’ud make a big hole in my pile o’ corn,” said granpap.

“You gittin’ it wrong, Mis’ Dolly,” said Snead. “B’ar meat as old as that feller is stringy an’ tough, an’ don’t make no grease to talk about. Ain’t hardly[174] anybody’ll buy it. Ol’ Abe ain’t pertickler ef he gits it cheap. He’ll take the green meat to Carson an’ sell it. Six dollars is top money fer him.”

“Yer talkin’ right, Ag,” said granpap. “Let’s go by Abe’s.”

We went by Abe’s, and granpap pocketed five dollars for the hog, the buyer considering six a “masterous price.”

Everybody seemed happy going home, except for a few regrets over the sow that got away, and a wail from little Ross for his lost pig. Everybody except myself. I was reflecting heavily in terms of profit and loss. All of my farm-help had given a day’s work; they would give another to-morrow, helping Snead. Four men two days meant a loss to me of eight days’ labor. Coretta would surely shame me into contributing toward new shoes and overalls for Sam. I must also count my disturbing escape from starting a feud; must even consider future entanglements on that score. Nor should I forget the emotional waste due to seeing every member of the party narrowly and frequently elude death from pitching head over heels into a rock-bed. And to its hopeless depths I must consider the probability of becoming indentured to the family of some ghost who[175] had sacrificed his fleshly part in bringing out “my” hogs; that is, if I persisted in exploiting my claim.

Snead dropped back and put an end to my list of contingencies. His voice was intimately lowered and I caught Sam’s eye following him furtively.

“I hate to see a woman git the worst of it when she’s tryin’ to be fair,” he began. “You’ve got a fine hog-claim, an’ you ought to be gittin’ something out of it. How many hogs hev the boys brought in fer ye this year?”

“This is the first time we’ve been after them.”

“’Course, though, the boys hev been out more’n onct amarkin’ shotes?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Well, I do, fer I’ve seen ’em.” He called to Sam. “Sam, how many shotes did ye git marked that day I seed ye out fer ’em?”

Sam did not flinch under the attack. “We marked a fine lot,” he said. “I don’t jest remember how many. I been meanin’ to tell ye ’bout that, Mis’ Dolly, ’cause you’ll be wantin’ to ’low us something fer the markin’. It’s shore hard work. That wuz when you’s gone to Hiwassee, an’ I fergot to tell ye when you come home. I knowed you’d make it all right.”

[176]“What’s it worth to mark hogs, Sam?”

“It’s worth more’n ketchin’ ’em, ’cause we’ve got to ketch ’em an’ mark ’em, an’ turn ’em loose. But we’re goin’ to make it easier on you than that.”

I exonerate Sam from any intention of charging me for “turning them loose.” He was merely embellishing his defense. But by a brief calculation I saw that if I gave half the value of the hogs for catching and bringing them in, and the other half, or a little less, for marking the young, I would have to pursue my profit with a microscope.

Snead again took up his confidential tone. “I ain’t a man fer makin’ trouble, an’ there ain’t anybody in a hundred miles o’ me can swear I ever accused him o’ sellin’ other folks’ hogs; but I wish you’d a gone by Ham Copp’s next day an’ seed what he had in his pen. I ain’t sayin’ what, an’ I never will say what, in court er out, but I ’low you’d know yer own mark.”

Sam and Len had hastily entered upon a subdued conference of their own, and just then Sam called to Snead.

“Wha’d you say, Uncle Ag, ef we don’t he’p ye to-morr’, an’ call it square about them shotes you ain’t paid fer yit?”

[177]He was staggered, taken in the open, but rallied jauntily.

“All right, boys; jest as you say.”

Sam turned to me. “We didn’t tell ye ’bout them shotes Uncle Ag got, ’cause he was in sech a hole ’bout payin’ fer ’em, an’ nacherly we didn’t want to worry ye till we got it fixed. Now he gits our part o’ the shotes fer he’ppin’ us to-day, an’ we’re willin’ to take yore part fer the markin’ you owes us, an’ wait on Uncle Ag fer it, seein’ we made sech a slow trade fer ye.”

By then I was in a position to foretell just the amount of revenue that in all time to come I was going to derive from my claim.

“We don’t want to take any downright money from ye, Mis’ Dolly,” explained Sam. “You’ve never been hard on us, an’ we kain’t afford to be hard on you. An’ by fixin’ it the way I said, ever’body’ll be satisfied, an’ you won’t be out nothin’ but a few shotes.”

“And a few shotes, Sam, don’t matter when I’ve got the woods full of them.”

“That’s what I wuz goin’ to say.”

“A man with the woods full of hogs is in a pretty good fix, isn’t he?”

[178]“Jest about fat rich, Mis’ Dolly.”

“Then you and Len are rich. The hog-claim is yours.”

They thought it a joke at first, and I labored to convince them; then they insisted on my keeping half of it.

“No, boys,” I persisted generously. “That would mix up our calculations. As it is, you’ll know what you’ve got, and I’ll know what I’ve got.”

“You’re right about that,” said Sam.

“I want to say, too, that this deal works backward. If there’s anybody owing for hogs, the debt is yours, and you needn’t ever bother me about it.”

“An’ if any meddlin’ ol’ loafer comes tellin’ ye ’bout seein’ hogs here, there, an’ yander, in other folks’ pens, from time back,” said Sam, with the dignity of righteousness, “it won’t be wuth a blue bean to him.”

“I’ll send him to you and Len. It will be your affair, not mine.”

At that, Len came over to me. His face was serious but glowing. “I knowed you’s white,” he said, “but I didn’t know jest how white you wuz. Abe Siler’s beggin’ me underhand to leave you an’ work on his place. Next time he asts me, I’m goin’ to bust my knuckles on them two big front teeth o’ hisn.”

[179]Len, who was noted as a “clean-crop-man,” was the most coveted tenant within three townships. I had bought his loyalty cheap.

Sam, of coarser but shrewder mind, spared me any disconcerting gratitude. Before their early bedtime I was to hear his comment to Coretta, who was shedding grateful tears.

“Aw, shet up, K’rettie. I reckon she’s got sense enough to know that the woods full o’ hogs ain’t wuth much to a woman.”

I

“BUT where do they sleep?” my “foreign” friends would ask, with the impertinence of civilization, whenever they returned from a call at the shack where Len and Serena, after nightfall, compressed their spreading family into two rooms and a loft.

With a light answer I would callously shunt investigation. “Oh, Serena tucks them away!”

Rectitude, founded on bathtubs, with privacy at one’s mere discretion, had lost its power over me during the years in which I had hoped for a season sufficiently free from disaster to enable me to add two morally indispensable rooms to Len’s cabin; nevertheless the desire hung like a vague compulsion in the back of my mind, unaffected by the indifference of Serena, who, oblivious to restriction, remained the smiling magnet of her swarm.

I did go so far as to give Len the lumber from an old house which I had torn down with the luxurious intent of lining my own cabin from the material. I found that[181] it contained enough sound chestnut to provide an ample kitchen for his house, and we spent a happy evening making the plans. There was to be a big fireplace, built by Uncle Ben Copp, an authority on chimney structure, and plenty of “shevs,” about which Len was enthusiastic, though Serena, innocent of industrial vision, liquidly inquired: “Whatever’ll I put on ’em?”

Len was to build the kitchen. He was untrained, but not inapt, and rarely finished a job without a proud touch of invention that gave him as much pleasure as the pay he received. But, as the only member of his family possessing the slightest energetic fire, “ever’ turn was hisn,” and he was always two or three years in the rear of his more ambitious intentions. The lumber made a promising stack in the back yard, and occasionally during the season that followed, Len would say to me: “Reckon my work’ll ever let up so’s I can git at that kitchen?”

The pile gradually receded, very noticeably after a few days of rainy weather, and by the end of the second year it had withdrawn to invisibility. No one ever spoke of the kitchen again, and I would have been the last to mention it; but when the winter winds found the crevices in my cabin and, with the gaiety of discoverers,[182] attacked my spine, I thought longingly of my lumber that had disappeared in Serena’s cook-stove; and one day I had the pleasure of hearing Si Goforth ask, as he passed through Len’s yard, whatever they’d put their stack o’ chestnut into? Getting no answer from a hurt and silent group, he added slyly: “A lumber pile nigh the house is as bad as a rail fence; it sucks itssef.”

I never had the hardihood to probe into the sleeping arrangements of Serena’s household; but I could see the two beds in the room where they kept a fire, sat and talked, picked the banjo and received their company. I knew there were beds in the loft for the boys, and that granpap placed his own there when he chose to live with Len and exchange, for a time, Coretta’s fidgety ambition for the cheery fatalism of Serena. There was no bed in the room where they cooked and ate, but this was for lack of space only. The necessarily long table, benches, and chairs devoured any vacancy left by the cook-stove, cupboard, and water-shelf. From chance remarks I gathered that if visitors were men-folks they ascended to the loft; if women, Len went above, leaving the guests below with Serena and the girls. There were “ticks” which could be placed on[183] the floor when the beds overflowed, as they did quite frequently. Just where they were put was something to wonder over, but I kept the whole matter in a sort of kindly murk, waiting the day when I should be able to act with deference due to an articulate conscience.

Because of Serena’s apathy toward gardening, canning, drying, and preserving, and her persistent habit of letting the children “run along and milk,” the family diet through the greater part of the year was without surprise or adventure. Corn bread, coffee, fried meat, ’taters, and ’lasses satisfied hunger, with no concessions to either infancy or age. Let me not forget pickled beans. That dish was a mainstay for babe and man. But notwithstanding the depressing fare, there was always company at Len’s. Constant good humor and unflagging welcome made for an open house. “Stay with us,” Len would say, and add the mountain jargon, which in this case was almost literally true: “We can give you plenty o’ spring water, pickled beans, an’ satisfaction.”

Sometimes I tried a carefully padded remonstrance, such as: “Don’t you think it is too hard on Serena to have so much company?”

“Reenie don’t bother hersef. They take what comes.”

[184]“With so many children, Len, you’ll kill yourself soon enough without providing for others.”

“You kain’t call what I give ’em providin’. I tell Reenie to hand ’em out some salt an’ let ’em pick ’round the yard.” And with his laughter filling the air, he would rush off to whichever of his many jobs was driving him the hardest.

My approaches to Serena were alike futile. I have good reason to remember the last one, which took place on my front porch one Sunday morning.

“We’re bound to take keer o’ the Madison folks when they come out,” she said, in response to a tentative protest from me. “The Merlins used to live back there, an’ so did all o’ my folks.”

“But Len isn’t the only Merlin around here.”

“He’s the one they think the most of anyhow,” she returned proudly.

“They’re not all from Madison. What about the people from over the ridge?”

“As to them, Mis’ Dolly, you know as well as I do that we’re up here half-way ’twixt all o’ Nighthawk settlement an’ the stores an’ post-office down at Beebread. When them folks git on top o’ the mountain, goin’ er comin’, they’ve got to set an’ rest. Ef it’s[185] dinner-time, of course I lay ’em a plate, an’ ef it’s leanin’ toward night you wouldn’t want me not to ast ’em to stay. A barn cat would be civiller than that an’ let ’em sleep in the hay.”

“There are other houses on the ridge, Serena.”

“Yes, here’s yorn right here, but you’re livin’ by yersef an’ company makes trouble. I’ve got sech a big fam’ly I don’t notice it when a few more drap in. Lots o’ times,” she continued, in an attempt to save my feelings and underrate her own popularity, “they say to me let’s go round to yore house, an’ I know you’re busy, so I tell ’em we’ll go after we set a bit. Then I wait till it’s too late to come over. ’Tain’t because they don’t like you, an’ don’t you git to thinkin’ it.”

I had understood that Serena always interpreted me favorably to the community, but I had not realized until that moment how much I owed to her sense of proprietorship in me and my affairs. More eager than ever to reciprocate, I pursued the argument.

“You haven’t explained Sunday. Very likely you’ll have to cook dinner for half a dozen people to-day, besides your own family.”

“I’m sort o’ expectin’ it. Some young folks told[186] Lonie and Ben they’s comin’ up to-day. You’re always sayin’ let the childern have a good time, an’ I reckon you wouldn’t want me to shet off Sunday. There wouldn’t be much left fer ’em.”

She knew I would find this unanswerable, and thus encouraged entered on doubtful ground.

“Har’et Drake said maybe she’d come too, with her man an’ the young-uns. She said they’d take dinner with you er me, one er t’other.”

“With me?”

“Har’et thinks a heap o’ you, but maybe she’ll stay at my house. I knowed her out in Madison.”

My eyes sought their familiar refuge, the horizon, and even as my glance swept the hill it fell upon Mrs. Drake, her man, and the five children in undeviating approach. Serena’s eyes followed mine.

“Looks like they’re comin’ here,” she said. “They’ll git a better dinner anyway. I ain’t got what I ought to hev fer anybody that’ll climb all the way up here jest a-neighborin’.”

I gave the guests a welcome which I hope did not reveal a daunted heart. There was still a chance that they would go with Serena, and my day of sun and solitude be restored to me. The Madison influence[187] might prevail. Unexpectedly I found myself blessing that contemned affiliation.

When Serena rose to go she proved to be the preferred hostess. Mr. Drake had brought a banana muskmelon from home, which he left with me in gentle propitiation for his desertion; and as the family accompanied Serena around the curving road I may have had a slight feeling of humiliation but no sense of injury. I knew that as an entertainer I could not compete with Len and Serena. They were reservoirs of mountain song and story, and their lingual flow never permitted a conversational vacuum. No wonder that I was passed by.

Serena undulated from my sight, but left illumination behind her. In a whirl of emotion I went to my smoke-house and took down from my store as much as I could carry in a generous basket, and, taking a back trail, brought the stuff to Serena’s kitchen door while her guests were “chowing” with Len on the front porch.

“The gardens haven’t come in yet,” I apologized, when Serena appeared at the door, “and I was afraid your canned stuff had given out.”

It was always out by Christmas, and this was April.

[188]“Yes,” said Serena, “it’s jest about gone. An’, I declare, I was out o’ sugar an’ lard too! I’ll shore pay you back.”

“Never mind that. The Drakes don’t get up here often. I want you to set them a good dinner.”

“I told Len,” she said, with a touch of triumph, “that he’d got it all wrong ’bout you not wantin’ us to have so much company. I told him you’s as free-hearted as ef you’s born in the mountains.”

With humbled step I turned into the trail home, and never again offered any admonitions against excessive hospitality.

Through the spring and summer I continued to make apologetic contributions to Serena’s table, glad in this way to lessen any debt of festivity that I owed the community. A more trustful spirit seemed to reign on the mountain, and there was a happy impetus toward no one cared what. All might have gone well for a much longer period if, toward the end of the summer, I had not become too deeply concerned over the emaciated appearance of little Ross, and the fact that Len, long overburdened, showed signs of failing health, apparently evident to none but me. An encounter with Serena brought my feelings to the surface. She came in one[189] day to tell me of an incident that had amused her “past common.”

But here I should explain that Serena insisted on “raising” ducks every year. I had striven in vain to induce her to transfer her love from the unprofitable duck to the remunerative hen. Ducks amused her, and at first I shared her pleasure when she took me to see a brood that had just “broke through.” A nestful of chickens is tame in comparison with ducklings that seduce the eye with their deeper, ineffable downiness and their constant vibratory motions that seem to annex the air to their twinkling contour. As they grow older the entertainment deepens. The rôle of parent, for good reasons, is enacted always by a hen, and she will soon learn to wander unconcernedly on the bank while her charges are diving and paddling in the water, but it is another matter when, a little after sundown, she attempts to hover ducklings that are determined to straggle about until after dark. The desperate mother wears herself out clucking, squawking, and spluttering as she tries to prevail upon the rebels to change their nature and go to sleep. Sometimes they impishly gather under her and are quiet for a moment, then as soon as the hen is in a merciful doze, out they come. The[190] morning also has its drama, for the ducklings are awake and ready to run about before daylight, while the hen is still longing for sleep. Throughout the day she will droop from weariness and distractedly revive to pursue her duty unthanked and derided.

As time passed, Serena’s ducklings remained out later, and finally would stroll home, drabbled and noisy, around nine o’clock. In the early morning one might see the hen roaming disconsolately without an offspring to cheer her, all of her brood being far in the woods searching the little streams and wet banks for the food ancestrally beloved. Their number lessened as wild creatures devoured them. Even dogs considered them rightfully their own, if found far from the barnyard, and by the end of the summer Serena would be as duckless as at its beginning, but she had had many a pleasant, shady jaunt in search of them “outdoin’est things.”

“I’ll try again,” she would say. “Duck-feathers make sech good pillers.” But she never got a feather.

On the day I have mentioned, she rippled in and said: “You know I set that gray hen on duck-eggs again.”

“So late in the year? Of course you’ll lose them.”

[191]“I’d lose ’em anyway,” she said, surrendering fundamental ground for temporary defense. “An’ I want to tell you ’bout that hen. You know what an awful time that first set give her this summer. They wuz the head-longest bunch I’ve ever had, an’ they kept her about crazy. I wouldn’t hev set her again ef there’d been another hen ready. I felt sorry fer the pore thing. To-day it wuz time fer her to come off an’ I went to the nest to see about her. I didn’t hear no yeepin’ an’ I stood around fer a good spell. All at onct there come a ‘yeep’ like a slit—you know how different a duck’s ‘yeep’ is from a chicken’s—an’ when that hen heard it she jumped off the nest an’ flew fer a smart stretch a-squawkin’ like she wuz skeered crazy, an’ run up the hill out o’ sight, an’ I ain’t seen her sence she took off. ‘Yeep,’ an’ she’s gone! She’d been showed, that gray hen had.”

“Serena,” I said, determined upon judgment, and refusing to smile more than once, “it is time for you to quit fooling with ducks. There are so many things you could be doing.”

“What things?”

“Your spring needs cleaning out. It is full of rotting leaves.”

[192]“Yes, I’ve been wishin’ Len could git time fer that.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?”

“It ’ud ruin a spring fer a woman to clean it out.”

“It was a very lazy woman who started that superstition, Serena. I clean my spring all the time.”

“Yes, an’ it ain’t what it used to be. I’ve been noticin’ that. It’s druggy.”

“Because the fine roots of that big maple have reached it. I’ll have Len take that tree out as soon as he gets time.”

“Looks like he gets busier ’n busier.”

“Of course, when the children are getting bigger and bigger and are not doing their share of the work. Len is killing himself trying to bring in enough for ten.”

“The boys don’t take after their poppie. An’ if they did, it wouldn’t keep him from workin’ as hard as he could anyhow. I do all I can fer him.”

“You could give him better food.”

“Ain’t beans good?”

“Didn’t you notice yesterday that Len left the table without eating a single bean? He was hot and tired—and pickled beans! He drank a lot of coffee and ate two bites of yellow bread. Then he went to the field to work until night.”

[193]“I ain’t ever heard him complain.”

“You never will. He’ll die believing you are the only woman on earth.”

“He ain’t goin’ to die.”

“No. You are going to quit living out of a lard can, a coffee bucket, and a pickle barrel.”

She was crying a little. “I ain’t got cans fer puttin’ up stuff,” she said.

“I’ll look out for the cans, Serena. You know you can work. I’ve seen you.”

“But I kain’t keep it up.”

She knew her weakness. Work one day and rest six was her version of the great example.

“Lonie will help you, and the boys. Len will plough and harrow all the good land you want for gardens and patches. We’ll put in a fall garden too, and have all kinds of green things through the winter—spinach, lettuce, collards, turnip-tops, celery—besides the keepers, parsnips, carrots, salsify, sweet potatoes put up in sand—and beans!”

I rushed on, with plans undigested but dazzling, and her few tears dried in shining twinkles. “I’ll try,” she said, “if you’ll keep right after me.” I smiled too, and she started home.

[194]“I wonder where that gray hen is by now,” she turned to say. “Ef you’d seen her when that duck-diddly yeeped, you’d be laffin’ yet.”

II

Serena tried. Her lifelong acceptance of things as they happened had kept her unaware of the complexities of an occupation made up of a jumble of industries, as farm life must ever be until the ferment of organization begins to heave effectively in the mind of the last individual, the man on the land. But she was favored by nature with a good brain, and began to be pleased when she found that it would work.

A neighbor made a dress for Lonie and the product was so hopeless a bungle that Serena, perforce, had to attempt remaking it. With no help from me except the initial urge, a trifle imperious, perhaps, she got at it, and the result was so charming that I asked in surprise why she had taken it to Mrs. Hite.

“I didn’t feel like foolin’ with it.”

“But you see you did have to fool with it. And you had to wash for Mrs. Hite in exchange for the sewing.”

“Washin’s easy if I’m feelin’ good. It kinder bothers[195] my head cuttin’ an’ sewin’. But Lonie is takin’ on so about that dress, I reckon I’ll have to mess with her clo’s from now on.”

“No, teach her to make them herself.”

“Lord-a-mercy, she’ll have to pick it up like I did. Don’t you git to pushin’ me, Mis’ Dolly, an’ maybe I’ll make it through like you want me to.”

She had the same success with the boys’ shirts. They had been accustomed to one sleazy shirt for Sundays and rags for work-days. Now, released from the commercially constant grays and drab blues of the cheaper ready-mades, they could, for the same money, buy material for two and have the thrill of selecting from an assortment of specks and stripes and colors of their heart. One Sunday when Len and Serena halted by my doorstep on their way to “preachin’ over the ridge,” I noticed that Len was uplifted by a modest lavender stripe. “I’ve been wearin’ them ol’ dingy shirts to meetin’ fer twenty years, an’, Lord, I’m sick of ’em,” he said, with a proud eye on Serena, the worker of miracles.

No more time was spent in following an ever-dwindling flock of ducks. Serena and I, with the help of Ned, patched the cover of an old building, treated it with[196] mite-proof whitewash, and with planks and clean straw made nests irresistible to any hen worthy of her keep. For the diddlies, we carried strips from an old sawmill and made coops which we could set about in sunny places. And Len sowed an acre of rye for green winter picking; also a “skiver of wheat” which was to be all Serena’s, as a basis for “feed,” but I suspected that the hens would anticipate that harvest—and they did.

In the spring, over at Len’s, a bountiful garden was in the ground early. It had been my onerous but measurably happy custom, if my intermittent journeying permitted, to cultivate a garden for my own needs, the surplus going, as kisses do, by favor, which meant that Serena had her share. But now—could I not buy of her? I had derived from my gardens a savory pleasure, superior and cryptic, but with ever-growing rebellion I realized that my method was the method of the spendthrift instead of the canny reckoner.

Take, if it please you, the most responsive of plants, lettuce. Consider its history from its origin in a seed catalogue (carefully conned instead of that haunting, unopened book of essays) to its final surrender on your dining-table, gold-white in its depths, and crackling crisp from an earthen jar set in your clear, cold spring.[197] Think, if the nuances of appetite permit, of the digging, the fertilizing, and the pulverizing of the soil, the preparation of new beds for transplanting, the transplanting itself at the time most propitious for the product, however inopportune for you, the guarding against heat, against cold, against drouth, against beating rain, the covering, the uncovering, and the rising early at last to uproot it with the night cool in its heart; all demanding a thousand thoughts and movements before its æsthetic finality can complete your dinner scheme and perish, it may be, under a tooth indifferently devouring mere lettuce. And so with those tender, early limas. So too, and a little more, with that dish of creamed something. And if your nucleus is broiled chicken, as it must often be, the alternative being some form of hog—chicken brought up from the egg under your proprietary eye; if your periphery include blueberries that did not fall of themselves from the ridge on the peak to ennoble your meal; and if the cream is the velvety sequence of a wet and weedy climb to the top of the pasture in pursuit of a thankless cow, pampered from your own corn-crib, that merely lifts her head and watches your stumbling, bedrabbled arrival to the last inch; the thought of being[198] able to “buy from Serena” will be a warm and driving glow in your heart. For such an end I, prudent at last, was willing to forego any mystic succulence to be secured from the participation of this my hand in the birth and growth of my edibles.

The injustice of letting the burden fall to Serena did not trouble me. She had a family to save, I had none. With her it was duty; with me it was an interruption of duty. But if my reasoning was fallacious, if my aim was besmirched with selfishness, if my intended liberality as to prices was only the bare gesture of reciprocity, I was ready to say, so be it. I was under the spell of that most alluring of hopes, the hope of combining the simplicities of nature, the abandon of the wilderness, the austere ecstasy of solitude, with the flowing market of the city voluptuary.

And so there was a bountiful garden at Len’s. It required tact amounting to technic to get all of the family help necessary in its preparation, and when finally it shot up with its promise of abundance, I felt that I had perspiringly insinuated it into and out of the ground. However, there it was, and the summer passed, leaving us affluent with the plunder we had wrung from it.

[199]But happiness had fled the mountain. Slowly, reluctantly, in my contact with the family, I became aware of the desertion—even felt it in my own denuded days. Formerly I had accepted Serena’s occasional help, knowing so well that I was not withdrawing her from imperative tasks at home. Now that was changed, and with a vengeance that demanded more than a reversal of favors. My time was never my own, calculated and indubitable. Daily it became more difficult to comfort myself with thoughts of “next year” when Serena’s reformation would be thorough and her work so adjusted that she at least would have time to run over to my cabin and remove the ashes from my big fireplace. I could never take out those relentlessly accumulating ashes without a protest to the stony gods; while Serena had often declared that she enjoyed doing it. “It makes the place look so clean and purty,” she would say, and go at the work with the heart of an artist. My thoughts began to linger tenderly on the days that were gone, days adorned with a dilatory, unprovident, laughter-loving Serena, who could always find time to take out my ashes.

I recalled that she had had a special gift of service for each of us, and began to see in that the secret of[200] her power. Ben cared for nothing so much as to have his one pair of trousers pressed for Sunday morning, when overalls were cast aside and he arrayed himself for courtship. Serena, unfailingly in the old days, had made this her Saturday-night job. Len could strain contentedly through the longest day of work if Serena would sit down after supper to hear his tale of it, and his plan for to-morrow; and it was her habit to take her seat by his side as soon as he had left the table and cut off his “chaw” of tobacco. If the children washed the dishes, very well. If they didn’t, or wouldn’t, cleaning up was deferred until morning, without protest or friction. Lonie loved music, and Serena not only traded her pet pig for a banjo, she never interrupted her daughter’s strumming, giving it an importance above any urgency of the moment, such as bringing water when the kettle was sizzling dry, rescuing a line of clothes from an advancing shower, or pulling a toddler from the bank of the stream that ran through the yard. Such minor duties Serena unhesitatingly assumed if Lonie happened to be lolling on the bed, her eyes on the ceiling, and her banjo on her stomach, while she drew out the chords to accompany such highland classics as

[201]

For her own pleasure, Serena demanded a neat appearance. Others might sling their rags and wear caked overalls, but a trim garb was her unquestioned privilege. Of late it seemed to me that the imp of untidiness had more than one finger upon her. That certainly meant unhappiness for herself. Then what did it indicate for the others? Their special right, too, was ignored, along with my fireplace.

But what began to give me real anxiety was the change in Serena’s expression and bearing. She was showing a network of fine wrinkles on her forehead, and beginning to walk with a slight, straining stoop, akin to Len’s—a stoop that had begun to reproach me in my dreams.

I was pondering all this one morning when I heard the chirp of Aunt Janey Stiles. “Why’n’t you go to preachin’ to-day? You’ve got a meetin’-house face on ye.”

“Oh, Aunt Janey! Did you stay on the mountain last night?”

[202]“Yes, I wuz so tired when I pulled up from Beebread yisterday that I stopped at Reenie’s an’ slept there. I ain’t goin’ to do it agin though.”

“What’s the matter, Aunt Janey?”

“The devil, I reckon. When I woke up this mornin’ I thinks fer a minute I’m at Dan Goforth’s, where the roarin’s as steady as the wind in Peach Tree Gap. I couldn’t b’lieve I’s at Reenie’s. They all slept late, ’cause it’s Sunday, an’ Ben got up an’ built a fire. Then he kept tryin’ to git his mother up, ’cause she hadn’t pressed his pants the night before, an’ he wuz aimin’ to go to meetin’ on Nighthawk. He kept stompin’ around, and jerkin’ the cheers about, and then he begun to swear. Right then Len bounces out o’ bed. Maybe he wuz sleepy er something, an’ didn’t understand it, but anyway he jumps up when Ben begins swearin’, an’ takes up a cheer an’ runs him out o’ the house with it, an’ him ’thout shoes on an’ hit frosty.”

“Len didn’t do that!”

“I ain’t astin’ you to believe it.”

“But he’s foolish about Ben.”

“He’s a sight bigger fool about Reenie though, an’ I reckon maybe he thought Ben wuz cussin’ at her.”

“Aunt Janey, this is terrible!”

[203]“I thought I’d drap by an’ tell ye. I felt like you ought to know there’s something spilin’ the peaceablest family in the settlement, and you’d better find out what it is.”

Aunt Janey went off, leaving me to unhappy reflections. Toward night I had a visit from Len. Of old it had been his habit to call out some witty greeting as he approached, but now his appearance was pathos unrelieved. He took a chair and began to talk of far-off matters, but I refused to be led around Robin Hood’s barn, and hurried him, slightly bewildered, to the object of his visit.

“We wuz gittin’ along all right,” he said, “till Reenie began to want ’tater patches in the moon.”

“You are getting along all right now, Len. Isn’t that old store debt nearly paid, that you used to say kept you awake nights?”

“Ay, that’s quit brogin’ round my bed, but I don’t mean things like that. I mean they ain’t any satisfaction in livin’. It’s been nigh three weeks sence Reenie set down by me an’ kept still long enough fer me to tie the first word to the next one. She’s cleanin’ up, er churnin’, er gittin’ the childern’s clo’s fixed fer school, er clearin’ something er other out o’ the way so she can[204] put in a full day to-morr’, she says, like next day wouldn’t have any hours at all. She don’t hardly take time to nuss little Ross, an’ him lookin’ like he ain’t goin’ to be here another year.”

“You’re looking better yourself, Len. You weigh more, don’t you?”

“Oh, I know we’ve got more to eat an’ to put on, but I’d ruther wear a feller an’ a wench, an’ set down to corn bread an’ coffee, an’ see some satisfaction. Lonie slips out with her banjo an’ goes to Bob Ellis’s, an’ that boy o’ Bob’s ain’t fit company fer my girl. It’ll come to something bad shore. An’ Ben is cuttin’ up like he’s goin’ to marry that no-’count girl o’ Jem Ray’s. It’ll be a sorry day fer Reenie ef he brings that thing in. Reenie’s worried to the bone, an’ coughs haf the night so she kain’t sleep. I don’t want her to be like Dan Goforth’s wife, a-strainin’ up hill and down, pickin’ strawberries, an’ blackberries, an’ buckberries, an’ dryin’ fruit, an’ cannin’ peaches, an’ runnin’ after chickens, an’ if ever she sets down a minute he says: ‘Nancy, looks like ye’d take better keer o’ that something er other, an’ me workin’ so hard to keep the fam’ly off the county,’ an’ she ups an’ goes at it agin. Her pore little hands, you could see to read through[205] ’em, an’ she’s so scant you could put her in a matchbox mighty nigh, an’ hit full. I don’t want Reenie to git thataway. When I married her I didn’t count on gittin’ much help. I knowed she wuz like her father, Uncle Lish Bates, out in Madison. He wuzn’t a workin’ man by natur. Six hundred acres o’ land wuz what he owned, an’ when one o’ his fields got wore out he would pick out the richest piece on the place, where the big timber growed, an’ cut a dead-ring around the oaks an’ chestnuts an’ poplars, an’ next year when they’s dead he’d chop out a hole in ’em an’ set fire in the hole, an’ it ’ud never go out till the tree wuz burnt up, less’n it rained, so he didn’t have clearin’ to do, only pilin’ brush. In the winter he’d go out an’ git him a big bunch o’ wood an’ bring it in an’ stack it up in the corner, high as he could. Then he’d make a big fire an’ set an’ tell the masterest tales so long as they wuz anybody to drap in an’ listen, an’ when they wuzn’t he’d jest set an’ sing. He couldn’t read a book-word, but he knowed ever’ song from Noher down. Nothin’ ever made him mad, an’ he wuz so clever round his house that folks said ef the devil wuz to come along, Uncle Lish would set him a bite an’ sing him a song, then tell him the way to the next place. I thought I wuz[206] gittin’ something like that when I married Reenie. I knowed I could work hard enough fer both of us, an’ ef I wanted to do it I wuz my own fool an’ nobody else’s. But here’s Reenie goin’ against her own sef, seems like, an’ so different I’m about to fergit where I live. I want you to go an’ talk to her, Mis’ Dolly. That’s what I’ve come fer. She’ll listen to what you say.”

“Hadn’t you better talk to her yourself, Len?” I asked, feeling appropriately uncomfortable.

“She might snap me up. She’s never done that in her life, an’ ef she did, I’d never fergit it. I ain’t goin’ to resk it. If I kain’t live peaceable with my own wife, we’ll bust the quilt right now an’ quit.”

He knew, of course, the part I had played in the change that afflicted Serena, but in his eyes, pleading so humbly for her restoration, there was no reproachful sign. I made him no promise further than agreeing to talk with her next day, but that was enough to send him home in a hopeful mood. Something had to be done, but it was not yet my intention to advise Serena to abandon her industrious course. A way of adjustment must be found. Contentment ought, and surely would, follow thrift.

[207]It was nearly sundown the next day before I could feel ready for the promised talk. I found Serena sitting in her kitchen, flapping a straw hat to cool her reddened forehead, though we were well into autumn. A bucket of wild gooseberries was on the floor by her chair. She had just come from Three Pine Ridge, she explained. The gooseberries were very thick up there.

“Didn’t you get tired, Serena, with such a climb?”

“Tired wuzn’t nothin’. I reckon the ground hurt fer fifteen feet around me. An’, Mis’ Dolly, I’ve quit.”

There was a brief silence between us, then she entered upon her defense.

“’Tain’t no use fer you to say you’ll hep me any more’n you do now, ’cause you kain’t. Len said last night it looked like you wuz gittin’ sort o’ keen an’ sharp-natered, an’ I told him it was on account o’ you runnin’ over here so much, an’ me no time to go to yore house an’ hep ye out in a pinch. He said he’d a lot ruther I wouldn’t do so much at home an’ hep you a little, ef that wuz what it took to keep you easy. But it looks like from the time I begin in the mornin’ to git the childern off to school——”

“And how well they are doing, Serena! The teacher[208] has been telling me. They look so happy in their new clothes, and Lissie and Tom are getting fat too.”

She took no notice of my trivial interpolation.

“An’ find all their caps an’ ’boggins an’ fix their dinner to carry, an’ something always to be mended ’fore they can start, and the cows waitin’ to be milked, an’ you tellin’ me to milk ’em on the stroke o’ the clock, the same time ever’ day——”

“And you’ve been having plenty of milk and butter. That’s a triumph, Serena, in a big family like yours.”

“An’ ever’ dish an’ pot to be washed, an’ the house to redd up, all before I can begin a day’s work, an’ Lonie a-sulkin’ ’cause I want her to take holt o’ the sewin’ while I’m puttin’ up stuff, an’ Ben, he used to think there wuzn’t nobody but me—” Here her voice shook slightly and she tacked about rebelliously. “But I ain’t keerin’ what they all think, I’m goin’ by my own feelin’s. An’ I’ve quit. I come to it up there in the late roas’in’-year patch. I went by there as I come from the ridge with this big bucket o’ gooseberries, which was heavy enough without a pile o’ roas’in’ years in my apern, but you said I must git another big mess ’fore the frost struck ’em heavy, an’ that field was plum full o’ pack-saddlers. One stung me ever’ time I laid my[209] hand on a roas’in’ year. Hit hurts worse’n a hornet fer a minute, an’ it’s harder on a body’s temper than a hornet is. Hit makes you feel bad all over an’ inside too. An’ this mornin’ I put on them sandals you give me to easy my feet, an’ by four o’clock they had me broke off at the ankles. I reckon my feet take a different kind o’ easin’ from yorn. An’ here’s these gooseberries got to be legged ’fore I can git supper, so’s I can cook ’em while I’m bakin’ bread, an’ save stove-wood. Ben is rearin’ an’ pitchin’ all the time now ’bout me usin’ so much wood, an’ leavin’ me to git it mysef haf the time. I’m so tired I know I ain’t goin’ to sleep none to-night.” Then, with a desolation in her voice that made my eyes suddenly hot, she added: “My sleep is all I git.”

I was stricken silent, and she began again. “They’re goin’ to bury Uncle Nathe Ponder to-morr’, an’——”

“Oh, Serena, is Mr. Ponder dead?”

“He died a Saturday. The Freemasons are comin’ out from Carson to bury him proper, an’ here I am tied up with fixin’ things to eat next winter! I ain’t had a chance to look inter the door at Uncle Nathe’s, an’ him been sick three months.”

“He was a good man, by all accounts.”

“Yes, I wonder why the Lord didn’t take shif’less ol’[210] Med Pace ’stead of a good man like Uncle Nathe, but I reckon He don’t want all the culls. ’Course Uncle Nathe had his way ’bout most things, but he was shore a good man. Never was a widder that couldn’t go to his mill an’ git a bushel o’ meal when she didn’t know where else to go. They got to callin’ the bottom o’ the meal-sack ‘Uncle Nathe,’ round in Silver Valley where he lived. When the meal was out they’d say: ‘We’re gittin’ down to Uncle Nathe.’ The Freemasons ought to give him a proper funeral ef they’d give it to anybody. Len says Arn Weaver wants to take a load o’ folks in his car, ef it don’t rain. Ef it rains he kain’t git over Red Hog Gap. I’ve never stept inter a car, an’ it would put heart inter me to git to go. I didn’t even see the baptizin’ on Nighthawk when they’s fifteen hit the water. An’ there’s Sis Long’s baby I ain’t ever looked at. It’s the first one she’s had in three year an’ they’re all so proud they’re buttin’ stumps about it. Hit don’t seem right to lay sech store by eatin’. Ef we ain’t got time fer dyin’ an’ bein’ born, what hev we got time fer?”

“Serena, how big is that car of Arnold Weaver’s?”

“It’ll hold seven scrouged in the seats, an’ you can pack in as many young-uns as you want to.”

[211]“I don’t suppose you could get the children ready to go to the funeral to-morrow.”

“No, I’d have to wash their clo’s all around, an’ do some mendin’. I couldn’t git ’em ready if I stayed up all night.”

“When Len comes in I want you to tell him to get word to Arn that we’ll go in his car to-morrow. We’ll leave Ben with the children and take Lonie with us.”

“You kain’t git Len to stop fodder-pullin’. He never done that in his life. Him an’ Sam ain’t brothers when it comes to takin’ fodder.”

“He’ll stop, Serena.”

Her eyes were like great jewels. “Them gooseberries’ll sour ’fore I git back.” But, as if afraid that I would take second thought, she appended hastily: “I don’t think much o’ gooseberries anyway. They’ll look about as good to me a-spilin’ as a-keepin’.”

III

We went to the funeral, and Serena and I remained in Silver Valley for a day and night, the guests of Aunt Lizy Haynes. When we returned it was the old Serena who came home. The factitious disguise of the[212] past twelve months had dropped utterly away. She assumed my acquiescence, and received it. Her utmost effort had been given, and my way had proved a failure. Therefore her own was better, and she returned to it with conscientious abandon. Her silence, in regard to her long, faithful struggle, grew, I think, out of her gentle pity for my defeat. Possibly she loved me more, but that was the crowning seal of my descent, marking the fall of authority. With time and tact and no mistakes I might again give oracular advice, but for the present my “mouth was growed up.”

Serena’s floor was not scrubbed, but my fireplace was neat once more, and my house shone with her occasional presence. Ben returned to week-day rags, but his Sunday trousers were always ready. Lonie lolled at home and picked the banjo, lazy indeed, but a vestal in no danger of perjure. Len found “satisfaction,” with Serena’s chair touching his in the firelight. He would grow thin again on coffee and untasted beans, but his smile would endure. Little Ross was happy with his mother’s arms waiting at any time. Of all the children he was the one that showed no improvement during Serena’s period of reformation. He might die of malnutrition, but tragedy—is it not the[213] commonplace of life? And happiness the rare fortune? I questioned Serena for the hundredth time about the boy’s diet. Oh, yes, he was eating eggs right along. But this time I was not satisfied with a meagre affirmative.

“How many does he eat?”

“I don’t keep no count. He goes to the nest when he hears a hen cackle. You told me the fresher they was the better they was, an’ I told him he could have ’em soon as they’s laid. He brings ’em in, gits him a spoon o’ grease, an’ cleans the ashes off the fire-shovel an’ cooks ’em on it right then.”

“But he can’t get them soft that way.”

“Oh, he kain’t eat ’em soft like you showed me how to fix ’em, jelly all through. They make him sick thataway. I thought it wuz better fer him to eat a hard egg than no egg at all. He cooks ’em till they couldn’t be no harder ’thout burnin’ up. An’ he takes enough of ’em. I kain’t look around, seems like, ’thout seein’ him cookin’ one. He’s drinkin’ milk, too, only he ain’t had none sence yisterday ’cause we’ve been out o’ coffee, barrin’ the grounds I boiled over fer Len.”

“What has coffee to do with it?”

“He kain’t take milk less’n it’s about haf coffee. He learned to drink coffee when he was a baby, an’ he[214] won’t take milk at all ef I don’t mix it up good with coffee. Then he’ll drink a lot of it. Yes, he takes plenty milk an’ eggs, but I kain’t see its heppin’ him a bit. He rolls about all night, an’ talks in his sleep, an’ gits up a-frettin’ till we kain’t stand him. I have to take him on my lap an’ nuss him like a baby ’fore he’ll quiet down. Len’s always sayin’, ‘Reenie, fer the Lord’s sake, take the pore little feller,’ an’ as soon as he gits on my lap he thinks he’s all right. An’ him ten year old. Ef the big uns git to be babies again I don’t know what I’m goin’ to do. I kain’t git on with my work a-settin’ backside to it all the time.”

But no one could smile in Serena’s heavenly way and at the same time be sincerely pining to get on with her work.

During her frictionally industrious year, the stream of company had somewhat lessened, but within a month after her return to the old smiling status it had resumed its normal flow. As time passed, the family larder was heavily, though genially, touched. The children’s winter store of “balanced rations” melted away in hospitable warmth, the cows dribbled their milk uncertainly, and if butter appeared on the breakfast-table, the small saucer was much augmented by a big bowl of gravy[215] made of half-cooked flour and grease, which at least was “filling”; and so long as the holiday atmosphere prevailed, every one, family and visitors alike, was superbly indifferent to dietary monotony.

I did not resume my encouraging contributions, and probably this was taken as a hint of disapproval, which caused a slight tension between our houses. One day near dark, when I found that Serena had to provide for nine sleepers besides her own ten, I offered to take three of the small children home with me, and met a dignified refusal. She “wouldn’t think o’ troublin’ me noway.” I went home, my conscience narcotized, and feeling a sort of admiration for Serena’s resourcefulness. But about bedtime she appeared, a little crestfallen, and said: “I reckon I’ll have to let the young-uns come over this onct. Uncle Med Pace drapped in jest now with two o’ his boys, an’ I ain’t got another tick I can put down. Ef it wuzn’t sech a cold night I could make out with a pallet, but we need all the kivers on the beds.”

I told her I should be glad to have the children, perhaps overdoing my heartiness because of her evident compunction. When she left, to send them over, she observed the highland punctilio of asking me to accompany[216] her and spend the night. This with no sense of the ludicrous. It was immemorial custom, from which any deviation, under any circumstances, would have seemed boorish.

The next time I was called upon to receive the overflow from her cabin there was less reluctance in her manner, and the third time it was done with such ease of spirit that I said testily: “Serena, why don’t you take boarders and get a little pay for your trouble?”

About a week afterward I passed Len’s on my way to Beebread. The house was a hundred yards distant from the main road, with only two gigantic apple-trees intervening. An old man, assisted by Serena, was removing plunder from a strange wagon before the door, but I knew better than to stop and investigate a happening so unusual. If I waited, I should eventually hear all about it; if I inquired, I should hear only the least that could be told me. Not to appear prematurely curious, I kept away from Len’s cabin for two or three days. Then I sauntered over. As I approached I heard screams so eerie, so full of anguish, that I ran staggeringly to the house and fell against the shut door. The windows had sheets pinned over them, and the door was carefully fastened with an inside bar. Years passed,[217] it seemed, before Serena came to the door and made an aperture large enough to admit of her passage onto the porch.

“It ain’t nobody but pore little Viny,” she said. “Do you want to come in and see her?”

“Can I help you?” I asked faintly.

“No, there kain’t anybody do fer her but me. She told me before she took her spell what to do. I’ve got to git back to her now, but me an’ Len’ll be over to see you after supper.”

I walked feebly homeward, and waited. Serena and Len came a little late. She explained this by saying: “I have to be sort o’ behind with my supper ever’ other day now. Viny don’t git over her spell till it’s turned five o’clock. You know we’ve been tellin’ you for a long time about Uncle Mace Morgan’s girl, Viny.”

So they had, I dimly recalled.

“She’s been wantin’ to come an’ live with us ever sence her mother died a year ago, an’ Uncle Mace brought her up the mountain Wednesday, with her bed an’ things.”

No longer dimly, but in a flash of apprehensive light, I recalled the story of Viny Morgan. She was a cousin of Serena’s. When a child of thirteen, she had been the[218] victim of a disease that had left her with a withered leg. The youngest of her family, and of an endearing disposition, she had tripped about happily on crutches until she was twenty-one. At that age she was stricken by a malady that produced acute crises of pain. As the years passed the pain increased and the crises came in regular periods every other day. For hours she would struggle in a crazed, semiconscious way, and only her mother could “manage” her at these times. After the mother’s death, the father did what he could for his daughter, while he kept looking about distractedly for some one to relieve him. Serena had the courage and the kindness, but deferred her consent, I think because she and Len in some vague way forefelt my protest.

“You know, Mis’ Dolly,” said Serena, “after you told me I ought to take boarders an’ git pay fer keepin’ folks, I thought ef there was anybody in the world I ought to take it was pore little Viny. She’s goin’ to give me five dollars a week, an’ she ain’t a bit of trouble only ever’ other day when she has her spell. Hit comes on around one o’clock an’ stays till about five, jest four hours is all it is, an’ I don’t have to do anything but set by her an’ rub her, an’ keep her from bitin’ me when the pain gits so bad she’s out an’ out crazy.”

[219]“Serena, are you telling me that you can sit by her and hear her scream like that for four hours?”

“Her mother done it fer twenty year, an’ it wuz harder fer her than fer me. Somebody’s got to take keer of her, an’ Uncle Mace is mighty nigh dead over it. He kain’t hold out like a woman. Five dollars a week’ll hep us a lot. You can git them cloaks you wanted fer the childern, now I’ve got a way to pay you. Ef I can earn it adoin’ what the Lord tells us is our duty, I’m glad o’ the chaince. ’Fore you make up your mind about it, Mis’ Dolly, I want you to come an’ see Viny. Come when she’s feelin’ good, so you can get acquainted. The young-uns are plum foolish about her, an’ I kain’t keep ’em off her bed.”

“Where is her bed, Serena?”

“It’s in the corner by the fireplace. It scrouges us a little, but Len fixed a bench at the foot o’ the bed, an’ the childern set on that an’ keep warm. There wuzn’t room fer Viny’s bed ’twixt mine and the girls’. Viny is shore sociable an’s been wonderin’ when you’ll come to see her. She can crochet the purtiest, an’ gits money fer it, but Uncle Mace don’t know it. Her mother left her a hundred dollars, all in five-dollar gold pieces, that she’d saved up aslippin’ eggs to the store, an’ sellin’ off[220] chickens quiet, an’ makin’ rugs fer them summer folks at Carson. She told Viny to git more ef she could, an’ go to the hospital with it. Uncle Mace never would hear to her goin’, an’ that’s why Viny won’t tell him about the money. He says she’ll never come back alive, an’ he’s agin the hospital awful. He b’lieves the devil gits inter pore innercent Viny to punish him fer some meanness he done onct, an’ he says God will drive it out in His own time. I told him it looked like God would ’a’ put it in him ’stead o’ Viny, an’ he said it hurt him worse fer Viny to have it, an’ he had to work, bein’ a man. ‘You’re too old to work now,’ I told him, ‘an’ maybe if you prayed hard, the Lord would put it inter you an’ let Viny off fer a while,’ but he said it wuz best to let God work it out in his own way. Viny, though, she kinder wants to try the hospital, an’ that’s why she won’t tell him about the money. You’ll take to the pore little thing soon as you look at her, Mis’ Dolly. Len said the day Uncle Mace brought her up the mountain that we ought to go an’ see you first, but I told him I’d lived by you long enough to know what you’d say ’thout askin’.”

Her eyes were bright with appeal. Len was straining anxiously over her shoulder. What could I do but beat down my anti-Samaritan intellect and surrender them[221] to their own undoing? I don’t remember what I said, but when they left me, and I held the lamp to light them across the little bridge in the yard, I saw that they were walking hand in hand, as they liked to do when sharing a supreme pleasure.

IV

I went to see Viny.

They had helped her from her bed to the fireside, and she talked, softly eager, while her slim hands were busy with a needle and Serena’s quilt-scraps. Without a knowledge of her age, I should have taken her for a frail girl in her twenties. She had the profound gentleness and mystic smile of one recently released from intolerable pain. They were all proud of her. Lonie took her advice as to the pattern of a new dress. Ned brought her an enormous apple whose keeping qualities he had been testing. Len came to the house for a drink when he could more easily have gone to the spring, because he had thought of something that would make Viny laugh.

Her illness was not mentioned until some one spoke of her mother’s long devotion. Then her warm, hazel eyes were lit with idolatry.

“At first,” she said, “my attacks come hit or miss, and it was awfully hard for mother to plan her work.[222] She had everything to do at home, and no help except father. They were all married off but me. I prayed fer my spells to come reg’lar, and after a while they did. Then mother could lay out her work, and get on all right.”

Her disease was terribly real, there was no doubt of that; but I wondered if, through concern for her mother, she had actually psychologized her crises into periodicity.

When I left the house Serena accompanied me a few steps. Len joined us, eager to know what I thought of Viny, and it was easy to say all that they were longing to hear.

“I knowed you’d like her,” said Serena. “She offered me one of her five-dollar gold pieces to-day, an’ I was ashamed to look at it, knowin’ all about her savin’ up fer the hospital. I made her put it back in that little bag she carries her money in. She don’t eat but onct a day. Then it’s only a little butter an’ a ’tater. I couldn’t think o’ chargin’ her fer a ’tater. Sometimes she’ll taste an egg, but she brought three hens, an’ I git more o’ the eggs than she does. She brought her own bed an’ kivers, so I kain’t charge her fer sleepin’. She lays there, not botherin’ anybody, an’ ever’ other day when she’s[223] not out of her mind, she heps me piece quilts, an’ I kain’t tell you the things she’s patched.”

“Perhaps you ought to pay her, Serena,” I said, but the irony did not penetrate.

“She wouldn’t let me do that. She says it’s only right fer her to hep me. No, she wouldn’t take pay fer piecin’ an’ patchin’.”

I was about to ask Serena why she couldn’t let Viny pay her for the service she received, but happily for me, I was forestalled by Len.

“Anybody,” he said, “that would take pay from Viny fer the leetle mite she eats would be so stingy they’d screak. An’ Reenie kain’t charge fer waitin’ on her. Ef there’s anything plain in the Bible it’s how we ought to take keer o’ the sick.”

“About them cloaks, Mis’ Dolly, you got fer Ray an’ Lissie,” Serena remembered to say, “I’ve studied out how I can pay you back by makin’ a fire an’ milkin’ fer you when the weather’s bad. I reckon that would suit you same as money.”

“Oh, a lot better, Serena!”

“I thought you’d like that,” she said, with a countenance as joyful as if the debt were already paid.

As the weeks passed I found there was only one objection[224] to Viny as a member of the household. Her “bad day” interfered with company, particularly if it fell on Saturday or Sunday. During her attacks, light and sound were like blows, and before entering on her torture she would implore Serena to keep the room darkened and silent. This meant that family and guests had to crowd around the little kitchen stove, impossibly subdued, until Viny “come out of it.” At those times I avoided the house and its immediate region. Never in my life had I watched the calendar so closely, fearing that I might make a mistake and hear those screams again. But once I ventured over on a “bad day,” waiting until five o’clock, when Viny would be “getting through.” I listened and heard only a low moaning. Serena let me in. Viny’s pretty head was weaving agonizedly, and in her broken moans I could distinguish an anguished appeal for help. “She’s bearable easy now,” said Serena, returning to the task of rubbing her patient’s head and arms and back.

I went to the bed and looked at Viny. Of her eyes, only the whites could be seen. It was hard to believe that within an hour they would be soft, dark, intelligent. The sight was too ghastly, and I retreated to the porch. After a few moments Serena came out.

[225]“She’s still now,” she said. “She’ll lay there quiet fer haf an hour, then she’ll be all right, only awful weak.”

I looked closely at Serena. It was clear that she was failing. “You can’t hold up at this,” I said, grasping at the commonplace.

“I could ef folks would change off with me onct in a while. I could hold up fine. But what you reckon that ol’ Ann Hite said when I sent her word I’d wash fer her ef she’d come an’ stay with Viny jest once? She said it ’ud take a year’s washin’ to pay fer that.”

“Serena,” I said, firmly defensive, “you needn’t look about for people as good as you are. They don’t exist.”

“I tried to slip out from Viny the last time, an’ let Lonie stay with her, but it wuzn’t more’n two er three minutes ’fore Lonie come runnin’ out cryin’, an’ showed me her wrist bleedin’ where Viny bit her. Viny cried awful about it when she come to, but Lonie won’t try it any more, so I’ll jest keep at it. I ain’t got to come over an’ hep you any ’bout milkin’ an’ makin’ fires, but you see how it is, an’ I reckon you don’t blame me. I’m studyin’ out how I’ll pay you some time.”

“Don’t speak of it again, Serena,” I replied, thankful to have escaped the degradation of lying in bed[226] and letting her come around the curve in the freezing weather to milk for me.

A month, perhaps, went by, and the influenza began to climb the mountain. As it drew nearer, I thought of Len’s household, with two invalids already in the crowded cabin, and the prospect took my breath. One morning about daylight I heard Len’s voice calling me, and hurried down the stairs to hear the worst.

“Reenie wuz took last night. Looks like she’s goin’ to git bad off. An’ I’ve come to ast you whatever’ll I do about Viny?”

“Is this her bad day, Len?”

“No, that thing don’t tech her till to-morr’.”

I knew what he was expecting me to say, but I launched a surprise that astounded him.

“Then hitch up as quickly as you can, put her things in the wagon, and take her back to her father.”

His lips made two or three quivering attempts at speech. “I thought maybe you’d——”

“No, Len. I can’t take care of Viny. I won’t take care of Viny. And the only thing you can do about it is to take her back to her father.”

“I reckon I’ll have to,” he said, in dazed dejection.

“How long will it take you to get off?”

[227]He glanced at the first rays of the sun, then said: “Two hours’ll do.”

“Then in two hours I will be over to say good-by to Viny and take care of Serena until you get back.”

He went, his long, stooped back plainly telling me that I had been weighed in the balance and struck the beam of heaven.

For about two weeks I was kept in close attendance on Serena and the children. Just as they were getting up, it came my turn to go down. Neighbors, far and near, were ready with kind help, but it was not until Serena walked in, a little pale yet from her own convalescence, and looked down at me with her blue eyes almost hazel dark with feeling, that the temperature of the pillow under my head dropped to a hopeful point. The bland movements of her hands seemed to be fulfilling an old desire. Behind her was the generation of Uncle Lish, who could sit and sing till the fire was out; and hovering with her presence was the never-defined equation that rescues from loneliness the edge of the grave. It did not trouble me to know that on my recovery I was going to be as foolish about Serena as Len and her children.

After I could sit in my chair, it was as good as hearing[228] gentle music just to see her on the other side of the fire, her hands in her lap, with the placidity of eternity doing nothing at all. One day she spoke of Viny.

“I reckon you was right about Viny. I didn’t know how scrouged we wuz till I got to stayin’ over here with you. Seems like they’s more’n as many agin of us now, an’ when we all try to git around the fire, some of us kain’t see the blaze, let alone feel it. When they’s company the childern have to set back so fur they’re too cold to git their lessons.”

It was then that the vague trouble about those two unbuilt rooms crystallized in my mind with unbearable clearness. By some economical turn or twist, I would get them put up.

“Serena,” I said, “I’m going to have enough lumber hauled up the mountain to make two more rooms at your house, and I’ll have Cleve Saunders build them if Len can’t get the time.”

“Oh,” she cried joyously, “me an’ Len wuz sayin’ last night how fine that would be! I reckon he’d better not go after pore little Viny till you git ’em done.”

I

WE were on our way to see Uncle Nathe Ponder buried. Serena was as happy as she could be with decency, considering our solemn destination. She had not been away from home for several months, and her joyous reaction could be suppressed only intermittently. But, at any time, her laughter was pleasantly low of key, as if she were softly trying it out before subjecting you to the full flow that never came.

And Serena was infectious. I had set out with my mind meditatively intrenched on the going down of men into the grave; the passing of man himself, of earth, of suns, of systems, with no full-grown hope of any immortal salvage; but Serena, pulsingly aware in a significant world, soon restored me to stature as a member of a community bent on giving due honor to one whose days among them had been spent with the vividness that amounts to virtue among a people who look to life for their drama instead of the stage and the morning papers.

[230]We had left home early because of Len’s prediction that we should have to walk after reaching Red Hog Gap, the entrance to Silver Valley. “But we’ll be in two miles o’ the graveyard then,” he said, “an’ can pick it up in no time.” Uncle Nathe’s farm lay in Silver Valley township only four miles, by crow’s wing, northwest of mine, but the descent over cliffs and crags was hazardous, and we had set off in exactly the opposite direction, walking the two miles down to Beebread, where Arnold Weaver was waiting on the new highway with his car—the first automobile to become a local pride in our part of the mountains. We soon sailed over the few miles of highway and reached Scatter, the next railroad-station below Beebread, where we turned into the narrow mountain road leading to Uncle Nathe’s country. Here we began to come upon people who were walking to the funeral, and it was here that our car, through Len’s cordiality, became so firmly packed. He extended invitations until the seats, the floor, and the running-boards would hold no more. “You’re payin’ fer the whole car,” he said, “an’ might as well git yer money’s worth.”

We were bouncing heavily along over the rutty road when ahead of us we saw a young man whose brisk step[231] was certainly not of the highlands. There were various unsuccessful conjectures as to his identity, and suddenly Len called out: “Hey, Arn, stop yer shooter! It’s Ann Lindsay’s boy!”

“He’d have to set ’tween yer big toe an’ the long un,” said Arn. “I ain’t goin’ to stop no more.”

“But he’s come all the way from C’lumby to be at Uncle Nathe’s buryin’.”

“He didn’t walk only from Scatter.”

“I’ll jump out an’ let him set in my place.”

“You ain’t got any place. You’re settin’ on the tip aidge o’ nothin’.”

But Arn stopped the car. “Here, Bake,” said Len, “I’m gittin’ out, an’ you hop in. Reckon you know me?”

“Len Merlin!” cried the stranger. “You caught that fox yet?”

“No, he’s waitin’ fer ye.”

“Can’t get him this trip. Got to hurry back. Go on, Arn, with your baggage. I’m walking to rest myself. Been on the train since last night. I’ll see you all over the hill.”

His refusal of the “seat” was positive, and we moved on, but not far. We were climbing the hill leading to[232] Red Hog Gap, and Lea’s prediction came true. The car refused to take the last lap over the hill, though we gave it an opportunity to do its best, by dropping out and scattering as readily as overripe plums from a suddenly shaken bough. With good cheer we began our walk to the graveyard. When nearly there we were overtaken by Bake Lindsay, and Len picked up their broken conversation.

“What yer hurryin’ to git back fer? You ain’t been in sence when?”

“Not since I was married,” said Lindsay, “and that’s five years. I started soon as I heard about Uncle Nathe.”

“Is he really a nephew of Mr. Ponder?” I asked of the woman walking nearest to me, for with the whole country calling him “uncle,” the blood-kin were left without distinction.

“No, he ain’t no nephew,” she said, in a tone that I had learned to recognize as a shut trail in Unakasia. The story was not for me, an outsider. Even Len and Serena had turned a gently impassive front to my very reasonable interest in Uncle Nathe’s family history. But Serena now stepped up and said intimately: “Jest wait, Mis’ Dolly. We’ll go to dinner with Aunt Lizy Haynes. Uncle Nathe’s half-brother, Ranz, is stayin’[233] there, an’ he’s shore to let loose after the buryin’. When Uncle Ranz lets loose it’s something else, I’m tryin’ to tell ye. They won’t be any more questions to ast when he gits through.” Then she moved over to Bake. “It’s fine, yore comin’ in, Bake,” she said.

“Of course I wanted to be at the funeral, but,” he explained honestly, “I’ve come mainly to get mother.”

“She goin’ back with you?” cried half a dozen voices.

“She’s promised to. I’ve been trying to get her to come out to me and Jenny ever since we’ve been married.” Then his voice seemed to struggle a little. “Before we tied up, Jenny gave me her word that she’d be good to mother, and I know she’ll keep it.”

“You got any young-uns?” asked Len, and Bake said he had a little boy. They had named him Nathan.

“That tickled Uncle Nathe, I reckon,” said the woman who had answered me the moment before. Then she hastened to cover her indiscretion. “’Course y’all have been on his place a long time, an’ he’s been mighty good to ye.”

“He’s been good to ever’body,” said another.

“I reckon he has,” said Bake, and we entered the graveyard.

It was to be a Masonic funeral. Uncle Nathe’s popularity[234] would have drawn a large attendance, but the presence of the Fraternity made the occasion an event in Silver Valley’s history. Nathan Ponder had been the only Freemason in his township, a member of the distant lodge in Carson, and for years he had not been in active attendance there, but he had left a request to be buried by the brethren, and they had gallantly responded.

“That’s Elmer Jenkins,” whispered Serena of a man who was prominent in the ceremony. “He’s a lawyer, come up from South C’liny ’bout a year ago, ’count of his wife’s health, an’ settled in Carson.”

“Looks like,” said another voice, “that they could ’a’ got along ’thout a furriner to tell ’em what to do.”

“He’s high up in the lodge,” said Uncle Ranz Ponder, the half-brother of Uncle Nathe, “an’ he seems mighty frien’ly.”

The old and impressive service was solemnly conducted to the end, and there was a general breaking-up, amid a conflict of invitations for everybody to go home with everybody else for dinner.

“We’ll go with Aunt Lizy,” said Serena. “They’s a lot been astin’ me, but they ain’t none of ’em pulled the buttons off my clo’s tryin’ to take me with ’em, an’ I[235] know we’ll be full welcome at Aunt Lizy’s. Uncle Ranz, he’s her cousin, he’ll be there, like I said.”

So Mrs. Haynes’s invitation was accepted. Serena and I were to stay until the next day, but Len and the daughter, Lonie, were to return that evening to look after the children, the cows, and the chickens.

The brethren who had come out from Carson returned to town, with the exception of Lawyer Jenkins, who, probably, was thinking of profitable affiliations with the remote but fertile valley. I observed him reading the headstones around the new-made grave, and it seemed to me that he was afflicted with a growing concern. He turned, with a question, to the man nearest him, who happened to be Len.

“Am I to understand that our good brother was married four times?”

“You shore air,” said Len. “There lays four of as good wives as a man ever had. Them tombstones don’t tell no lies. They’s all ’fore my time, savin’ Aunt Lindy, his last ’un, but I’ve hearn enough to know what they wuz.”

“But four? Isn’t it a little unusual?”

“Well, maybe it is, but Uncle Nathe wuzn’t no hand to set at home by hissef.”

[236]At that moment, to Len’s apparent relief, Aunt Lizy came up, and we found that Mr. Jenkins also had accepted her invitation. He walked with her husband, Uncle Dan’l Haynes, and I gathered from drifting fragments of their conversation that Mr. Jenkins was still on the trail of Uncle Nathe’s connubial history.

At the dinner-table he pleased all of the guests by introducing the topic from which they were politely holding back. “I have been learning from our kind host,” he said, eying with favor his selected piece of fried chicken, “what this loss means to the community.”

“Yes,” some one responded, “it knocks all of us, losin’ Nathe does.”

“There is some property too, I believe. I trust there is harmony among the heirs.”

“They’re all behavin’ fine,” said Aunt Lizy, with some heartiness.

“Our brother was married several times, I understand. Did—er—all of his wives leave issue?”

“Young-uns? No, Aunt Lindy never had any, ner Lu Siler, but Callie had a little feller that died—Rufe, they called him. An’ Ponnie, his fust wife, left four, all livin’ yit. They git along together fust-rate.”

“I wonder what Ponnie would ’a’ said,” reflected[237] Uncle Dan’l, “ef somebody had told her Nathe wouldn’t be buried alongside o’ her.”

“Well,” said Uncle Ranz, “I’d ruther not hear what Ponnie would ’a’ said.”

“I say it ought to ’a’ been Lindy he wuz laid by,” asserted Aunt Lizy. “She lived with him the longest an’ worked the hardest.”

“She didn’t think a grain more o’ him than Lu Siler did,” returned Uncle Dan’l.

“Our brother expressed no preference?” inquired Mr. Jenkins.

“You mean which un did he want to lay ’longside of? No, he wuzn’t a man to put one wife ’fore another. He left that to us.”

“Very thoughtful, I take it,” said the lawyer. “A strong character certainly. I am sorry I never knew him.” And he mused a little on the bed-rock qualities of the old mountaineer.

“We meant,” explained Uncle Dan’l, “to lay Nathe by his fust wife, Ponnie, but when we dug down there we struck a rock that would ’a’ had to be blasted out, an’ we’s afeard it would shake up the graves. We couldn’t lay him t’other side o’ her, ’cause her two childern wuz there, an’ then come Lindy, his last wife, so[238] we decided to dig jest beyant Lindy. But about four feet down we come to water that turned ever’thing inter mud—it wuz that spring, I reckon, that sinks inter the ground above the graveyard—an’ we had to go to the upper row where Callie an’ little Rufe an’ Lu wuz layin’. We couldn’t put him by Lu, ’cause she wuz in the aidge o’ the Ponder lot, right next to Randy Hayes in Bill Hayes’s lot, an’ it jest had to be Callie er nothin’.”

Comments followed, various and spirited, with citations of other instances, historic and contemporary, and the dinner was over. Mr. Jenkins regretted that he must leave us. He was urged to stay, in the politest highland manner, but when the door had closed behind the respected “furriner,” the immediate relaxation in the air showed that the hour of restraint had been heroically prolonged.

“Harmony!” exclaimed Aunt Lizy. “An’ there’s Angie Sue claimin’ ever’thing her daddy had. There won’t be a scrap left when they all git through fightin’.”

The general glance slanted toward me, and I began to think that I ought to have disappeared with Mr. Jenkins, though the fact that I was under Serena’s native wing had done much to vouch for me.

[239]“I don’t reckon Bake Lindsay’ll mix up in anything,” said Pole Andrews, with an eye carefully diverted. “I seen he wuz at the buryin’.”

“Wonder what he’s back here fer?” said another, equally disinterested.

“He’s come to git his mother,” Serena easily announced.

“Ann!” came from several voices.

“That’s what he said. You heard him, Mis’ Dolly.”

She turned to me with careless confidence, and I responded with an uncritical smile that embraced the company.

“Oh, yes! He has come in for his mother. She is going to live with him and Jenny.”

I knew everything then! There was a stir of abandon, and an eager voice asked: “You don’t think that Bake can tech any o’ the property, do you?”

“’Course he kain’t,” said Aunt Lizy, before I could recover from the direct appeal. “Anybody knows that.”

“You are right, Mrs. Haynes,” said I, now clothed in authority. “He is not entitled to a single thing. Though, of course, I’ve never heard the whole story. I’ve been wishing some of you would tell me everything just as it happened.”

[240]“Ranz there’ll tell ye,” said Aunt Lizy. “He thinks his tongue’s got a mortgage on ever’thing abody could say about Nathe Ponder.”

“Ef I’ve got sech a mortgage, Lizy, you’re always scrappin’ to git yer name on it.” Then he turned to me. “If I tell it, I’ll have to start at the fust of it. I never could hit the middle an’ go on.”

“All right, Uncle Ranz,” said one of the younger men. “That’s what we want. I reckon this is the last time we’ll all corcus over Uncle Nathe.”

“Y’all keep Lizy from pesterin’ me then, an’ turn that feist out, some o’ ye.”

II

“Nathe took me to live with him an’ Ponnie,” began Uncle Ranz, “when they’s fust married. I wuz about ten years old then, an’ I’ve got to say it fer Nathe, he wuz as good to me as a daddy. He wuz thirty years old when his fust trouble come up, an’ he’d been married turnin’ onto ten years. Him an’ Ponnie had four childern a livin’ an’ two dead.”

“You wuz there, Uncle Ranz,” put in a guest, “the very day o’ the trouble, wuzn’t you?”

“I wuz right there, but ef I’m goin’ to talk it will[241] have to be on my own time an’ not yorn.” There was a chastened silence, then he continued amiably: “Ponnie had been spittin’ fire fer two er three days, an’ the childern wuz dodgin’ her. I wuz grown up by that time, an’ could look out fer myself. Nathe an’ Ponnie had been plum crazy about each other when they got married, but they had black eyes pineblank alike, an’ I’ve noticed that don’t work out as well as when you marry a different color. Nathe’s hair wuz curly, though, an’ Ponnie’s wuz straight an’ long. It wuz powerful thick, too, an’ she could twist it an’ wrap it round her head big as a dish-pan mighty nigh. I’ve hearn she had a drap o’ Cher’kee in her——”

“That wuzn’t so, Ranz,” Aunt Lizy interjected. “Me an’ Ponnie wuz the same age, an’ run together from the time we’s out of our cradles, an’ ef there’d been any Indian in her I’d ’a’ knowed it.”

“You’d ’a’ had to know her gran’mother, I reckon. Anyways I’m jest tellin’ what I hearn. There wuz a woman up on Sawmill Creek that folks said wuzn’t much good. She had hair as yaller as honey, an’ as sprangly as a stump full o’ gran’daddies. It begun to seep around that Nathe wuz slippin’ over there, an’ Ponnie got holt o’ the talk. After that, Nathe dassent[242] stay away from home all night, she’d git so ruffled up. He come to me one day an’ ast me ef I couldn’t ride over inter Tennessee an’ look at some mules he wanted to buy to trade on. I thought he ought to go hissef, ’cause he knowed a mule from the tip o’ his nose to the kick in his heels, so I says: ‘Nathe, you kain’t afford to let Ponnie ruin yer business. Air ye a man, er air ye not?’ That’s what I said, an’ I reckon I ought to ’a’ kept my mouth shut, seein’ how it turned out, an’ gone on inter Tennessee. Nathe walked off an’ saddled up, an’ told Ponnie he’d be gone four er five days. She’d come out to the gate, an’ when he told her that, I saw her kindle up, an’ she turned square around an’ went inter the kitchen. After Nathe rid off I went in too, an’ I saw Ponnie wuz workin’ hard an’ tryin’ to git easy. We talked about what a good man Nathe wuz, an’ what he wuz doin’ fer his fam’ly, an’ how the neighbors thought sech a sight o’ him, an’ what he wuz goin’ to make agittin’ mules out o’ Tennessee an’ tradin’ on ’em, an’ she quieted off an’ seemed all right till Nathe got back from his trip. When he come in she wuz mighty glad to see him. He told her he’d done well, an’ she’d be stringin’ di’monds in that black hair some day, an’ they ’most had a little courtin’ spell. But Julie Mack[243] come in the next day to help Ponnie put up fruit an’ bile off apple butter, an’ Julie’s mother lived up on Sawmill Creek not fur from that woman.”

“Ol’ Sis Mack could split a truth an’ make two lies out of it!” said Aunt Lizy, and Uncle Ranz loftily accepted the interpolation.

“That’s what I told Ponnie when she come out to the orchard where I wuz shakin’ down apples. She said that Julie’s mother had seen Nathe ridin’ down Sawmill Creek road, an’ I told her what I thought of ol’ Sis Mack’s tongue. ‘He may ’a’ jest rid by innercent,’ I says. ‘Innercent!’ says Ponnie. ‘It wuzn’t yisterday she seen him, it wuz the day before.’”

“‘Well, ef it’s so,’ I told her, ‘it ain’t so bad as buryin’ Nathe.’ I reckon that’s another time I spoke wrong, fer she said she didn’t know about that, an’ went off a-studyin’. But she come in an’ got supper, tryin’ to smile peart, an’ Nathe didn’t know nuthin’ wuz wrong. Next mornin’ she got to studyin’ agin, an’ come round to me about ten o’clock. ‘Ranzie,’ she says, ‘I’m goin’ to kill Nathe,’ an’ I says: ‘You need him too bad, Ponnie, to hep raise yer childern.’ ‘I kain’t raise ’em at all,’ she says, ’ef he keeps me bothered this a-way. Nathe’s my man, an’ I ain’t goin’ to have him[244] runnin’ here an’ yander.’ I went to Nathe then, an’ told him that Ponnie knowed about him an’ he’d better get it fixed up with her. He said nobody could lie hard enough to git anything fixed up with Ponnie, an’ I said: ‘What ef she took a notion to kill ye, Nathe?’ He laffed big at that, an’ said: ‘Ranz, you don’t know Ponnie like I do. She’d keep me here jest fer her temper to bite on.’ ‘She ain’t so awful high-tempered,’ I says. ‘She works hard, an’s raisin’ yer four childern. She’d never say a hot word, leastways to you, ef it wuzn’t fer the way folks say you run around. Ef it’s so, I’d try to quit it till she gits to where she don’t think enough o’ you fer it to bother her.’

“‘Lord, they ain’t no hope o’ that,’ he said. ‘But don’t you worry ’bout her killin’ me.’ An’ he went off to hep some men we had workin’ in the fodder. I kep’ busy in the orchard, an’ ’long a little ’fore twelve I wuz goin’ inter the yard with a tow-sack full o’ winesaps on my back when I seen Ponnie comin’ from the smoke-house with the big butcher-knife in her hand, an’ seen Nathe a-crossin’ over to the spring. They come up close together, an’ she put out her hand an’ took holt o’ Nathe’s hair right above his forehead. He had powerful curly hair then, like I told ye, an’ black as sut. She[245] turned his head right back, an’ says: ‘Nathe, I’m goin’ to cut yer throat.’ That sack dropped off my back, but I wuz so cold I couldn’t move. Nathe looked right at her an’ laffed. ‘Go ahead, Ponnie,’ he says. ‘I reckon that’s what you ought to do.’ She let go then an’ made like she wuz playin’ with him, but she says, ‘Some o’ these days I’ll mean it,’ an’ went inter the kitchen. In about haf an hour she come to the door an’ called ever’body to dinner. We’s all in the yard, washed up by that time, an’ we went in. Ponnie had made apple pies that mornin’, an’ had chicken an’ dumplin’s, ’cause that wuz what Nathe liked, an’ she’d set the table out nice, an’ put on a white table-cloth, which we didn’t have only fer company an’ Sundays. She hepped ever’body, an’ picked out the drumstick fer little Rosie, an’ made the boys, Herb an’ Sam, stop scrappin’. Then she says: ‘Hep yersevs, I’m goin’ inter the big room fer a minute.’ We went on eatin’, an’ Nathe called out she’d better hurry up, the dumplin’s wuz goin’ fast, an’ right then we heard a shot. When we got in, there she wuz lyin’ on the floor stone dead, an’ Nathe’s ol’ rifle there to tell it. Nathe fell down on the floor an’ kept sayin’, ‘You don’t mean it, Ponnie, you know you don’t mean it,’ over an’ over till I’s about crazy. He’d rub her[246] black hair like he wuz techin’ a baby, an’ swear that he’d put his eyes out ’fore he’d look at another woman agin. ‘You know you hear me, Ponnie,’ he’d say, ‘you know you do.’”

Uncle Ranz paused feelingly, and when another voice took up the narrative, the help was tolerantly welcomed.

“Yes,” said Uncle Dan’l, “I’ve hearn Ben Goforth tell it. He wuz one o’ the men workin’ there that day, an’ they pulled Nathe away from Ponnie an’ inter the yard, till the women could lay her out. Soon as she wuz dressed fer her coffin he went back an’ laid on the floor till they carried her off.”

“He got over it, though,” said Serena, who could never linger in gloom.

“Purty slow, purty slow, but when he did put it by—well, sir, he put it by.”

“Slow it wuz,” said Aunt Lizy. “I remember, as well as Ranz, er anybody here, ’bout that next winter an’ spring. Nathe kept lookin’ like he didn’t keer whether he wuz in this world er the next, an’ he wouldn’t put in no crap. Ranzie here had the whole farm on his hands, an’ I’ll say it fer Ranz that ef it hadn’t been fer him them little young-uns would ’a’ gone hungry that year, er lived off the neighbors. The deacons fin’ly went[247] to Nathe an’ ast him ef he thought he wuz heppin’ Ponnie any by neglectin’ her childern, an’ said he ort to git somebody who would take keer of ’em. They told him to marry some good woman that ’ud look after them like Ponnie wanted. An’ after they’d pestered him a while, he says: ‘All right, I’ll marry, but I don’t want a woman that’s crazy about me, an’ I don’t want to git crazy about her.’ He told ’em to find somebody that would be good to the young-uns an’ he’d be satisfied. The deacons went all around then, an’ got their wives to go, an’ they talked to all the single women as fur up as Sawmill Creek an’ as fur down as Nighthawk, but they’s all skeered to marry Nathe, an’ no wonder when he kept stuggin’ round the country lookin’ like the hind wheels o’ destruction. They thought there must be something awful quare about him er Ponnie wouldn’t ashot hersef. There wuz jest one widder——”

“Ay, Mary Kempit,” said a voice, as Aunt Lizy paused, a little short of breath. “She had five young-uns.”

“That’s her,” said Aunt Lizy, coming back with some haste, before Uncle Ranz could weld his broken narrative. “She said she’d try it, fer Nathe had a fine farm, an’ Bune Waller said the same. Bune wuz an old[248] maid with one leg crippled up ’count of a snake-bite when she wuz little. The old folks thought Bune would suit better’n the widder, not havin’ any young-uns to mix up with Nathe’s, so they went to him an’ told him that Bune wuz the best they could do. I’ve always wished I could ’a’ been there when they told him. Uncle Joe Withers, he wuz senior deacon then, he said Nathe cut his galluses an’ went straight up. When he come down an’ got his breath, he says to ’em, ‘Who’s counted the finest-lookin’ single woman in Silver Valley?’ an’ they ’lowed Callie Brown wuz the takin’est one, sence she’d come back from South C’liny, where she’d been workin’. But she wuzn’t keen to marry, not a mountain man anyway, fer she wouldn’t look at Mince Peters, who wuz runnin’ a payin’ sawmill, an’ the best ketch ’twixt Cherokee an’ Hiwassee. Nathe ast ’em would she be good to the childern, an’ they ’lowed she would, she looked like she’d jump out o’ the way of a worm ruther’n step on it, but he couldn’t git her, they said, not ef he’s as rich as cream in a cracklin’ gourd. She didn’t have no call fer holdin’ off though, Uncle Joe told him, fer she hadn’t saved a brownie workin’ in the mills, put it all on her back, he reckoned, an’ she didn’t have no home, her folks all bein’ dead.[249] ‘But ef you go to see her,’ he says, ‘you’ll ride back jest like you come. She’s livin’ at my house, an’ I know Callie.’ Nathe never paid no more ’tention to what they said, an’ fixed hissef up fer courtin’.”

“Fixed hissef up!” Uncle Ranz bore in, returning with vigor to his own. “I reckon! I wuz right there, an’ the way he shaved an’ slicked an’ combed an’ dressed would take me all day to tell ye. We wuz exactly the same size, me an’ Nathe, an’ he walked in on me an’ says: ‘Ranz, you let me have that new suit o’ yorn, an’ I’ll give you that white sow an’ them three shotes you been a-wantin’. I’ve got to have it right now,’ he says. He’d let his clo’s run down till a skeercrow wouldn’t ’a’ swopped with him ’thout a smart chance o’ boot. But when he wuz all growed inter my suit, an’ rid off on a big bay mare he had, thinks I yer my own half-brother, but it ’ud take some travellin’ to find yer mate fer looks. He went over to Joe Withers’, where Callie wuz stayin’, an’ in two weeks they’s married. When he wanted to, Nathe had a way o’ talkin’ that folks said would put heart in a holler log, an’ I reckon Callie wuz all heart, the way it turned out. As fer holdin’ hersef high, I never seen none o’ that after she come to live with Nathe. She made him a good wife, an’ got to[250] likin’ him powerful, but he never seemed to take to Callie. ’Twuzn’t thinkin’ about Ponnie, though, that kept him from likin’ her, fer when he did drap his troubles he drapped ’em hard. It pestered me awful the way he went on fer a while, huntin’ up ever’ woman he could hear of that wuzn’t much good. I said to him onct that Callie seemed to be doin’ her part, an’ he said: ‘Ef you don’t think I’m adoin’ mine, Ranz, jest keep a-thinkin’ it.’ An’ I dassent say any more, fer Nathe in them days wuz wearin’ his temper outside his shirt, an’ you had to tech him keerful er go round. When Callie wuz fust married she didn’t know much about housework an’ takin’ keer o’ farm stuff, but she went at it steady, an’ in less’n a year she wuz runnin’ ever’thing like it ort to be, an’ nobody would ’a’ knowed the childern wuzn’t hern ef she hadn’t been too young to be their mommie.”

“Ay,” said Aunt Lizy, “they went under her skirts like they belonged. Nathe lost a lot of his luck when he buried Callie Brown.”

“How long did she live?” I asked, and Uncle Ranz seemed to approve of the sympathetic query, which perhaps reminded him that he had a new and perfectly safe pair of ears for an old tale.

[251]“She lived four years full, an’ inter five, from the time she married Nathe till we put her in the graveyard in the row above Ponnie an’ her two. We wuz lookin’ fer Callie’s baby, little Rufe, to die, an’ Nathe ’lowed they could lay there together. That soft look Callie had turned out to be weak lungs, an’ the cotton-mills hadn’t hepped ’em any. The hard work at Nathe’s pulled her down to a shadder. I own it, I got to thinkin’ a heap of Callie. Looked like she wuz tryin’ her best an’ never botherin’ Nathe, er lettin’ on she wuz any more to him than a hired woman. When I seen it wuz killin’ her, I wuz druv to say something. I’d tried Nathe, an’ that didn’t hep any, so I went to Callie an’ told her straight out that she could git a divorce from Nathe any day she wanted it, fer the whole country knowed how he wuz runnin’ on, an’ the deacons had been to him about it. I said she wouldn’t have to go fur, nuther, to git somebody to take keer of her right. She wouldn’t have to go blood-naked ner eat acorns, not by a thousan’ mile, while I wuz drawin’ a workin’-man’s breath. When I said that, Callie turned her back on me an’ begun to cry. I waited to see what she wuz goin’ to say, fer a woman’s cryin’ might mean one thing an’ it might mean another. When she turned round she says: ‘Ranzie,[252] I’ll fergive ye ef ye’ll go to church reg’lar.’ An’ I went to meetin’ from then on, till Callie died, though it wuzn’t easy to set still an’ listen to ol’ Silas Mack a-whinin’ from the time he got up to preach till he set down two hours afterwards. Barrin’ that, I ain’t ever been sorry I let Callie know she could git away ef she wanted to. I told Nathe about it after she wuz dead, an’ he said he wouldn’t hold it agin me, seein’ he never hurt hissef makin’ it easy fer Callie, an’ he told me to stay right on with him an’ hep look after the farm. I thought ef he didn’t want to make a fuss, I wouldn’t, an’ I staid right on till he married Lu Siler. He wuzn’t slow about pickin’ up Lu. She hadn’t been a widder more’n three er four months, an’ chainces wuz thick with her, ’cause she had a house an’ lot in Carson, an’ a fine piece o’ land on Little Horse Branch. When Nathe got ready he walked right in an’ took her. She wuz a little older’n him, an’ short on looks, but there never wuz a better woman than Lu, leavin’ out Callie, an’ she wuz awful proud o’ Nathe. She wuz the one who got him inter this Freemason business, bein’ Eastern Star hersef, an’ a lot o’ her folks an’ friends belongin’. Nathe took to it fine, an’ went as high as he could as fast as they’d take him, an’ always held a big[253] hand afterwards in whatever they had goin’ on, till late years when most o’ the old members had drapped out er wuz buried, an’ he seemed to sort o’ fergit about it. He went around with Lu, an’ treated her respectful, like he ort, with her deedin’ him ever’thing she had an’ cuttin’ out her own folks. He sold the house an’ lot in Carson an’ built the big house on the farm the first year he was married to Lu. He said he wanted her to have ever’thing as nice as she had it in Carson when she wuz livin’ with Jim Siler. It wuz in them years that Nathe sort o’ stept up in life.”

Uncle Ranz was forced to take breath, though he knew that Aunt Lizy would be in at the breach.

“Nathe never got bigetty though,” she said. “It wuz about that time that he got to lookin’ round an’ heppin’ folks in hard luck. He wuz always ready with the loan of a cow fer a widder, er a plough-critter fer new-married couples, er a sack o’ meal, an’ sometimes a bit o’ money that he wuzn’t too pertickler about gittin’ back. I’ve said many a time that Silver Valley owed a lot to Lu Siler fer makin’ a changed man out o’ Nathe.”

“You want to start that old argyment, Lizy, an’ you can have it. I say, an’ I’ll always say, it wuz Ann that changed Nathe, an’ not Lu Siler.”

[254]“Ann!” The contempt of the elect was in Aunt Lizy’s voice. She reached into her pocket for her snuff. Only snuff could reconcile her to the existence of Ann. Uncle Ranz turned to his more passive hearers.

“There ain’t any man, er woman nuther, in this country,” he said, “who knows more about that than I do. It begun ’long in the last year o’ Callie’s lifetime, an’ I reckon I wuz purty keen on what wuz happenin’ round Callie. Nathe had a little ol’ mill on one end o’ his farm, fer grindin’ corn fer hissef an’ his neighbors. It’s there yit, only it’s been built all over. An’ he had a little ol’ log house settin’ close to the mill, where he kept a fam’ly to ’tend to the grindin’ an’ hep on the farm. He ’lowed the man could work on the farm, an’ his wife could tend to the mill, in a pinch anyways. Well, Curt Lindsay, he come over from round Cowee an’ ast fer the place. He said he wuz married, an’ his wife’s mother wuz livin’ with ’em, an’ she could handy ’tend to the mill. His wife wuzn’t much stout, an’ he didn’t count on gittin’ anything out of her but a little housekeepin’, an’ maybe hoein’ in the patches. An’ Nathe told him to come on. Curt wuz a big feller an’ looked like he’d make a good hand. I told Nathe so mysef, an’ there’s one more time I’d ’a’ done better ef[255] I’d kept my mouth shet. Well, they come on, an’ the mother looked like all she knowed wuz hard work an’ more of it. But Ann, Curt’s wife, she looked like a hummin’-bird round a rosey-bush. The mother, that ’uz Mis’ Baker, told me Ann had never been much strong an’ her daddy, up till he died a little ’fore that, had never let anything be put on her too hard. Ann wuz willin’ enough, but they had to put it on her light, er she’d git down sick. Curt didn’t keer one way er another so the work got done. Ann had married him when she wuz fourteen, an’ she wuzn’t more’n up’rds o’ fifteen when she come to live on Nathe’s place. Nathe wuz a little above thirty-five, an’ had seen his troubles, but they hadn’t put the years on him. When he wuz smoothed up, folks said ef his good looks wuz divided around, they’d make ever’body in the settlement look passable, even countin’ Sary Copp, who had a caved-in nose an’ scrofula o’ the jaw. But Nathe wuz fur from bein’ as good as he wuz good-lookin’. I reckon he wuz the furdest from the Amen row right then that he ever wuz in his life. He’d put a mortgage on his farm to git spendin’ money, an’ he wuz runnin’ round spendin’ it. ‘Ranz,’ he says to me, ‘I don’t keer much about women, but what’s a feller to do with hissef?’

[256]“An’ then Ann moved in. ‘Let’s go over,’ Nathe says to me one day, ‘an’ see ef Curt’s got settled. Maybe he’ll need some hep about something.’ ‘All right,’ says I, an’ we went. Looked like there wuzn’t nobody at home when we come up. Nathe walked up big an’ pounded on the door till I wished there wuzn’t anybody in there to hear him. Then Ann opened the door. Nathe hadn’t ever seen her ’fore that, an’ when she looked up, a bit skeered, an’ her eyes as blue as a prize ribbon at a fair, Nathe fell back inter the yard like she’d pinted a gun at him. I ask her how her folks wuz, seein’ Nathe wuzn’t goin’ to talk, an’ she said they’s well, an’ her mother wuz in the house, wouldn’t we come in, an’ Curt wuz gone to Carson to git some things they needed fer housekeepin’.

“‘What things?’ says Nathe, gittin’ over his lock-jaw, an’ when she told him, he says: ‘Tell yer mother to come over to the house an’ my wife’ll give her anything you’re needin’.’ Then he went off. I follered him, an’ he walked along like a wooden man till we got nigh home, then he says: ‘Ranz, I reckon I’d better look after things round here a little closer’n I been adoin’.’ An’ from that minute Nathe wuz changed, an’ he hadn’t ever set eyes on Lu Siler. Callie wuz still alive, an’ she[257] seemed awfully hepped up about Nathe. She talked to me of how he wuz takin’ holt like he raley owned the place, an’ it wouldn’t be long till he’d lift the mortgage, an’ maybe send Angie Sue to Carson to school. But Callie wuz too worn out by that time fer any change to do her downright good, an’ she died in the spring, like I wuz tellin’ ye. Then Nathe married Lu. I ain’t sayin’ my own half-brother married a woman fer what she had, but I do say that he’d got to be sort o’ cravin’. Where he’d spent a dollar before, free as water, looked like he wuz tryin’ to save three. He wuz runnin’ the farm close, an’ raisin’ ever’thing we et purty nigh, but coffee an’ sugar, an’ wuz watchin’ his tradin’ right sharp, though when Lu got there he built her a nice house, like I said, with her own money, an’ he went around the country with her whenever she wanted him to, an’ didn’t mind spendin’ on his lodge a bit ’er heppin’ folks like Lizy wuz tellin’ ye. I quit livin’ at Nathe’s an’ went over inter Tennessee. Callie wuz on my mind, more’n when she’d been livin’, seemed like, an’ on top o’ that I wuz afeard Nathe an’ Lu were goin’ to have fallin’ weather. I thought ef he wuz in fer a mess I’d seen enough o’ his troubles. But he kept writin’ fer me to come back, an’[258] when I’d been gone about two year I come home. I found ever’thing runnin’ like sugar-water in sap-time. Nathe never went round the mill, er where Ann wuz, so fur as anybody knowed. When something had to be ’tended to over there, he’d git Lu to go.

“‘Lu,’ he says one night at supper, ‘looks like we ortn’t to live here in this big house with ever’thing comfortable, an’ water piped from the mountain yander, an’ the fam’ly that works fer us puttin’ up with that smoky little hut over at the mill. When yore folks wuz out from Carson the other day I wuz ashamed to tell ’em that shack wuz on our farm. What you think about takin’ what I make tradin’ this year an’ fix ’em up a place they can keep clean an’ make look like something? Mis’ Baker’s always ready to come over here an’ give you a hand at anything, an’ we ort to make it easier at home fer a hard-workin’ woman like she is.’

“‘I’d hate to fix up a place fer that rowdy, Curt Lindsay,’ said Lu. ‘He stays drunk half o’ his time now.’

“‘You fix it, Lu, an’ I’ll drive him off er make him do better. The women-folks there are human, same as us, even ef Curt ain’t.’

“‘Yes,’ says Lu, ‘I git awfully sorry fer that pore[259] little Ann. I don’t know what keeps her spirits up. She’s always singin’ when I go over there, er diggin’ in the yard round her flowers, an’ they say Curt beats her, too.’

“Nathe jumped up then, like he’d swallered a crumb too quick, an’ went out to the water-bucket. When he come back he wuz a little hoarse from chokin’, an’ he says: ‘You do what I told you, Lu. You know more about houses than I do. Fix it up so we won’t be ashamed of it anyway, an’ I can git a better man to live there ef I have to drive Curt off.’

“Lu ast me to hep her, an’ we got Mose Kimpit to boss the job, him that married Angie Sue afterwards, an’ I hired some men, an’ in no time Ann wuz livin’ in a little house that looked like a pickcher, but Curt wuz drinkin’ harder than ever.

“‘You’ll have to get rid o’ him, Nathe,’ said Lu, an’ he said: ‘Well, let’s go over there an’ see about it.’ ‘Come on, Ranz,’ he said; ‘Curt might jump onto me an’ I might want some hep.’ Nathe wuzn’t afeard o’ nuthin’ this side o’ Jordan, an’ I laffed an’ went on with ’em. When we all got in a hunderd yards o’ the house we heard somebody screamin’, an’ Nathe got white as a dead man. ‘It’s Ann,’ says Lu; ‘he’s a-beatin’ her,’[260] an’ she begun to cry. Nathe says to me: ‘You stay here with Lu. I’ll fix him,’ an’ set off runnin’ like he’d gone mad. He didn’t open the door, jest kicked it in like it wuz glass. There wuzn’t any more screamin’, an’ when he come out he says: ‘Go in there, Ranz, an’ hep patch that feller up. I’ve give him two hours to git up an’ crawl off. He knows what the law does fer a man that lays his hand on a woman in the fix Ann’s in, an’ he’ll go. He don’t want to spend the next ten years in the pen.’

“Well, Curt went off, an’ Mis’ Baker wrote fer a son she had over on Cowee to come an’ take his place on the farm, an’ they all lived there in the little house quiet as could be. The whole country wuz braggin’ on the way Nathe had settled with Curt, though some said he ort to have tuk him up an’ let him go to the pen. Anybody that ’ud beat a little thing like Ann ort to git the worst the law could lay on him.

“In about three months Ann’s baby wuz born, an’ Lu acted like she thought it wuz hern, the way she took keer of it, an’ wuz over there half the time. She begged Nathe to go with her to see it, but he wouldn’t. That wuz woman’s business, he said. Things went on quiet-like fer two or three years, maybe four. Angie Sue[261] got through school an’ married Mose Kempit. She didn’t do much fer hersef, considerin’ the chaince they give her. She had Ponnie’s temper, too, but Ponnie had a big heart along with her temper, an’ Angie Sue never had no more heart than a hornet’s got. Little Rosie wuz a-growin’ up, an’ the boys, Herb an’ Sam, wuz nearly men. They wuz quiet boys, not wuth much one way er t’other. Ann’s brother got married, an’ Nathe fixed him a house not fur from the other one, an’ Ann an’ her mother lived by thersevs. Mis’ Baker, she ’tended to the mill. The boy wuz named Baker, fer Ann’s father, an’ folks called him little Bake Lindsay.

“Well, we’s livin’ along, an’ ever’body comfortable, when one day in the fall when the woods wuz a-turnin’, Lu says to me: ‘Ranz, s’pose we take Rosie an’ the boys an’ go hunt chestnuts to-day? I ain’t been in the woods this year.’ That suited me, an’ we all went over to the big hill about a quarter of a mile to the back of Ann’s house. Nathe wuzn’t along. He’d got a letter the day before tellin’ him to come to Carson about a trade, an’ he’d set off walkin’ that mornin’, not lettin’ the boys drive him to Scatter to hit the train. It wuz too much trouble, he said, an’ he liked to walk. He wuz in fine[262] health then, his skin clear pink, an’ not a gray hair in his head. Lu wuz feelin’ a little lonesome, I reckon, after he set off, an’ that’s what made her hit on goin’ fer chestnuts. We had a good time, an’ picked up a lot, but we didn’t go up the big hill any furder than the oak spring. Me an’ Lu an’ Rosie set down by the spring to rest a bit, an’ the boys said they’d shammuck along home an’ carry the chestnuts. We had about two flour-pokes full. While we’s settin’ there, me an’ Lu an’ Rosie, we heard somebody laffin’ way up at the top o’ the hill. ‘There’s somebody else out to-day,’ said Lu. ‘Let’s wait an’ see who it is.’ We knowed from the way the voices sounded that whoever wuz up there had started down. I sort o’ felt like I knowed the man’s voice, the way he wuz laffin’, an’ I set there with my eye-teeth a-gittin’ loose, till right out o’ the woods about fifty yards above us come Nathe an’ Ann. They come on down, not seein’ us till they wuz right on us, but we saw them all right. An’ I’ll say to ever’body here, an’ Lizy too, that they may have been as mean as the old boy, but they looked like they’d got to Heaven an’ took up. Nathe’s face wuz like halleloo, an’ Ann wuz flutterin’ ’s ef she wuz made out o’ wings. She saw us ’fore Nathe did, ’cause he wuzn’t seein’[263] nothin’ but Ann, an’ she give a little scream an’ set right down on the ground. Nathe looked around then, right at Lu. They stood there lookin’ at each other, an’ Nathe couldn’t move his eyes fer a minute. Ef there’d been a hole anywheres handy I reckon he’d ’a’ drapped into it, but he didn’t have any hidin’-place, an’ Lu—Lord bless her!—maybe she wuz sorry fer him, she said, ‘Let’s go home, Rosie,’ an’ turned off an’ we come home.”

“Ay,” said Uncle Dan’l, “Lu wuz a good woman. I wuz thinkin’ when that Jenkins wuz here an’ we wuz talkin’ about who ought to lay ’long o’ Nathe, that Lu had paid fer the place, even if she didn’t git it.”

“Maybe so, but I am glad it wuz Callie got it, an’ I hope she knows it,” said Uncle Ranz, a bit snappishly. “I wuz sorry fer Lu, though. Nathe come in about midnight an’ went to bed in the room next to the one where him an’ Lu always stayed. But he didn’t sleep none, an’ about three o’clock he come an’ woke me up an’ ast me what Lu wuz meanin’ to do. I told him she hadn’t said yit, he’d find out to-morr’. But next day she couldn’t speak fer a cold she’d caught settin’ by that spring. She wrote on a piece o’ paper that she’d git a divorce an’ they’d divide the property[264] fair. Nathe got down by the bed an’ begged her not to do that. He said there wuzn’t anybody to blame but him, an’ it ’ud kill Ann to be disgraced, which wuz what he ortn’t ’a’ said to Lu, but Nathe wuz so tore up I reckon he couldn’t think o’ pickin’ his way. An’ Lu wrote, ‘Is Baker yore boy?’ an’ Nathe said he wuz. I s’pose he thought lyin’ wouldn’t hep him any with Lu lookin’ right through him. I could see the big tears rollin’ down Lu’s face, an’ she wrote: ‘I’m goin’ soon as I git up.’ But she didn’t go, an’ there wuzn’t any divorce, fer her cold turned inter double pneumony. In three days she wuz dead, an’ we laid her up there in Callie’s row next to little Rufe.

“It wuzn’t long till talk wuz floatin’ round ’bout Nathe an’ Ann, though I don’t b’lieve he went nigh her, an’ I reckon Rosie started the talk. Nobody but me had heard Nathe say that Bake wuz hisn, but Rosie told Angie Sue what she’d seen that day by the spring. An’ they thought it wuz fine to act smart about it.”

“The gals thought a heap o’ Lu,” said Aunt Lizy, irrepressible as justice. “I don’t blame ’em fer takin’ her part.”

“I ain’t blamin’ ’em,” said Uncle Ranz. “I’m sayin’ they wuz mighty hard on Ann. Angie Sue said she wuz[265] goin’ to tell her father he had to turn Ann off the place. I never heard her tell him, but I seen her go into the room where he wuz. When she come out she looked like she wuz fallin’ to pieces, an’ milk couldn’t be whiter. As fur as I know that wuz the only time she ever named Ann to her daddy. Nathe wuzn’t bothered about Angie Sue, but he walked mighty keerful on Ann’s account. He kept goin’ to church right along, an’ travelled over to Carson faithful to his lodge meetin’s, an’ acted a little more’n fair in his tradin’, an’ kept his name right up. He wuz gittin’ to be wuth something too. I reckon his farm, an’ stock, an’ what he had in the Carson bank, would ’a’ come to more’n anybody else in Silver Valley could ’a’ spelt. So the deacons let him alone, as they ort, with no more proof than what me an’ Rosie saw, an’ him behavin’ right an’ payin’ the preacher reg’lar, besides givin’ him a suit o’ clothes an’ a fine pair o’ shoes at Christmas.

“Folks sort o’ made it easy fer Ann too, fer ever’body thought a sight of her.” Here Aunt Lizy gave the narrator a glance that drove him to an emendation. “Barrin’ a few o’ the women that wuz so good they didn’t have no use fer the New Testament. Most o’ the folks would go to the mill, like they’d been doin’, an’[266] act frien’ly, an’ make a heap over little Bake. Ever’body knowed that Ann had had an awful time with Curt, an’ Nathe wuz twenty years older’n her an’ could talk water up-hill. Nobody could prove nothin’ anyway, ’cause walkin’ in the woods one time wuzn’t no proof, not what the law could handle anyhow.

“Lu had been dead runnin’ onto a year, an’ the talk had died clean out, when Nathe told me to go to Mis’ Baker an’ tell her to take Ann to Carson an’ git a paper from the judge sayin’ she wuzn’t Curt’s wife. It wuz the law in them days that if a man an’ his wife didn’t live together fer three year they wuz nachally divorced ’thout goin’ inter court. I b’lieve they’ve changed it to five year now, but it wuz three then, an’ Curt had been gone four year an’ up’ards. I found Ann all in a trimmle an’ cryin’ hersef to death. She showed me a letter she’d got from Curt sayin’ he wuz comin’ back to settle with Nathe—that he’d heard whose boy Bake wuz, an’ he reckoned Nathe wouldn’t be so spry about havin’ him arrested ef he come back. She said she wouldn’t marry Nathe, fer Curt would be shore to slip in an’ kill him. That’s what Curt said he would do in the letter, an’ she didn’t have no more sense than to believe it. I went home an’ told Nathe, an’ he swore like no human[267] bein’ ort to, an’ went straight off to Ann’s. When he come back, I knowed from his looks as fur as I could see him that his tongue hadn’t hepped him fer onct.

“‘I told her,’ he said, ‘I’d marry her, an’ take keer o’ her the rest o’ her life, like no woman wuz ever tuk keer of in Silver Valley, an’ ef Angie Sue come home she’d have to begin smilin’ at the gate er she’d never git inter the house, an’ Ann told me to find me a good woman an’ let her alone!’

“‘She’s afeard Curt’ll come back an’ kill ye, Nathe,’ I told him.

“‘Yes,’ he says, ‘Curt’s comin’ to kill me! That’s why he sent in his brag. So’s I could have my trigger ready.’

“‘Shucks,’ I said, ‘he’s a big coward; he’ll never come.’

“‘’Course he won’t,’ says Nathe, ‘but that don’t hep me ef I kain’t make Ann believe it. Git me a good woman, she says, an’ let her alone! It ’ud serve her almighty right ef I did.’

“‘You won’t do that, Nathe,’ I says, an’ he said: ‘No, I’ll hang around Aim fer the rest o’ my life, waitin’ fer a chance to lick her shoes!’

“‘That won’t be much to do,’ I told him. ‘Her shoes[268] ain’t bigger than a thimble.’ ‘No, they ain’t,’ he says, an’ took the all-over trimmles. ‘I’m clean crazy, Ranz,’ he says.

“He mulled around fer maybe a month, kickin’ at his luck, an’ tryin’ to break pore little Ann, an’ the very day Mis’ Baker told me that Ann couldn’t hold out agin him much longer, he tied up with Nan Tittiewad.”

Uncle Ranz paused once more, and Aunt Lizy, always at the gap, and now evidently big with information, darted in.

“Her name wuzn’t Tittiewad. I knowed her folks that year me an’ Dan lived out in Jackson County. Her name wuz Benson, an’ her fam’ly wuz sort o’ bigetty. She married Jim Sluter the fust time. Jim’s father wuz called Taterwad ’cause he stole a wad o’ ’taters onct, not more’n a good mess, an’ wuz carryin’ ’em home when he wuz ketched with ’em. His name wuz Ham Sluter, but folks called him Ham Taterwad after that, an’ from him it went to his whole fam’ly. When Jim married Nan Benson, they called him Jim Taterwad after his father, an’ Nan would git so mad about it they told her they’d change it to Tittiewad ef that ’ud suit her better, an’ the madder she got the tighter[269] that name stuck to her. Jim an’ her didn’t git along. They fit up an’ down the road, till fin’ly Jim left her, an’ nobody ever knowed what become of him. He got clear away from Nan. But they kept callin’ her Nan Tittiewad, the same as ever, ’cause it fitted her, I reckon, an’ it follered her wherever she went. I could ’a’ told Nathe all about her, but he wuzn’t sayin’ much to folks around home right then. He met Nan one day in Carson, an’ went round to the boardin’-house where she put up. They talked all night, an’ the next mornin’ they went to the court-house an’ got married.”

Aunt Lizy was breathless from the hurried discharge of her burden, and Uncle Ranz came in leisurely.

“I never knowed nothin’,” he said, “till I seen ’em drive up an’ Nathe hepped Nan out o’ the buggy. She wuz tall, an’ had a fair sight o’ flesh on her, but you couldn’t call her fat. She had red hair, but nobody wuz ’lowed to say it wuz red. She said it wuz orbun, but that didn’t change its color a bit. Her skin wuz white as a white egg-shell, an’ her eyes sky blue, not dark blue like Ann’s, an’ her lips as red as shumake heads. She wuz the fust woman Nathe had laid his hand on in nigh to a year, an’ I reckon, considerin’ what his nater wuz, it jest made him swim off. Nan sailed inter[270] Lu’s house, an’ in less’n half an hour she’d been in ever’ corner of it. Her lip wuz curlin’ considerable, but when Nathe come in she ’peared to be satisfied. I b’lieve she wuz raley took up with Nathe at first, an’ he went about with his head lookin’ over all of us, heppin’ do ever’thing she wanted, pullin’ the furniture here an’ yander, an’ takin’ the pick o’ the parlor set to the room where they slept, an’ all sech crazy work. But when they’d been married about three weeks, an’ Nathe begun to think o’ settlin’ down to work like he ort, she said at breakfast one mornin’ that seein’ they’d done without a honeymoon, s’pose they tuk a trip to Californy er Flurridy. She’d always wanted to go to them places, she said. Nathe ’lowed he didn’t have enough money in the bank fer the trip, an’ didn’t have time to go ef the cash wuz layin’ handy. She got mad then, an’ said: ‘Well, I ain’t got time to wash yer dishes an’ sweep yer house an’ cook yer meals, nuther.’ Nathe told her he thought Rosie had been doin’ most of the work, but ef it wuz too much fer her, he’d let Angie Sue come home a while. She’d been wantin’ to come, ’cause she’s havin’ trouble with Mose Kempit, the man she married the fust time. An’ Nan said: ‘Oh, Lord, don’t bring any more peek-eyes in here! I’m[271] smotherin’ to death now!’ Then she got up an’ walked down toward the creek, but she come back fer dinner, an’ from that time on it looked like the devil wuz runnin’ the house from top to bottom. Nathe fin’ly said he’d give her the money to go to Californy on ef she’d stay when she got there, but she told him she wuzn’t that easy, he wuz goin’ to do more than that fer her. She said she’d have to be paid good fer comin’ to sech a hole an’ livin’ with an ol’ squeeze-pocket that had killed three wives an’ kept another woman too. I reckon she’d picked something out o’ the neighbors, an’ Rosie had told her about Ann, fer she wuz powerful thick with Nan the fust week she wuz in the house.”

Uncle Dan’l was growing restless. “I say, Ranz,” he put in, “I never b’lieved Nan wuz near as bad as she made hersef out. She wuz tryin’ to git Nathe to drive her off, so she could sue him fer support an’ live where she wanted to.”

“’Course she wuz,” assented Uncle Ranz. “I found that out right away, an’ me an’ Nathe talked it over. ‘You want to be keerful, Nathe,’ I told him, ‘an’ keep yer hands off her an’ not give her any claim agin ye. She’ll wear hersef out ’fore long.’ ‘You reckon she will?’ Nathe ast me, an’ I told him I wuz shore she would ef[272] he kept still no matter what she done. That seemed to hep him, an’ he set his teeth an’ tried to stand it. He didn’t dare go to see Ann, fer that wuz what his wife wuz watchin’ fer. He knowed she’d find him out, day er night, an’ he walked straight as a shingle. The whole neighborhood thought Nathe wuz actin’ fine, an’ anybody would ’a’ been sorry for him the day that Nan called Ann’s name an’ put something else to it as plain as the Bible speaks it. Nathe set still, like he’d never move till jedgment-day, an’ her tongue hurtin’ him worse than rippin’ fire. I b’lieve Nan felt kinder discouraged after that, thinkin’ she’d never git him riled enough to beat her er drive her off.

“It wuz awful the way she made a destroyment of things in the house. One day she wuz settin’ in the big room with Nathe, an’ she tuk a little penknife she had an’ begun to cut the threads out of a cushion that Lu had worked all over with little birds an’ leaves. ‘Don’t do that,’ said Nathe. ‘Lu made that hersef.’ An’ Nan says, ‘It’s mine now!’ an’ throwed it inter the fire. Nathe jumped up to grab it off the blazin’ logs, an’ Nan got right afore him. He’d ’a’ shoved her down, I reckon, if Cricket Sawyer hadn’t been there an’ held him back. Crick knew what Nan wuz after, the same[273] as the rest of us, an’ she got so mad at him she never spoke to him afterwards, though they set at the same table three times a day.

“She found out where Nathe kept the aperns an’ trimmin’s an’ things he wore at his lodge meetin’s. He thought more o’ them cooterments than anything he had. Nan got the key to the drawer, an’ when he come in one day she wuz all rigged out in ’em. ‘Don’t I look purty, Nathe?’ she says, walkin’ up an’ down ’fore him. An’ he wuz afraid to say a word, fer he knowed what she’d done to that cushion. ‘You won’t be wantin’ ’em any more,’ she says, ‘’cause yer lodge’ll turn ye out soon as I tell ’em what you’ve got over yander at the mill.’ Then she walked out an’ down the road with them things on, an’ Nathe never seen a stitch o’ the riggin’ afterwards. I fixed it up that she tied a rock to ’em an’ throwed ’em inter the creek.

“We’d had about seven er eight months o’ Nan when Nathe begun to look thin an’ show he wuz losin’ out. I b’lieve he got to thinkin’ that Nan wouldn’t mind heppin’ him off inter the next world ef she could do it sly. He kept Crick Sawyer hired, but I couldn’t find out what fer, he wuz so lazy an’ slept half of ever’ day. I got to teasin’ him about drawin’ pay fer gittin’ his[274] breath, an’ he fired up an’ told me that Nathe had hired him to watch Nan at night, he’d got so skeered o’ what she might do when he wuz asleep. I felt ashamed o’ Nathe fer that, an’ I never let him know I’d found out what Crick’s job wuz. But I says: ‘Crick, ef Ponnie er Callie er Lu left here owin’ Nathe a hard time, Nan has shore paid it fer ’em.’

“She never done a thing to hep round the house, but she wuz always on time fer her meals. She’d take the head o’ the table, too, like she wuz the queen bee, though she hadn’t warmed kiver with Nathe sence the fust month she wuz there. She’d talk an’ laff an’ make fun o’ Crick, an’ wouldn’t let a soul pour the coffee but her. One day when she’d poured a cup fer Nathe, it sparkled up quare, an’ he throwed it inter the fireplace. It wuz that day that he went off to Carson an’ come back with a cousin of ourn, Lem Thatcher, who’d went out West an’ done well, an’ come back to see his kinfolks. He wuz a widower, an’ a little younger’n Nathe, an’ tolerable fair-lookin’ too. When Nan found out he had some money she put on her best dressin’ an’ smiled like a pickcher. When she wuz all flossied up an’ shiny, a man would have to look at her sort o’ easy out o’ one eye, till he found out her ways didn’t match[275] up. We’s all past the place where Nan’s looks counted fer anything, but Lem wuzn’t, an’ when she’d plumb her eyes at him he’d wriggle an’ turn red. Nathe seen his chaince then, an’ told Lem he had to go inter Tennessee fer a few days, but fer him to make hissef at home an’ not think o’ leavin’ till he got back. He staid about a week, an’ when he come home Lem an’ Nan had been gone three days. I reckon they’s half-way to Californy by that time. She left a note tellin’ Nathe the sooner he got his divorce the better it would suit her an’ Lem, an’ he could keep the few dollars in his old sock, she said. She didn’t have no use fer ’em, an’ his boy, Baker, might need ’em. She had the note tacked up outside the front door. I wuzn’t at home the mornin’ they left, but Crick told me she made Lem tack the note up, an’ her laffin’ till you could hear her to the pasture gate.

“Nathe got a divorce soon as he could, but it wuz a year er two ’fore anybody could speak to him about Nan ’thout him takin’ out his big handkercher an’ wipin’ his for’ed, he’d got inter sech a habit of it while she wuz around. As fer his house, it shore needed a good woman in it, Nan had been sech a tear-down.”

“He got a good woman when Aunt Lindy Webb[276] went there,” said Serena, anticipating Aunt Lizy, and making it known that the story had reached a stage familiar to her generation.

“Ay, Nan had sort o’ shattered him,” said Uncle Dan’l, “and he made up his mind he wouldn’t make no mistake the next time.”

I wanted to hear about Ann. A depression was upon me, as if she had died. Then I remembered that she was going to South Carolina with Bake. But it was a relief when Uncle Ranz uttered her name again.

“Of course Nathe went to see Ann first, but she stuck to what she’d said before, an’ Nathe didn’t take it so hard this time. He could see fer hissef that Ann couldn’t run his place, an’ he wuz shore needin’ somebody that could. Rosie had got married, but her an’ Angie Sue kept comin’ home to stir up trouble with anybody that wuz hired on the place, an’ Nathe wuz beginnin’ to show his gray hairs. Ann had been sick fer a long spell. She tuk down dreckly after he married Nan, an’ when Nathe seen her fer the fust time in nearly a year, he give right in an’ told her she could have her own way about ever’thing an’ he’d stand by her jest the same. She begun to pick up purty soon, and in a little while wuz as peart as ever. I don’t reckon[277] it made any difference ’tween ’em when he married Lindy Webb. Lindy had been married before——”

“Twice,” said another voice, younger than Aunt Lizy’s.

“That’s so, twice,” said Uncle Ranz, “an’ she had shown clear as gospel what a good woman she wuz. Nathe ast about her from fust to last ’fore he ever went to see her. He wuzn’t takin’ any chainces. Lindy’s fust man would run away ’bout ever’ other year, an’ she would make the crap an’ take keer of it, an’ have his plate at the table ready fer him ever’ meal she set down to, in case he drapped in. Ef she had a little money saved up, he took holt of it right away. Onct she saved seventeen dollars makin’ syrup, runnin’ the cane-mill night an’ day, an’ he took ever’ dollar soon as he come in. He went off at last an’ staid so long that Jim Webb wanted to marry Lindy, so he went round ’mong the neighbors an’ called a meetin’. They voted she could marry Jim, but she couldn’t take up with any furriner that might come along an’ want her farm. She married Jim then, an’ he would ’a’ made her a good husband ef he hadn’t hurt his leg tryin’ to break a yoke o’ steers hissef, ’stead o’ lettin’ Lindy do it like she wuz used to. It didn’t heal up, an’ Lindy had to wait[278] on him hand an’ foot fer ten years, an’ make the livin’ fer both of ’em. Jim wuz quarrellin’ all the time, an’ Lindy said he wuz fractious ’cause he wuz so disappinted in not bein’ able to hep her like he’d set out to do. He died about the time her farm wuz run through with, ’count o’ him wantin’ ever’thing, an’ livin’ on almanac medicine, but she had nice things in her house an’ she brought ’em all to Nathe’s. It wuzn’t long till she had Nathe’s place lookin’ as well as it did in Lu’s time, an’ she had more in the cellar to eat an’ drink than Lu ever had. There wuzn’t nuthin’ Lindy didn’t know how to do er to make. She wuzn’t burnin’ jealous nuther, an’ told me hersef she wuzn’t goin’ to keep Nathe miser’ble by tryin’ to change his nater. She’d leave that to the Lord, she said.”

“That wuz the only thing,” said Aunt Lizy, “that I held agin Lindy. She wuz too easy about Ann.”

“Well, Ann never bothered her. She never set her foot in the big house, an’ she told Nathe she’d never cross the doorstep after that day she met Rosie in the road, an’ Rosie mewed up her mouth an’ drawed back her skirts. Nathe come to see that Ann wuz right. Lindy had a strong hand on the girls, an’ kep’ his house so he could set in it peaceable, which wuz more’n Ann[279] could ’a’ done. He told Ann she could always do as she pleased about ever’thing except one. He said Bake would have to go away to school. He put it that the other childern might treat him like he wuzn’t as good as they wuz, an’ Ann give in. But I had an idy he seen she wuz gittin’ all wrapped up in Bake. Nathe couldn’t stand bein’ left out like that. Anyway he sent Bake off, an’ he growed up a fine feller, comin’ back fer his vacations, an’ to hunt ’possums Christmas, an’ ever’body likin’ him same as ef he’s raised right here.

“About a month after Nathe married Lindy, somebody writ Ann from Birmingham that Curt had died down there, an’ Nathe sent me to Alabam’ to make sure it wuz so, an’ I found out it wuz. I thought Nathe would be terr’bly cut up when I told him, ’cause ef he’d waited a little, Ann might ’a’ married him with Curt out o’ the way. But he ’lowed it wouldn’t ’a’ made any difference, he couldn’t let Ann come inter the big house where the girls would keep her miser’ble even ef she’d been willin’ to try it, an’ it wuz too late fer him to go away from Silver Valley an’ begin all over. I could see he wuz gittin’ satisfied with things as they wuz.”

“Why wouldn’t he be satisfied?” said Aunt Lizy,[280] “with pore Lindy doin’ ever’thing fer him while he rid aroun’, an’ went over to Ann’s whenever he took a notion! An’ folks never stopped him from bein’ deacon.”

“What proof did they have agin him, I’d like fer ye to tell me,” said Uncle Ranz. “They couldn’t do nothin’ without proof. It wuz his own mill, an’ ef he wanted to set around there fer a while, onct or twict a week, he had a right to. Nobody but me knowed what he’d said about Bake, an’ I never told it till to-day.”

“To-day!” exclaimed Aunt lazy. “I’ve heard it a hunderd times ef I have onct!”

“Well, I may have told you a time er two, Lizy, but I never went round the settlement a-tellin’ it. I reckon folks thought ef Lindy didn’t want to act up about Ann, they didn’t have no call to make trouble. Lindy had her hands full anyhow, there wuz always so many runnin’ in an’ out o’ the big house. The boys got married, too, an’ some o’ the childern wuz comin’ an’ goin’ all the time. It wuz quiet over at Ann’s, an’ she wuz a lot easier in her mind after Curt died. She growed stronger, an’ begun to ’tend to the mill hersef. When her mother died, she kept right on tendin’ it. An’ she wouldn’t take nobody to live with her. Her brother’s fam’ly wuz so close she didn’t need nobody, she said.[281] Folks would come to the mill, an’ talk pleasant, an’ hep with the liftin’, an’ Nathe couldn’t make her give it up.”

But Aunt Lizy must add a bitter touch. “It’s a pity,” she said, “that he didn’t try to make Lindy give up some o’ her hard work; she’d ’a’ lived longer.”

“I know she worked hard,” said Uncle Ranz, “an’ the gals wuz aggervatin’, but she seemed satisfied, an’ Nathe never interfered with her about nothin’.”

“I reckon,” said Uncle Dan’l, “them twenty-odd years he lived with Lindy wuz about the best o’ Nathe’s life. An’ she never opened her mouth about Ann.”

“You’re fergittin’ what she said when she wuz dyin’. Lindy wuz proud o’ her nice things—all the quilts she’d pieced, an’ counterpins an’ kiverlids she’d wove, an’ rugs, an’ table-kivers, an’ curtains. When she wuz dyin’ she ast Nathe not to let Ann come in over ’em soon as she wuz dead cold. Nathe promised her he wouldn’t. ‘Ef I bring a woman in here, Lindy,’ he said, ‘she’ll have to be as smart as you’ve been.’ That pleased Lindy better’n anything he could ’a’ told her. Nathe kept his word too, an’ married a fine widder from out around Waynesville. She wuz up in years, but healthy, an’ could turn her hand to anything.[282] Nathe wuz proud o’ the Widder Stiles when he brought her in.”

“I knowed her boy, Zeb, out in Jackson County,” said Uncle Dan’l. “He wuz a smart feller, an’ went off an’ made two kinds of a doctor of hissef, a rubbin’ doctor an’ the other kind. I seen Doc Stiles when he went through here last summer.”

“His mother could ’a’ come inter Silver Valley without puttin’ on airs, though,” Aunt Lizy informed us, in a tone savoring of keen reminiscence.

“She had different notions from Lindy, an’ that’s what Nathe wuzn’t expectin’,” continued Uncle Ranz. “She never ast no questions, an’ nobody told her nothin’, but she looked around fer hersef, an’ it didn’t take her long to make up her mind about Ann. When they’d been married about six weeks, she told Nathe she believed she’d go fer a visit to see how her folks wuz gittin’ on. Nathe said all right, only he’d ruther she wouldn’t stay long an’ it harvest-time. He hitched up, an’ took her to Scatter, an’ she got on the train an’ never come back. Nathe went over to Waynesville after her, but he had to come home by hissef. Seemed like he wuz tuk down about it, an’ never got back his spirit. ’Twasn’t long till he couldn’t ride over to Ann’s,[283] an’ after that he went off fast. Angie Sue left her second husband, an’ come to live with her daddy, an’ Herb’s wife wuz dead an’ him an’ all the childern wuz there, an’ pore ol’ Nathe had to die ’thout anybody in the house to make things run easy an’ peaceable.

“Angie Sue is claimin’ ever’thing her daddy had fer takin’ keer o’ him, but ef it hadn’t been fer the things Ann cooked up an’ slipped over to him by me an’ the neighbors, he wouldn’t ’a’ teched a bite fer three weeks ’fore he died. Angie Sue quit takin’ her stuff in to him, ’cause all he’d say wuz: ‘Git out o’ here with that pizen.’ The day he wuz dyin’ he sent me to tell Ann that Bake would take keer o’ her. She knowed that, but he wanted to be sendin’ some word. She wuz settin’ by the winder holdin’ something in her hand when I come inter the yard. I went to the winder, an’ she paled off a little an’ ast ef he wuz gone. When I told her what he wanted me to, she says: ‘You give him this. He’ll know what it is.’ I looked, an’ it wuz a big ol’ shiny chestnut, so light I knowed they wuzn’t nuthin’ in it but dust. ‘I picked it up,’ she says, ‘that day about a minute ’fore Lu saw us.’ I took it, but Nathe wuz dead when I got back home.”

[284]

III

At Scatter the next morning Serena and I waited for the up-train to Beebread. A little mother and her big son were waiting for the down-train going east. Serena went over to the mother, who was Ann Lindsay, and they chatted softly. I kept aside, not precipitating an introduction. Was she not a nugatory survival, who, by all laws of fitness, ought to have been on the hill ’longside the others? But the “others” would have removed their dusty skirts; and Bake had said that Jenny would be good to her. That expectation was apparent, I thought, in her quiet assurance. And suddenly, unreasonably, I felt that her departure was a desertion.

I recalled the futile Angie Sue, the innocuous Herb and Sam, the negligible Rosie, and thought of Nathe with all his vital insistence buried so “proper” in an untended grave. Then I looked at big Bake, whose resolute posterity would shoulder through, undoubtedly, to the end of a needy world. Here, for the breath-time of earth, at least, Uncle Nathe might hold oblivion in check.

The whistle of the east-bound train blew, a mile[285] away. I had overheard enough to know that Bake and his mother would leave the train at Carson and motor over the new highway, out and down to their lowland home—that highway, monstrously magical, so rapidly obliterating the Unakasia of my intimate care and delight. Within a few years, the ways and customs of Atlantis would not be more dim in time.

While the whistle of the train was still keen in the air, Elmer Jenkins walked on to the platform. He spied Baker Lindsay, and went to him at once.

“I saw you at the funeral yesterday,” he said.

“I saw you too,” said Bake, his smile implying that no one could have missed the master of ceremonies. Mr. Jenkins was pleased, and his glance of response included the pretty, white-haired woman at Bake’s side. When he was introduced, the lawyer would have offered his hand, but Ann, unfledged in new air, was too timid to note the gesture.

“I suppose you were out yesterday, Mrs. Lindsay,” he said, and she dropped a soft negative.

“Too bad you missed the ceremony! It was unusual in a district so remotely rural. I was glad to be instrumental in getting a good turn-out from the Carson lodge, though Mr. Ponder had not been in attendance[286] for some years. These fine old mountaineers are passing—passing. It was a very interesting funeral. Very.”

“I reckon it was,” said Ann, as Bake, gently dominant, lifted her to the train.