Judith of the Cumberlands

April was in the mountains. All the vast timbered slopes and tablelands of the Cumberlands were one golden dapple, as yet differentiated by darker greens and heavier shadows only where some group of pine or cedar stood. April in the Cumberlands is the May or early June of New England. Here March has the days of shine and shower; while to February belongs the gusty turbulence usually attributed to March. Now sounded the calls of the first whippoorwills in the dusk of evening; now the first mocking-bird sang long before day, very sweetly and softly, and again before moonrise; hours of sun he filled with bolder rejoicings, condescending in his more antic humour to mimic the hens that began to cackle around the barn. Every thicket by the water-courses blushed with azaleas; all the banks were gay with wild violets.

Throughout March’s changeful emotional season, night after night in those restless vehement impassioned airs, the cedar tree talked ardently to Judith. Through April’s softer nights she wakened often to listen to it. It went fondly over its first assurances. And the time of Creed Bonbright’s advent was near at hand now. Thought of it made light her step as she went about her work.

“Don’t you never marry a lazy man, Jude.”

The wife of Jim Cal Turrentine halted on the doorstep, a coarse white cup containing the coffee she had come to borrow poised in her hand as she turned to harangue the girl in the kitchen.

“I ain’t aimin’ to wed no man. Huh, I say marry! I’m not studyin’ about marryin’,” promptly responded Judith in the mountain girl’s unfailing formula; but she coloured high, and bent, pot-hooks in hand, to the great hearth to shift the clumsy Dutch oven that contained her bread.

“That’s what gals allers says,” commented Iley Turrentine discontentedly. “Huldy’s forever singin’ that tune. But let a good-lookin’ feller come in reach and I ’low any of you will change the note. Huldy’s took her foot in her hand and put out—left me with the whole wash to do, and Jim Cal in the bed declarin’ he’s got a misery in his back. Don’t you never wed a lazy man.”

“Whar’s Huldy gone?” inquired Judith, sauntering to the door and looking out on the glad beauty of the April morning with fond brooding eyes. The grotesque bow-legged pot-hooks dangled idly in her fingers.

“Over to Nancy Cyard’s to git her littlest spinnin’ wheel—so she said. I took notice that she had a need for that wheel as soon as ever she hearn tell that Creed Bonbright was up from Hepzibah stayin’ at the Cyards’s.”

Had not Iley been so engrossed with her own grievances, the sudden heat of the look Judith turned upon her must have enlightened her.

“Huldy knowed him right well when she was waitin’ on table at Miz. Huffaker’s boarding-house down at Hepzibah,” the woman went on. “I ain’t got no use for these here fellers that’s around tendin’ to the whole world’s business—they’ own chil’en is mighty apt to go hongry. But thar, what does a gal think of that by the side o’ curly hair and soft-spoken ways?”

For Judith Barrier at once all the light was gone out of the spring morning. The bird in the Rose of Sharon bush that she had taken for a thrush—why, the thing cawed like a crow. She could have struck her visitor. And then, with an uncertain impulse of gratitude, she was glad to be told anything about Creed, to be informed that others knew his hair was yellow and curly.

“Gone?” sounded old Jephthah’s deep tones from within, as Mrs. Jim Cal made her reluctant way back to a sick husband and a house full of work and babies. “Lord, to think of a woman havin’ the keen tongue that Iley’s got, and her husband keepin’ fat on it!”

“Uncle Jep,” inquired Judith abruptly, “did you know Creed Bonbright was at Nancy Card’s—stayin’ there, I mean?”

“No,” returned the old man, seeing in this a chance to call at the cabin, where, beneath the reception that might have been offered an interloper, even a duller wit than his might have divined a secret cordial welcome. “I reckon I better find time to step over that way an’ ax is there anything I can do to he’p ’em out.”

“I wish ’t you would,” assented Judith so heartily that he turned and regarded her with surprise. “An’ ef you see Huldy over yon tell her she’s needed at home. Jim Cal’s sick, and Iley can’t no-way git along without her.”

“I reckon James Calhoun Turrentine ain’t got nothin’ worse ’n the old complaint that sends a feller fishin’ when the days gits warm,” opined Jim Cal’s father. “I named that boy after the finest man that ever walked God’s green earth—an’ then the fool had to go and git fat on me! To think of me with a fat son! I allers did hold that a fat woman was bad enough, but a fat man ort p’intedly to be led out an’ killed.”

“Jude, whar’s my knife,” came the call from the window in a masculine voice. “Pitch it out here, can’t you?”

Judith took the pocket-knife from the mantel, and going to the window tossed it to her cousin Wade Turrentine, who was shaping an axe helve at the chip pile.

“Do you know whar Huldy’s gone?” she inquired, setting her elbows on the sill and staring down at the young fellow accusingly.

“Nope—an’ don’t care neither,” said Wade, contentedly returning to his whittling. He was expecting to marry Huldah Spiller, Iley’s younger sister, within a few months, and the reply was thus conventional.

“Well, you’d better care,” urged Judith. “You better make her stay home and behave herself. She’s gone over to Nancy Card’s taggin’ after Creed Bonbright. I wouldn’t stand it ef I was you.”

“I ain’t standin’—I’m settin’,” retorted Wade with rather feeble wit; but the girl noted with satisfaction the quick, fierce spark of anger that leaped to life in his clear hazel eyes, the instant stiffening of his relaxed figure. Like a child playing with fire, she was ready to set alight any materials that came within reach of her reckless fingers, so only that she fancied her own ends might be served. Now she went uneasily back to the hearthstone. Her uncle, noting that she appeared engrossed in her baking, gave a surreptitious glance into the small ancient mirror standing on the high mantel, made a half-furtive exchange of coats, and prepared to depart.

Up at the crib Blatch Turrentine was loading corn, and Jim Cal came creeping across from his own cabin whence Iley had ejected him. He stood for a while, humped, hands in pockets, watching the other’s strong body spring lithely to its task. Finally he began in his plaintive, ineffectual voice.

“Blatch, I take notice that you seem to be settin’ up to Jude. Do ye think hit’s wise?”

The other grunted over a particularly heavy sack, swung it to the waggon bed, straightened himself suddenly, and faced his questioner with a look of dark anger.

“I’d like to see the feller that can git her away from me!” he growled.

“I wasn’t a-meanin’ that,” said Jim Cal, patiently but uneasily shifting from the right foot to the left. “I’ll admit—an’ I reckon everybody on the place will say the same—that she’s always give you mo’ reason than another to believe she’d have ye. Not but what that’s Jude’s way, an’ she’s hilt out sech hopes to a-many. What pesters me is how you two would make out, once you was wed. Jude’s mighty pretty, but then again she’s got a tongue.”

“Her farm hain’t,” chuckled Blatch, pulling a sack into place; “and I ’low Jude wouldn’t have after her and me had been wed a short while.”

“I don’t know, Blatch,” maintained the fleshy one, timid yet persisting. “You’re a great somebody for havin’ yo’ own way, an’ Jude’s mighty high sperrity—why, you two would shorely fuss.”

“Not more than once, we wouldn’t,” returned Blatch with a meaning laugh. “The way to do with a woman like Jude is to give her a civil beatin’ to start out with and show her who’s boss—wouldn’t be no trouble after that. Jude Barrier has got a good farm. She’s the best worker of any gal that I know, and I aim for to have her—an’ this farm.”

Within the house now Judith, her cheeks glowing crimson as she bent above the heaped coals, was going with waxing resentment over the catalogue of Huldah Spiller’s personal characteristics. Her hair, huh! she was mighty particular to call it “aurbu’n,” but a body might as well say red when they were namin’ it, because red was what it was. If a man admired a turkey egg he would be likely to see beauty in Huldah’s complexion—some folks might wear a sunbonnet to bed, and freckle they would! A vision of the laughing black eyes and white flashing teeth that went with Huldah Spiller’s red ringlets and freckles, and made her little hatchet face brilliant when she smiled or laughed, suddenly put Judith on foot and running to the door.

“Uncle Jep,” she called after the tall receding form, “Oh, Uncle Jep!”

He turned muttering, “I hope to goodness Jude ain’t goin’ to git the hollerin’ habit. There’s Iley never lets Jim Cal git away from the house without hollerin’ after him as much as three times, and the thing he’d like least to have knowed abroad is the thing she takes up with for the last holler.”

“Uncle Jep,” came the clear hail from the doorway, “don’t you fail to find Huldy and send her straight home. Tell her Iley’s nigh about give out, and Jim Cal’s down sick in the bed—hear me?”

He nodded and turned disgustedly. What earthly difference did it make about Jim Cal and Huldah and Iley? Why should Judith suddenly care? And then, being a philosopher and in his own manner an amateur of life, he set to work to analyze her motives, and guessed obliquely at them.

The sight of his broad, retreating back evidently spurred Judith to fresh effort. “Uncle Jep!” she screamed, cupping her hands about her red lips to make the sound carry. “Ef you see Creed Bonbright tell him—howdy—for me!”

The sound may not have carried to the old man’s ears, but it reached a younger pair. Blatch Turrentine was just crossing through the grassy yard toward the “big road,” and Broyles’s mill over on Clear Fork, where his load of corn would be ground to meal with which to feed that blockaded still on the old Turrentine place which sometimes flung a delicate trail of smoke out over the flank of the slope across the gulch. As he heard Judith’s bantering cry, Blatch pulled up his team with a muttered curse. He looked down at her through narrowed eyes, jerking his mules savagely and swearing at them in an undertone. He was a well-made fellow with a certain slouching grace about him as he sat on his load of corn; but there were evil promising bumps on either side of his jaws that spoke of obstinacy, even of ferocity; and there was something menacing in his surly passivity of attitude. He looked at the girl and his lip lifted with a peculiar sidelong sneer.

“Holler a little louder an’ Bonbright hisself’ll hear ye,” he commented as he started up his team and rattled away down the steep, stony road.

Sunday brought its usual train of visitors. The Turrentine place was within long walking distance of Brush Arbor church, and whenever there was preaching they could count on a considerable overflow from that direction. The Sunday after Creed Bonbright put in an appearance at Nancy Card’s, there was preaching at Brush Arbor, but Judith, nourishing what secret hopes may be conjectured, refused to make any preparation for attending service.

“An’ ye think ye won’t go to meeting this fine sunshiny Sabbath mornin’, Sister Barrier?” Elder Drane put the query, standing anxious and carefully attired in his best before Judith on the doorstep of her home.

She shook her dark head, and looked past the Elder toward the distant ranges.

“I jest p’intedly cain’t git away this morning,” she said carelessly.

The Elder combed his sandy whiskers with a thoughtful forefinger. Not thus had Judith been wont to reply to him. Always before, if there had been denial, there were too, reasons adduced, shy looks from the corners of those dark eyes and tender inquiries as to the health of his children.

“Is they—is they some particular reason that you cain’t go this morning?” the widower inquired cautiously.

There was, and that particular reason lay as far afield as the Edge and Nancy Card’s place, but Judith Barrier did not see fit to name it to this one of her suitors, who had brought her perhaps more glory than any other. She was impatient to be rid of him. Like her mother Earth, having occupied her time for lo! these several years in the building of an ideal from such unpromising materials as were then at hand, she was ready to sweep those tentative makings—confessed failures now that she found the type she really wanted—swiftly, ruthlessly to the limbo of oblivion.

Elihu Drane stood high among his neighbours; he was a man of some education as well as comfortable means. His attention had been worth retaining once; now she smiled at him with a vague, impersonal sweetness, and repeated her statement that she couldn’t go to church.

“I’ve got too much to do,” she qualified finally. “Looks like the work in this house never is finished. And there’s chicken and dumplin’s to cook for dinner.”

The Elder’s pale blue eyes brightened. “Walk down to the gate with me, won’t you?” he said hopefully, “I’ve got somethin’ to talk to you about.”

When they were out of earshot of the house, he began eagerly, “Sister Barrier you’re workin’ yourse’f to death here, in the sweet days of your youth. I did promise the last time that I never would beg you again to wed me, but looks like I can’t stand by and hold my peace. If you was to trust yourse’f to me things would be different. I never did hold with a woman killin’ herse’f with hard work. My first and second had everything that they could wish for, and I was good and ready to do more any time they named what it was. I’ve got a crank churn. None of these old back-breaking, up-and-down dashers for me. I hired a woman whenever my wife said the word. I don’t think either of mine ever killed a chicken or cut a stick of firewood from the time they walked in the front door as a bride till they was carried out of it in their coffins.”

He stared eagerly into the downcast face beside him, but somewhere Judith found strength to resist even these dazzling propositions.

“I ain’t studyin’ about gittin’ wedded,” she told him most untruthfully. “Looks like I’m a mighty cold-hearted somebody, Elder Drane. I jest can’t fix it no way but to live here with my Uncle Jep and take care of him in his old days. Oh, would you wait a minute?” as they reached the horse-block and the Elder began to untie his mount with a discouraged countenance. “Jest let me run back to the house—I won’t keep you a second. I got some little sugar cookies for Mart and Lucy.”

Mart and Lucy were the Elder’s children. He stood looking after her as she ran lithely up the path, and wondered why she could love them so much and him so little. She came back laughing and a bit out of breath.

“I expect we’ll have company to-day,” she told him comfortably. “We always do when there’s preaching at the church, and I ’low I’d better stay home and see to the dinner.”

The Elder had scarcely made his chastened adieux when the Lusk girls came through the grove walking on either side of a young man.

The Lusk girls were Judith’s nearest neighbours—if you excepted Huldah Spiller at Jim Cal’s cabin, and at the present Judith certainly was in the mind to make an exception of her. The sisters were seldom seen apart; narrow shouldered, short waisted, thin limbed young creatures, they were even at seventeen bowing to a deprecating stoop. Their little faces were alike, short-chinned with pink mouths inclined to be tremulous, the eyes big, blue, and half-frightened in expression, and the drab hair drawn away from the small foreheads so tightly that it looked almost grey. They inevitably reminded one of a pair of blue and white night-moths, scarcely fitted for a daylight world, and continually afraid of it.

“Cousin Lacey’s over from the Far Cove,” called Pendrilla before they reached Judith. “Ain’t it fine? Ef we-all can git up a play-party he says he’ll shore come ef we let him know in time.”

The young fellow with them, their cousin Lacey Rountree, showed sufficient resemblance to mark the family type, but his light eyes were lit with reckless fires, and his short chin was carried with a defiant tilt.

“What you foolin’ along o’ that old feller for, Judith?” he asked jerking an irreverent thumb after the departing Elder.

“I wasn’t fooling with him,” returned Judith, her red lips demure, her brown eyes laughing above them through their thick fringe of lashes. “Elder Drane was consulting me about church matters—sech as children like you have no call to meddle with.”

Young Rountree smiled, “I’ll bet he was!” picking up a stone and firing it far into the blue in sheer exuberance of youthful joy. “Did he name anything about a weddin’ in church?”

“Elder Drane is a mighty fine man,” asserted Judith, suddenly sober. “Any gal might be glad to git him. But its my belief and opinion that his heart is buried with his first—or his second,” and she laughed out suddenly at the unintentional humorous conclusion she had made.

“See here, Jude,” the boy put it boldly as the four young people strolled toward the house, “you’re too pretty and sweet to be anybody’s thirdly. Next time old man Drane comes pesterin’ round you, you tell him that you’re promised to me—hear?”

Again Judith laughed. It is impossible to talk seriously to a boy with whom one has played hat-ball and prisoner’s base, whose hair one has pulled, and who has, in retort courteous, rolled one in the dust.

“I’m in earnest if I ever was in my life,” asserted Lacey, taking it quite as a matter of course that Cliantha and Pendrilla should be made party to his courting.

And the two little old maids of seventeen looked with wondering admiration at Judith’s management of all this masculine attention—her careless, discounting smile for their swaggering young cousin, her calm acceptance of imposing Elder Drane’s humble and persistent wooing.

Judith awakened that morning with the song of the first thrush sounding in her ears. Day was not yet come, but she knew instantly it was near dawn, so soon as she heard the keen, cool, unmatched thrush voice. Not elaborate the song like the bobolink, nor passionate like the nightingale, nor with the bravura of the oriole; but low or loud, its pure tones are always penetrating, piercing the heart of their hearer with exquisite sweetness.

The girl lay long in the dark listening, and it seemed to her half awakened consciousness that this voice in the April dawn was like Creed Bonbright. These notes, lucid, passionless, that yet always stirred her heart strangely, and the selfless personality, the high-purposed soul that spoke in him, they were akin. The crystal tones flowed on; Judith harkened, the ear of her spirit alert for a message. Yes, Creed was like that. And her feeling for him too, it partook of the same quality, a thing to climb toward rather than concede.

And then after all her tremulous hopes, her plannings, the dozen times she had taken a certain frock from its peg minutely inspecting and repairing it, that it might be ready for wear on the great occasion, the first meeting with Creed found Judith unprepared, happening in no wise as she would have chosen. She was at the milking lot, clad in the usual dull blue cotton gown in which the mountain woman works. She had filled her two pails and set them on the high bench by the fence while she turned the calves into the small pasture reserved for them and let old Red and Piedy out.

He approached across the fields from the direction of his own house, and naturally saw her before she observed him. It was early morning. The sky was blue and wide and high, with great shining piles of white cloud swimming lazily at the horizon, cutting sharply against its colour. Around the edges of the cow-lot peach trees were all in blossom and humming with bees, their rich, amethystine rose flung up against the gay April sky in a challenge of beauty and joy. The air was full of the promises of spring, keen, bracing, yet with an undercurrent of languorous warmth. There was a ragged fleece of bloom, sweet and alive with droning insects, over a plum thicket near the woods,—half-wild, brambly things, cousin on the one hand to the cultivated farm, and on the other to the free forest,—while beyond, through the openings of the timber, dogwood flamed white in the sun.

Judith came forward and greeted the newcomer, all unaware of the picture she made, tall and straight and pliant in her simple blue cotton, under the wonderful blue-and-white sky and the passionate purple pink of the blossoms, with the scant folds of her frock outlining the rounded young body, its sleeves rolled up on her fine arms, its neck folded away from the firm column of her throat, the frolic wind ruffling the dark locks above her shadowy eyes. There were strange gleams in those dark eyes; her red lips were tremulous whether she spoke or not. It was as though she had some urgent message for him which waited always behind her silence or her speech.

“I thought I’d come over and get acquainted with my neighbours,” Bonbright began in his impersonal fashion.

“Uncle Jep and the boys has gone across to the far place ploughing to-day,” said Judith. “They’s nobody at home but Jim Cal and his wife—and me.” She forebore to add the name of Huldah Spiller, though her angry eye descried that young woman ostentatiously hanging wash on a line back of the Jim Cal cabin.

“I won’t stop then this morning,” said Bonbright. “I’ll get along over to the far place. I wanted to have speech with your uncle. He was at Aunt Nancy’s the other day and we had some talk; he knows more about what I’m aiming at up here then I do. A man of his age and good sense can be a sight of help to me.”

“Uncle Jep will be proud to do anything he can,” said Judith softly. “Won’t you come in and set awhile?”

She dreaded that the invitation might hurry him away, and now made hasty use of the first diversion that offered. He had broken a blooming switch from the peach-tree beneath which he stood, and she reproached him fondly.

“Look at you. Now there won’t never be no peaches where them blossoms was.”

He twisted the twig in his fingers and smiled down at her, conscious of a singular and personal kindness between them, aware too, for the first time, that she was young, beautiful, and a woman; before, she had been merely an individual to him.

“My mother used to say that to me when I would break fruit blows,” he said meditatively. “But father always pruned his trees when they were in blossom—they can’t any of them bear a peach for every bloom.”

She shook her head as though giving up the argument, since it was after all a matter of sentiment. Her dark, rich-coloured beauty glowed its contrast to his cool, northern type.

At present neither spoke more than a few syllables of the spiritual language of the other, yet so powerful was the attraction between them that even Creed began to feel it, while Judith, the primitive woman, all given over to instinct, promptly laid about her for something to hold and interest him.

“The young folks is a-goin’ to get up a play-party at our house sometime soon,” she hazarded. “I reckon you wouldn’t come to any such as that, would you?”

“I’d be proud to come,” returned Creed at once. But he spoiled it by adding, “I’ve got to get acquainted with people all over again, it’s so long since I lived here; and looks like I’m not a very good mixer.”

“Will you sure come?” inquired Judith insistently, as she saw him preparing to depart.

“I sure will.”

“You could stay over night in your own house then—ain’t you comin’ back, ever, to live there?”

“Why, yes, I reckon I might stay there over night, but it’s too far from the main road for a justice’s office.”

“Well, if you’re going to try to sleep in the house, it ort to be opened up and sunned a little; you better let me have the key now,” observed Judith, assuming airs of proprietorship over his inept masculinity.

Smiling, he got the key from his pocket and handed it to her. “Help yourself to anything you want for the party, or any other time,” he said in mountain fashion.

She looked down at that key with the pride of one to whom had been given the freedom of a city. Its possession enabled her to bear it with a fair degree of equanimity when Huldah Spiller, having “jest slung her clothes anyway onto that line,” as Judith phrased it to herself, came panting and laughing across the slope between the two houses and called a gay “Howdy!” to the visitor. The lively little red haired flirt professed greatly to desire news of certain persons in Hepzibah, and as Creed was departing sauntered unconcernedly beside him as far as the draw-bars, detaining him in conversation there as long as possible. She had an instinctive knowledge that Judith, looking on, was deeply disturbed.

Creed set his justice’s office about a hundred yards from Nancy Card’s cabin, on the main road that led through the two Turkey Track neighbourhoods out to Rainy Gap and the Far Cove settlement. The little shack was built of the raw yellow boards which the new saw-mill was ripping out of pine trees over on the shoulder of Big Turkey Track above Garyville. Most of the mountain dwellers still preferred log houses, and the lumber was sent down the mountain by means of a little gravity railway, whose car was warped up after each trip by a patient old mule working in a circular treadmill.

God knows with what high hopes the planks of that humble shanty were put in place, with what visions sill and window-frame were shaped and joined, Aunt Nancy going out and in at her household tasks calling good counsel over to him; Beezy, the irrepressible, adding shaving curls to her red frazzle; Little Buck, furnished with hammer and tacks, gravely assisting, pounding his fingers only part of the time. Hens were coming off. Old Nancy had a great time with notionate mothers hatching out broods under the floor or in the stable loft, and the plaintive cheep-cheep! of the “weedies” added its note to the chorus of sounds as the children followed them about, now and then catching up a ball of fluff to pet it, undeterred by indignant clucks from the parent.

As Creed whistled over his work, he saw a shadowy train coming down the road, the people whom he should help, his people, to whose darkness he should bring light and counsel. They knew so little, and needed so much. True, his own knowledge was not great; but it was all freely at their service. His heart swelled with good-will as he prepared to open his modest campaign of usefulness.

To come into leadership naturally a man should be the logical outgrowth of his class and time, and this Creed knew he was not. Yet he had pondered the matter deeply, and put it thus to himself: The peasant of Europe can only rise through stages of material prosperity to a point of development at which he craves intellectual attainment, or spiritual growth. But the mountaineer is always a thinker; he has even in his poverty a hearty contempt for luxury, for material gain at the expense of personality. With his disposition to philosophy, fostered by solitude and isolation, he readily overleaps those gradations, and would step at once from obscurity to the position of a man of culture were the means at hand.

“Bonbright,” remonstrated Jephthah Turrentine, in the first conversation the two held upon the subject, “Ye cain’t give people what they ain’t ready to take. Ef our folks wanted law and order, don’t you reckon they’d make the move to get it?”

“That’s it exactly, Mr. Turrentine,” responded Creed quickly. “They need to be taught what to want.”

“Oh, they do, do they?” inquired Jephthah with a humorous twitch of the lips. “Well, ef you’re a-goin’ to set up to teach, hadn’t you better have a school-house, place of a jestice’s office?”

“Maybe you’re right. I reckon you are—exactly right,” Creed assented thoughtfully. “I’d studied about that considerable. I reckon I’m a more suitable age for a schoolmaster than for a justice; and the children—but that would take a long time; and I wanted to give the help where it was worst needed.”

“Oh, well, ’tain’t a hangin’ matter,” old Jephthah smiled at the younger man’s solemn earnestness. “Ef this new fangled buildin’ o’ yours don’t get used for a jestice’s office we can turn it into a school-house; we need one powerful bad.”

The desultory, sardonic, deep-voiced, soft-footed, mountain carpenters who worked leisurely and fitfully with Creed were always mightily amused by the exactness of the “town feller’s” ideas.

“Why lordy! Lookee hyer Creed,” remonstrated Doss Provine, over a question of matching boards and battening joints, “ef you git yo’ pen so almighty tight as that you won’t git no fresh air. Man’s bound to have ventilation. Course you can leave the do’ open all the time like we-all do; but when yo’re a-holdin’ co’t and sech-like maybe you’ll want to shet the do’ sometimes—and then whar’ll ye git breath to breathe?”

“I reckon Creed knows his business,” put in the old man who was helping Doss, “but all these here glass winders is blame foolishness to me. Ef ye need light, open the do’. Ef somebody comes that you don’t want in, you can shet it and put up a bar. But saw the walls full o’ holes an’ set in glass winders, an’ any feller that’s got a mind to can pick ye off with a rifle ball as easy as not whilst ye set by the fire of a evenin’.”

He shook a reprehending head, hoary with the snows of years, and containing therefore, presumably, wisdom. He had learned the necessary points of life in his environment, and as always occurs, the younger generation seemed to him lavishly reckless.

It was only old Jephthah’s criticisms that Creed really minded.

“Uh-huh,” allowed Jephthah, settling his hands on his hips and surveying the yellow pine structure tolerantly; “mighty sightly for them that likes that kind o’ thing. But I hold with a good log house, becaze it’s apt to be square. These here town doin’s that looks like a man with a bile on his ear never did ketch me. Ef ye hew out good oak or pine timber ye won’t be willin’ to cut short lengths for to make such foolishness.”

Creed would often have explained to his critics that he did not expect to get into feuds and have neighbours pot-hunting him through his glass windows, that he needed the light from them to study or read, and that his little house was as square as any log hut ever constructed; but they lumped it all together and made an outsider of him—which hurt.

Word went abroad to the farthest confines of the Turkey Track neighbourhoods, carried by herders who took sheep, hogs, or cows up into the high-hung inner valleys of Yellow Old Bald, or the natural meadows of Big Turkey Track to turn them loose for the season, recited where one or two met out salting cattle, discussed by many a chip pile, where the willing axe rested on the unsplit block while the wielder heard how Creed Bonbright had done sot up a jestice’s office and made peace between the Shallidays and the Bushareses.

“But you know in reason hit ain’t a-goin’ to hold,” the old women at the hearthside would say, withdrawing their cob pipes to shake deprecating heads. “The Bushareses and Shallidays has been killin’ each other up sence my gran’pap was a little boy. They tell me the Injuns mixed into that there feud. I say Creed Bonbright! Nothin’ but a fool boy. He better l’arn something before he sets up to teach. He don’t know what he’s meddlin’ with.” All this with a pride in the vendetta as an ancient neighbourhood institution and monument.

The office of the new justice never became, as he had hoped it would, a lounging place for his passing neighbours. He had expected them to drop in to visit with him, when he might sow the good seed in season without appearing to seek an occasion for so doing. But they were shy of him—he saw that. They went on past the little yellow pine office, on their mules, or their sorry nags, or in shackling waggons behind oxen, to lounge at Nancy Card’s gate as of old, or sit upon her porch to swap news and listen to her caustic comments on neighbourhood happenings. And only an occasional glance over the shoulder, a backward nod of the head, or jerk of the thumb, told the young justice that he was present in their recollection.

But there was one element of the community which showed no disposition to hold aloof from the newcomer. About this time, by twos and threes—never one alone—the virgins of the mountain-top sought Nancy Card for flower seed, soft soap recipes, a charm to take off warts, or to learn exactly from her at what season a body had better divide the roots of day lilies.

Old-fashioned roses begin blooming in the Cumberlands about the first of May, and when this time came round Nancy’s garden was a thing to marvel at. The spring flowers were past or nearly so, and the advent of the roses marked the floral beginning of summer. In the forest the dogwood petals now let go and fell silently one by one through the shadowed green. But over Nancy’s fence of weather-beaten, hand-rived palings tossed a snow of bloom so like that here they were not missed at all; and the mock orange adds to the dogwood’s simple beauty the soul of an exquisite odour. Small, heavily thorned roses, yellow as the daffodils they had succeeded, blushing Baltimore Belles, Seven Sisters all over the ricketty porch—one who loved such things might well have taken a day’s journey for sight of that dooryard in May.

“Well, I vow!” said the old woman one day peering through her window that gave on the road, “ef here don’t come Huldy Spiller and the two Lusks. Look like to me I have a heap of gal company of late. Creed, you’re a mighty learned somebody, cain’t you tell me the whys of it?”

Creed, sitting at a little table deep in some books and papers before him, heard no word of his friend’s teasing speech. It was Doss Provine, at the big fireplace heating a poker to burn a hole through his pulley-wheel, who turned toward his mother-in-law and grinned foolishly.

“I reckon I know the answer to that,” he observed. “The boys is all a warnin’ me that a widower is mo’ run after than a young feller. They tell me I’ll have to watch out.”

“I say watch out—you!” cried Nancy, wheeling upon him with a comically disproportionate fury. “Jest you let me ketch you settin’ up to any of the gals—you, a father with two he’pless chaps to look after, and nobody but an old woman like me, with one foot in the grave, to depend on!”

There was one girl however who, instead of multiplying her visits to the Card cabin with Creed’s advent, abruptly ceased them. Judith Barrier was an uncertain quantity to her masculine household; unreasonably elated or depressed, she led them the round of her moods, and they paid for the fact that Creed Bonbright did not come across the mountain top visiting, without being at all aware of where their guilt lay. After that interview at the milking lot one thought, one emotion was with her always. Always she was waiting for the next meeting with Creed. Through the day she heard his voice or his footstep in all the little sounds of the woods, the humble noises of the farm life; and at night there was the cedar tree.

Now the cedar tree had affairs of its own. When, with the egotism of her keen, passionate, desirous youth, the girl in the little chamber under the eves listened to its voice in April, it was talking in the soft air of the vernal night about the sap which rose in its veins, spicy, resinous, odoured with spring, carrying its wine of life into the farthest green tips, till all the little twigs were intoxicated with it, and beat and flung themselves in joy. And the tree’s deep note was a song of abiding trust. There was a nest building within its heart—so well hidden in that dense thicket that it was safe from the eye of any prowler. Hope and faith and a great devotion went to the building. And the tree, rich and happy in its own life, cherished generously that other life within its protecting arms. Its song was of the mating birds, the building birds, the mother joy and father joy that made the nest ready for the speckled eggs and the birdlings that should follow.

But to the listening girl the cedar tree was a harp that the winds struck—a voice that spoke in the night of love and Creed.

Finally one morning she saddled Selim and, with something in her pocket for Little Buck and Beezy, set out for Hepzibah—reckon they’s nothin’ so turrible strange in a body goin’ to the settlement when they’ out o’ both needles an’ bakin’ soda!

As she rode up Nancy herself called to her to ’light and come in, and finally went out to stand a moment and chat; but the girl smilingly shook her head.

“I got to be getting along, thank ye,” she said. “I can’t stop this mornin’. You-all must come and see us, Aunt Nancy.”

“Why, what’s Little Buck a-goin’ to do, with his own true love a-tearin’ past the house like this and refusin’ to stop and visit?” complained Nancy, secretly applauding the girl’s good sense and dignity.

“Where is my beau?” asked Judith. “I fetched him the first June apples off the tree.”

“Judy’s brought apples to her beau, and now he’s went off fishin’ with Doss and she’s got nobody to give ’em to,” old Nancy called as Creed stepped from the door of his office and started across to the cabin. “Don’t you want ’em, Creed?”

The tall, fair young fellow came up laughing.

“Aunt Nancy knows I love apples,” he said. “If you give me Little Buck’s share I’m afraid he’ll never see ’em.”

Judith reached in her pocket and brought out the shiny, small red globes and put them in his outstretched hand.

“I’ll bring Little Buck a play-pretty from the settlement,” she said softly. “He’ll keer a sight more for hit than for the apples. I wish I’d knowed you liked ’em—I’d brought you more. Why don’t you come over and see us and git all you want? We’ve got two trees of ’em.”

ALL through April Judith’s project of a play-party languished. She had to pull steadily against the elders, for not only were the men hard at it making ready for the putting in of the year’s crops, but it was gardening time as well, when even the women and children are pressed in to help at the raking up and brush piling. Wood smoke from the clearing fires haunted all the hollows. Everybody was preparing for the making of the truck patch. Down on the little groups would drop a cloud and blot out the bonfire till it became the mere glowing point at the heart of a shaken opal—for if you are wise you burn brush on a rainy day.

Old Jephthah opposed the plan for the girl’s festivity on another ground. “I’ve got no objection to a frolic, Jude,” he observed quietly, on hearing the first mention of the matter, “but I wouldn’t have no play-party at this house. Hit’s too handy to that cussed still of Blatch’s. A passel of fool boys is mighty apt to go over thar an’ fill theirselves up with corn whiskey, an’ the party will just about end up in a interruption.”

He said no more, and Judith made no reply. Though ordinarily she would have hesitated to go against her uncle’s expressed wishes, her heart was too much set on this enterprise to allow of easy checking. She made no reply, but her campaign on behalf of the merrymaking went steadily on.

“I wonder you can have the heart to git up play-parties and the like when Andy and Jeff’s a-sufferin’ in the jail,” Pendrilla Lusk plucked up spirit to say when the plan was first mooted to her.

Andy and Jeff, the wild young hawks, with the glamour upon them of lawless, adventurous spirits, and bold, proper lovers, equally fascinated and terrified the Lusk girls—timid, fluttering pair—and were in their turn attracted to them by an inevitable law of nature.

“I don’t see how it hurts the boys for us to have a dance,” rejoined Judith with asperity. “If we was all to set and cry our eyes out, it wouldn’t fetch ’em back on the mountain any quicker.” Then with a teasing flash, “I’ll tell ’em when they git home what you said, though.”

“Now, Jude, you’re real mean,” pleaded Cliantha Lusk sinking to her knees beside Judith and raising thin little arms to clasp that young woman around the waist. “You ain’t a-goin’ to tell them fool boys any sech truck as that, air ye? Pendrilly jest said it for a sayin’. We’d love to come to yo’ play-party, whenever it is. I say Andy and Jeff! Let ’em git out of the jail the way they got in.”

This is the approved attitude of the mountain virgin; yet Cliantha’s voice shook sadly as she uttered the independent sentiments, and Pendrilla furtively wiped her eyes in promising to attend the play-party.

All this was in April. By the time May came in, that dread of a belated frost which amounts almost to terror in the farmer of the Cumberlands was ended; the Easter cold and blackberry winter were over, and all the garden truck was planted. Everybody began whole-heartedly to enjoy the time of year. The leaves were full size, but still soft; the wind made hardly any noise among them. In the pasture lot and fence corners near the house, meadow flowers began to star the green. The frog chorus, so loud and jubilant in early spring, had subsided now except at night, when their treble was accompanied by the bass “chug-chug” of the bull-frogs. The mornings were vocal with the notes of yellow hammer, cuckoos; the cooing of doves, the squawk of the jay, and the drum of the big red-headed woodpecker sounded through the summer woods; while always in the cool of the day came the thrush’s song. The early corn was in by mid April. About the first full moon of May the main crop was planted.

Early in June Judith, walking in the wood, brought home the splendid red wood lily, and a cluster too of “ratsbane,” with its flowers like a little crown of white wax.

The spring restlessness was over throughout all the wild country; life no longer stirred and rustled; the leaves hung still in the long sunny noons. The air was clear, rinsed with frequent showers; the woods were silent except for birds and cow bells. The crops were laid by. The huckleberries ripened; the “sarvices” hung thick in the forest. Even the blackberries were beginning to turn and Andy and Jeff had been back at home more than a week, when Judith finally succeeded in getting her forces together and her guests promised. Many of them would have to walk four or five miles to sing and play for a few hours, tramping back at midnight to lie down and catch what sleep they could before dawn waked them to another day of toil. Thursday evening was set for the event. On Wednesday the Lusk girls coming in to discuss, found Judith with shining eyes and crimson cheeks, attacking the simple housework of the cabin.

“I wish’t you’d sing while I finish my churnin’,” the girl said, “I’m so flustered looks like I can’t sca’cely do anything right.”

The sisters clasped hands and raised their childish faces. Cliantha had a thin, high piping soprano like a small flute, and Pendrilla sang “counter” to it. They were repositories of all the old ballads of the mountains—ballads from Scotland, from Ireland, from England, and from Wales, that set the ferocities and the love-making of Elizabeth’s time or earlier most quaintly amidst the localities and nomenclature of the Cumberlands.

“Sing ‘Barb’ry Allen,’” commanded Judith as she swung the dasher with nervous energy.

The July sunshine filtered through the leaves of the big muscadine vine that covered and sheltered the tiny side porch. Bees boomed about the ragged tufts of clover and Bouncing Bet that fringed the side yard. The old hound at the chip pile blinked lazily and raised his head, then dropped it and slumbered again. Within, the big room was dim and cool. The high, thin, quavering voices celebrated the love and woe of cruel Barbara Allen. Judith’s dark eyes grew soft and brooding; the nervous strokes of her dasher measured themselves more and more to the swing of the old tune.

“I don’t see how anybody can be hardhearted thataway with a person they love,” she said softly as the song descended to its doleful end.

The next morning Judith hurried her work that she might get through and go over to the Bonbright house, there to put in execution her long-cherished plan of cleaning it and making it fit for Creed’s occupancy that night. Old Dilsey Rust, their tenant, came in to help at the Turrentine cabin always on occasions like this, or with the churning or washing; and penetrated with impatience the girl finally left her assistant in charge of matters and set forth through the woods and across the fields, the little key which she had carried ever since that morning in early April in her pocket like a talisman. At last it was to open her kingdom to her. Behind the bolt that it controlled lay not only the home of Creed’s childhood, but supposably the home of his children. Judith’s heart beat suffocatingly at the thought.

Halfway across she met Huldah Spiller coming up from the Far spring with a bucket of sulphur water which was held to be good for Jim Cal’s rheumatism.

“Whar ye goin’?” asked Huldah, looking curiously at the broom over Judith’s shoulder, the roll of cloths and the small gourd of soft soap she carried.

“I’m a-goin’ whar I’m a-goin’,” returned Judith aggressively. But the other only smiled. It did not suit her to be offended at that moment. Instead, “What are you goin’ to wear to-night, Judy?” she inquired vivaciously. It was one of the advantages of waiting on table at a boarding house in the settlement—pieced out perhaps by the possession of red hair—that Huldah had the courage to address Judith Barrier as “Judy.”

The hostess of the evening’s festivities was half in the mind to pass on without reply; then her curiosity as to Huldah’s costume got the better of her, and she compromised, with a laconic,

“My white frock—what are you?”

“Don’t you know I went down to Hepzibah after you said you was goin’ to have a play-party?” asked Huldah, tossing her head to get the red curls out of her eyes. “Well, Iley had give me fifty cents on my wages—” Huldah worked as a servant in her sister’s family, which is not uncommon in the mountains—“an’ I tuck it and bought me ten yard of five-cent lawn, the prettiest blue you ever put yo’ eyes on.”

“Blue!” A sudden shock went over Judith. She had forgotten; and here Huldah Spiller would wear a blue dress, and she—oh, the stupidity, the bat-like, doltish, blindness of it!—would be in white, because it was now too late to make a change. Out of the very tragedy of the situation she managed to pluck forth a smile.

“I was aimin’ to wear blue ribbons,” she said finally. It had just come into her head that she could pull the blue bow from her hat—that blue bow with which she had zealously replaced the despised and outcast red—and so make shift.

“Blue’s my best feller’s favourite colour,” contributed Huldah, picking up the bucket which she had set down, and starting on. “He ’lows it goes fine with aurbu’n hair.”

“Wade never said that,” muttered Judith to herself as she took her way to the Bonbright place.

But after all one could not be long out of tune with such a summer day. The spicy odour of pennyroyal bruised underfoot, came to her nostrils like incense. Even the sickly sweet of jimson blossoms by the draw-bars of the milking lot was dear and familiar, while their white trumpets whispered of childish play-days and flower-ladies she had set walking in procession under the shadow of some big green leaf. Blue—the soft stars of spider-wort opening among the rocks reminded her of the hue; blue curls and dittany tangled at the path edge; but the very air itself was beginning to wear Creed’s colour and put on that wonderful, luminous blue in which the Cumberlands of midsummer melt cerulean into a sky of lapis lazuli. Creed’s colour—Creed’s colour—her dark eyes misted as they searched the far reaches of the hills and found it everywhere.

Jephthah Turrentine used to say that if a man owned enough mountain land to set his foot on, he owned the whole of the sky above him; it was a truer word than this old mountain dweller could have known, since the mere possessor of a city lot, where other tall roofs cut the horizon high, must content himself with less of the welkin.

Judith opened the door, went in, closed it behind her, and gazed about. There lay over everything a fine dust; there was the look of decay which comes with disuse; and the air bore the musty odour of a shut and long uninhabited house. The Bonbright home had been a good one for the mountains, of hewn logs, and with four rooms, and two great stone chimneys. Inside was the furniture which Mary Gillenwaters brought to it as a bride when her mountain lover came down to Hepzibah and with the swift ardour of his tribe—this Bonbright’s fires of eloquence were all kindled upon the altar of his mating romance—charmed the daughter of its one merchant. These added to the already fairly complete plenishings, many of which had come over the mountains from Virginia when Sevier opened up the new State, gave an air of abundance, even of sober elegance to the room.

Reverently Judith moved among the dumb witnesses and servitors of Bonbright generations. Here was the spinning-wheel, here the cards, and out in the little room off the porch stood the loom. She had dreams of replacing these with a sewing machine. Nobody wove jeans any more—but a good carpet-loom now, that might be made useful. Unwilling to hang the bedding on bushes for fear of a chance tear from twig or thorn, she rigged a line in the back yard, and spread quilt and homespun blanket, coarse white sheets and pillowcases that were yellowing with age, out for the glad gay wind to play with, for the sunshine to sweeten.

“What a lot of feather beds!” she murmured as she tallied them over. “That there ticking is better than you can buy in the stores. My, ain’t these light and nice!”

All the warm, sunny afternoon she toiled at her self-appointed labour of love. She swept and dusted, she scrubbed and cleaned, with capable fingers, proud of the strength and skill that made her a good housewife; then bringing in the fragrant, homely fabrics, made up the beds and placed all back in due order.

“He’s boun’ to notice somebody’s been here and put things to rights,” she said over and over to herself. “If it looks sightly, and seems like home, mebbe he’ll give out the notion of stayin’ at Nancy Card’s, and come and live here.” She brooded on the bliss of the idea as she worked.

Under the great mahogany four-poster in the front room was slipped a trundle-bed that she drew out and looked at with fond eyes. No doubt Creed’s boyish head had lain there once. She wished passionately that she had known him then, all unaware that we never do know our lovers when they and we are children. Even those playfellows who are destined to be mates find, all on a day, that the familiar companion who has grown up beside each has changed into quite a different person.

She rolled the trundle-bed back into place and turned to lift a pile of bedding that lay apparently on a chest. When it was raised it revealed the clumsy old cradle that had rocked three generations of Bonbrights. She stood looking down at it with quickening pulse, then reached a fluttering hand and touched its small pillow tenderly. Here had rested that golden head, so many years ago; beside it his mother had sat and rocked. At the thought Judith was on her knees, her hands falling naturally upon the side and rocking the small bed. In a strange conflict of dreamy emotion, she swayed it back and forth a moment, and then—what woman could resist it?—began to croon an old mountain cradle song. Suddenly the westering sun got to the level of a half shrouded window and sent a beam in across Judith’s bent head.

“My land!” she whispered, getting to her feet. “I ain’t got no call to stay foolin’ here all day. Dilsey’ll jest about burn them cakes I told her to bake, and I ain’t fixed my blue bow for my hair yet.”

She swept a glance around the speckless room, gathered up her paraphernalia of cleaning, passed out, locked the door, and set her face toward home.

In Mary Bonbright’s garden, now given over to weeds as the gardens of dead women are so apt to be, there had grown a singular, half wild rose. This flower was of a clear blood red, with a yellow heart which its five broad petals, flinging wide open, disclosed to view, unlike the crimped and guarded loveliness of the more evolved sisters of the green-house. Mowed down spring after spring by the scythe of Strubley, the renter, the vigorous thing had spread abroad, and as Judith stepped from the door its exultant beauty caught her eye. Flaming shields of crimson, bearing each its boss of filagree gold, the hosts of the red rose stood up bravely in the choking grass to which the insensate scythe blade had so often levelled them, and shouted to the girl of love and joy, and of youth which was the time for both. Wide petalled, burning red, their golden hearts open to sun and bee, they were the blossoms for the earth-woman. She ran and knelt down beside them.

He had said that his favourite colour was blue—but there are no blue roses. She did not follow it far enough to guess that the man who was content with the colour of the sky might not get his gaze down close enough to earth to care for roses. She bent above them gloating on their fierce, triumphant splendour. Was there ever such a colour? But the stems were dreadfully short. A sudden purpose grew in her mind. With hasty, tremulous fingers she gathered an apronful of the blossoms. Once more she unlocked the front door, hurried back to that bed which she had so lovingly spread, and on its white coverlet began arranging a great, glowing wreath, fashioned by setting a circle of red roses petal to petal.

As she worked Cliantha Lusk’s ballad came into her head, and she sang it under her breath.

“No—that ain’t it—

True lovers—she crooned the word over and over. It was sweet to say it. She thrilled through all her strong young body with the delight of what she was doing.

“He’ll wonder who put ’em there,” she whispered to herself. “Ef nothin’ else don’t take his eye, these here is shore to.”