Jim never forgot the strange look of everything—of the cave with its rough walls, of the bats and spiders and beetles, of his mother, sitting there on the ground, all bewildered and strange-looking, and of the girl who clung to her and shuddered.
“Get out of here! Get out of here!” called Pa McBirney cheerily. “It’s a fine day outside.” And he helped his wife and Azalea to their feet and led them outside.
“Best not build a fire,” he said. “We’ll have to lie low a day or two till them show folks get out of the way. I cooked the bacon before I come, and I brought the coffee in a pail. It was hot when I started, but I reckon it’s cold enough now. But here’s plenty of biscuit, and a jar of gooseberry jam, and some of them star cookies and some hard-boiled eggs and a few radishes and some cold potatoes—”
“My goodness, Thomas!” cried his wife. “Did you think we had turned into wolves because we was living in a den?”
“Well you see, Mary, this here will have to last you all of to-day and perhaps a part of to-morrow. There’s no telling just what will happen. I might be penned up down there, with men watching me, and then you’d want a little stock of stuff laid by.”
Jim had moved over toward Azalea, and now the two stood side by side staring at the older people. Pa might be penned up, and ma, who was hiding in a den, might go hungry! Did such things really happen? Jim turned and gazed at the girl, and he couldn’t help thinking how pretty she was, with her oval face and her great gray eyes and her long braids of brown hair. She looked as if she could run as well as a boy and ride a horse as well, or maybe better. Suddenly an idea came to him.
“Say!” he burst out. “You’re glad you’re with us, ain’t you? You don’t wish you’d gone on with them other folks?”
“Glad!” said the girl. “Of course I’m glad. I never want to see them again—never, never!” Her gray eyes turned almost black, and she straightened her thin little figure till, in Jim’s words, she was like a ramrod.
“Peter!” thought Jim. “I wouldn’t like to get her mad at me.” She wouldn’t be a good one to tease, Jim made up his mind. Jim saw that his mother was watching the girl, too, and he knew how his mother hated anything like bad temper and he wondered if she would like Azalea as well when she saw that she could be “peppery.” But all she said was:
“Azalea, I know a place where there’s a spring of water. Pa’s brought us a towel and some soap and a comb. We’ll go down to the spring and make ready for breakfast.” So the two went off together, and Jim and his father spread the breakfast out on a sort of table-rock.
Then they sat down to their breakfast, and whether it was the strangeness of the night and the wildness of the place and the beauty of the morning, or whether it was fun in its way, being outlaws and in hiding, who can say? But as the meal went on they began to laugh and talk as they seldom did even when there was company; and Azalea couldn’t keep from laughing either. There was something hushed and sad about her face, and when she spoke, her voice had a break in it, for her terrible sorrow lay heavily upon her heart. Yet, as she had said to Ma McBirney the night before, she had known for a long time that her mother could not live, and she had thought how, after her mother was gone, she herself must go on, taking the rough treatment the show men had given her, and riding bareback on those poor thin horses, and doing tricks for people who called out horrible things to her. Now she felt safe, and even there in that wild place, more at home perhaps than she ever had felt before in her life.
After a time Jim and his father went away, but not before they had gone in the cave and killed or driven out every creature in it. They made a sort of broom right on the spot before Azalea’s astonished eyes, and brushed the place and cleaned it; and pa pried back a big stone on top and let the sunlight in. And then he asked ma how she was going to put in her time.
“Just sitting still,” said ma.
“I never saw you sit still yet, Mary,” said pa. “I don’t believe you can do it.”
“Yes I can, Thomas. Don’t you worry. I can sit and sit and I’m going to. It’s years since I’ve had a quiet spell and it looks like this was my time to take it.”
“Seeing’s believing,” said pa. And laughing and telling ma not to worry about anything, he and Jim turned down the trail.
“Let’s get nearer the waterfall,” said ma to Azalea. So they went to a place where a great flat rock ran out into the mountain stream, and here they sat with the water tossing and leaping past them and hurling itself over the side of the mountain. Ma lay down and put her hands under her head and looked straight up through the branches of an overhanging beech, into the soft blue sky. And Azalea pillowed her head on her arm and lay there too. A long time passed and neither spoke. It was enough to listen to the voices of the mountain, to watch the sailing of the clouds and the winging of the birds. But after a time ma reached out and touched Azalea gently.
“Little girl,” she said, “little daughter!”
“Ma’am?”
“I’ve been a-thinking and a-thinking, and it seems to me it’s a queer world.”
“Yes’m, it is,” said Azalea as if she too had settled that fact in her mind.
“Some things that seem wrong is right, and some that everybody—or almost everybody—says is right, is really, when you come down to it, plumb wrong.”
“I reckon that’s so, ma’am.”
“Now, me taking you in the way I did—grabbing you away from the folks you’d known and been with—that might look wrong. But it ain’t, Azalea, it ain’t! You want to know how I know it ain’t wrong?”
“If you please, ma’am.”
“Well, first of all I reasoned it out. You was better in a house than on the road. You was better living where you could go to school than where you’d slave for people who’d give you no education. You was better with people who’d take you to church and read the Scriptures to you than with people who’d swear and curse and drink and gamble. And most of all, you was better with them that would love and cherish you than with them that would just use you, and perhaps bring you to some harm and turn you off when they got through with you.”
“Oh, yes’m! I know, ma’am. I’m thankful—”
“I don’t want you bothering to be thankful, Azalea. I just want you to be loving. But I haven’t said what I wanted to say. It ain’t reason that tells me I’ve done right. It’s something else.”
There was a little pause, and then she went on:
“It’s something I wouldn’t like to speak of to everyone, Azalea. But you see, you’re going to take Molly’s place with me, and I’m going to begin right away treating you as if you was her.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Well, now this thing—its like a little bird singing in my heart. Ever since I was a little girl, times would come when that little bird would begin singing. Maybe ’twould be a pretty day and me down washing clothes at the spring; maybe ’twould be something preacher said in church; maybe ’twould be Jimmy shouting and hollering out in the woods, or his pa coming up the trail and letting out a yell to tell me he was on the way. But when the bird sang best, dear, was when I’d done something that I knew I ought to do and that it was hard to do. Now it was hard for me to take you away from those folks, for I don’t like to run counter to no one. I like friends and I hate foes, and I had to make foes of them people. But they wouldn’t listen to what was right and reasonable, and I had to do the way I done. But all last night when we was climbing the trail in the dark, and when the storm got us, and when we lay in that filthy den, and most of all this morning when I woke up and found you there beside me, the bird was singing in my heart. It sings sweeter than any of these here birds round about, though they sing sweet enough, goodness knows. But it’s just as if something new was come into the world—it’s just as it was the day Jimmy was born and lay on my arm and I knew I had a little son of my own. Why, it’s just the way it was the day I found I had a Saviour, and learned that the love of my Heavenly Father was round about me, and that I could walk in it and fear nothing. Did you ever feel like that, Azalea?”
The girl turned her great eyes on her. “No’m, I don’t think I ever did.”
“Well, you will, Azalea, you will! I’m going to tell you all about that. I’m going to tell you every good thing I know. And you must tell me all you know, too, for I’m an unschooled woman, who’s worked hard and not seen much. But anyway, even for me, I can see that life has trails that lead up the mountain. Don’t you like to be here on the mountain top, child?”
“Oh, I do, ma’am. I think it’s the most beautiful place I ever did see!”
“Well, and I was studying about your poor ma. Just think, to-day whatever there is to know over beyond life, she’s knowing. She was brave, wasn’t she, and kind?”
“Yes’m, Oh, yes’m—good to folks and animals and everything.”
“And it will be counted to her. It’s just got to be. She’s happy and safe to-day; but maybe she wouldn’t have been happy if she couldn’t have known you was safe, too, Azalea.”
“Do you think she knows, ma’am?”
“I think she knows! I can’t sit here on this mountain top and see them birds winging along and hear the wind blowing and the water singing and have the little bird singing away in my heart and not think she knows. Someway, it’s like two and two. When you add them they make four. I can’t explain what I mean, but I’m trusting, Azalea, and I’m happy.”
Her thin face shone with a beautiful light, and the eyes she turned on Azalea were full of lovely tears. The girl crept a little closer to her on the broad rock. The long day passed in silence, to the humming of bees, to the shifting of shadows, to the call of birds. They watched the sun set and the stars rise. They felt the dew fall on their hands, and saw the blackness drop like soft veils. Again they crept into their den, this time quite without fear, and slept in each other’s arms.
It was about sundown and Pa McBirney and Jim were sitting on the porch of their cabin, feeling lonesome and deserted, when Dick Bab, a bachelor who had a house about halfway between the McBirney house and the foot of the mountain, came driving up on his yellow mule. He grinned when he saw the two sitting there, silent.
“Listening to the whippoorwills?” he asked teasingly.
“Nope,” said Pa McBirney shortly.
“Had your supper?”
“Such as it was.”
“Suppose you wouldn’t have minded a little set-to with them there show folks, would ye?”
“Well, if they’d come, I reckon we-all wouldn’t have run away.
“Well, the neighbors thought I’d better ride up and let you know that there won’t be nothing doing. They was all hanging around looking for a little amusement too. In fact so many of them came down to see what kind of a lay-out them folks had, that the show raked in a good deal of money—more than they’ve had for a long time, to all appearances. Then Elder Mills, he spoke up and said he reckoned they’d made a pretty good thing out of this community and the best they could do was to be a-moving on. He said so emphatic. And the others spoke up and said they thought so too. So that’s the last any of us will see of that outfit. They’ve packed up bag and baggage, and if they had any idea of coming up here and making trouble for you they concealed it mighty well. So your missus may as well come out of hiding and enjoy the comforts of her own rooftree.”
“They didn’t show much spirit, did they?” asked pa in rather a disappointed voice.
“Not much. But if they’d showed more you might have been punctured full of holes by this time. I reckon it’s better for your health the way it is.”
“Like as not; like as not,” said pa. “You ’light, Dick, and spend the night. Me and Jim’s bunking together, so you can sleep in Jim’s bed.”
“I reckon you-all are wanting ma,” said Dick. And this time pa showed no resentment.
“I reckon we be,” he admitted.
So, the next day, about noon, down the steep trail walked Pa McBirney with a forked stick in his hand. Behind him came ma, who had had enough of “sitting” and was ready to go to work again. After her came Azalea, whose feet seemed fairly to touch the rocks and bound off again, and whose little head turned this way and that with a birdlike way of trying to see and hear all that there was to be seen and heard. Last of all came Jim, his arms full of laurel blossoms.
“Well,” said ma, looking in at the door of the cabin, “If this here place don’t look like a hurricane’d struck it! Azalea, you and me’ll have to straighten things up. We can change our dresses and freshen up afterward.”
“Being a girl’s hard luck,” thought Jim. “Me and pa can sit on the front porch I reckon, while the women folks tidy.” But he was mistaken.
“Here you, Jim,” called his mother in her most businesslike tones, “bring up fresh water from the spring. Pa, I’d like some more wood, please. Azalea, you can be sweeping out. I’ll get over hot water for the dishes. I thought you promised me, pa, that you’d keep the dishes washed!”
“Didn’t I do it then?” said pa despairingly. “I washed and washed and Jim wiped and wiped till we about dropped.”
“You drop pretty easy,” answered ma. But she was not scolding. Ma didn’t waste much time in scolding. There was always a laugh behind her words when she said a thing like that. Jim felt a little cast down. And he wondered if the new girl would think they had to work like that all the time. He looked at her to see how she was taking it, and he found her sweeping with all of her might. True, his mother had to show her how to hold the broom in the right way, and how long to take her strokes, but she seemed to think it was fine to be able to sweep out, and it came over Jim that up to now she probably hadn’t had a house to sweep, and no doubt she liked it.
But all the work seemed worth while when, at last, they sat down at the table together. Ma had chopped up some salt pork in beaten eggs, and had baked some potatoes in the ashes, and made biscuit and a custard pie. And pa had brought in some fresh radishes and mountain honey; so there was a real feast for them.
“This is lots better than a cave,” Azalea said shyly. “It’s lots better than the road too.” She was looking very odd in a dress of ma’s, which was worlds too wide for her, and which they had tied in with an old blue ribbon. Her pretty, birdlike little head came up out of all this cotton stuff like the head of a frightened chicken out of its ruffled feathers.
“We’ve got to get right down to the store, Azalea,” said ma briskly, “and buy some stuff to sew up for you. I can’t endure to have you looking that a-way.”
“Why, ma, couldn’t Molly’s clothes be fixed up to fit Azalea? There might be some changing to do, but you’re so handy you could manage that.”
“I ain’t got a stitch of Molly’s clothes left,” said ma rather sharply. “What do you think I’d be doing? Letting them there good things lie idle when they was needed by others? Molly wouldn’t have liked me to do a thing like that, would she? I gave them all away.”
“Well, they would have come in handy now, ma. Sometimes I think you’re too impulsive. You just go and do whatever comes into your head to do right off quick.”
“So I do, Thomas; so I do. Soon as I laid eyes on you I knew you was the man I wanted to live with for the rest of my natural life, and when you asked me to marry you it didn’t take me a quarter of a second to say yes. Soon as I saw Jimmy there, I knew he was the baby for me. Of course he really was mine, and I’d ’a’ had to put up with him even if I hadn’t liked the kind he was; but it turned out he was the kind to suit me. It was just the same with Azalea there. The minute I laid eyes on her, I yearned over her, and I can tell just as well as if it was proved to me, that she’s going to be a comfort to all of us. Yes, I’m that way, Thomas, mighty impulsive and quick-acting. Now, I’ve just made up my mind that to-morrow we’ll all go down to Lee together and get what we want for Azalea and show the folks what a united family we be.”
“You don’t want to go flaunting Azalea in the faces of folks, do you, ma?” pa protested.
“Well, I don’t know as I’d use the word ‘flaunting,’ pa, if I was in your place. The folks will be just crazy to see what she’s like, and after the stand they took, hustling them show people out of the way and all, and maybe saving your life by doing it, I think the least we can do is to let them see that the girl was worth all the trouble they took.”
“Like as not; like as not!” agreed pa.
That ma had other things on her mind was very certain. She went poking over chests and drawers, searching for something, and at last she came on some undyed homespun cotton of her own weaving. She sat for several minutes with this on her knees, looking at it. At last she called Azalea to her.
“I’ve half a mind to use that there blue dye Mis’ Leiter brought over, to color this here, so’s I can run up a dress for you, Azalea. I can’t have you go down to town looking like a scarecrow, and I ’clare to goodness, I’m prejudiced against having you go down in that outgrown dress you had on when I saw you first. Why, your arms and legs stuck out like the turkey legs on a platter. It ain’t fitten for you to go that way.”
“It does seem like you have to go to an awful lot of trouble for me, ma’am,” murmured the girl. “And anyway, you couldn’t get that done for to-morrow.”
Ma muttered something to herself which Azalea could not catch, and the next minute Mrs. McBirney was away down to the spring, building a fire, putting over a pot, and showing that she was in for what Jim called “one of her spells.”
“When ma has a spell of work,” he told Azalea, “nothing in this world can stop her.”
It couldn’t have been more than an hour later that the good, well-made stuff, dyed a rich, dark blue, was whipping on the line in the wind. An hour after that it was pressed and ready to be cut out; and before Azalea could realize what had happened, ma was fitting the waist of a new dress to her.
“I always had a knack of snipping things out,” she told Azalea, “and since I bought that there sewing machine with my egg money, I can run a thing up in no time. As luck will have it, I’ve got some crocheted edging that will look well on the neck and sleeves.”
A minute later she broke out:
“See here, Azalea, you don’t want hot, tight sleeves coming down to your wrist, like you was an old woman! I keep my eyes peeled when I go down to Lee, and I notice them girls at the hotel wears their sleeves about up to their elbows. I don’t say you want yours hiked up quite that high, but we’ll have them somewheres betwixt and between, shan’t we?”
Azalea nodded. She had little to say. She was letting all the comfort of being there soak into her as rain soaks into the thirsty earth.
“And then as to collars!” broke in ma. “I can’t bear to see a girl with a nice, round little throat, all choked up in a collar. I’ll cut this neck out a little, to give you a chance to crook your neck around like a young owl and look at the world.”
And then the machine raced along over the seams and hems, and the scissors snipped at raw edges, and ma’s needle flew in and out. It was left to Azalea and Jim to get supper, which they did well enough.
“It’ll give you a chance to learn where everything is,” said ma. “Jim, you show her the spring house and the dishes and everything.”
The little girl had cooked over a camp fire more than once, but she had never before set what Ma McBirney called “a nice table.” However, she soon found out the way that the McBirneys wanted things done, and meantime ma sewed on, faster and faster. Her hair got roughed from sitting in the wind, her hands were nervous and her eyes too bright, but she had set her mind on doing that particular thing and nothing that anyone could say to her would stop her. She was at the buttonholes when the rest of the family crept into bed.
“Don’t you do any worrying about me,” she bade them. “I’m better satisfied than I ever thought to be again.”
So they slept—Azalea on a little ‘knockdown’ that would have to serve till a place had been properly provided for her—and when morning came, on the chair lay the blue frock with its handmade edging, as simple and charming a little gown as any girl in the country would care to wear. Moreover, some faded ribbons had been dyed, and looked almost like new. And there was clean underclothing—not quite the right size, to be sure—and the old shoes had been polished and made to look fit.
But if Azalea thought that everything was to be done for her, and that she was to do nothing in return, she soon found out that she was wrong. Probably no such idea occurred to her, for she was born with a loving heart, and she had learned to serve. She was not surprised, therefore, when she found that all of the family got up early and worked hard. There were the animals to feed, the house to tidy, the water to bring, the plants to water, the garden to weed. Nobody hurried, exactly, but ma was not fond of “lazy bones,” and she kept everyone going till all was as it should be. She advised pa to drive the calf down to the butcher, and she had a basket of eggs to get ready.
But at last all was done, and pa, with Jim beside him, sat on the front seat of the wagon, and ma and Azalea sat in the back seat, all clean and fine, ready to drive down the mountain. The little calf was tied on behind. The hounds had been shut up, and only the cat saw them off. The chickens and guinea hens and turkeys could be heard away up in the brush, but they concerned themselves very little with the comings and goings of anyone. The martins were flying in and out of the high-swung gourds, but they seemed to care as little as the ground fowl. Neither did the little old house, basking there in the sun, seem to mind. And the graves there, under the Pride of India trees—they minded not at all.
So by steep and pleasant ways, underneath the chestnuts and the hemlocks, the oaks and the mulberries, the tulip trees and the poplars, the McBirneys, four in number, went winding on down, down the road toward Lee.
They had not been an hour on their way before something curious happened. There was a rushing in the bushes beside the road which startled the horses and made Thomas McBirney take the whip out of its socket to be ready for anything that might arise. And the queer part of it was that the creature that was making the noise, was running along, trying to keep pace with the wagon.
“If it was one of the hounds broken loose, it would set up a cry,” said pa. “And it ain’t leaping and jumping like an animal, nohow.”
Azalea’s heart beat hard. She thought that perhaps it was, after all, a wild animal, and that maybe they would be attacked. She was used to being on the road, but this part of the Blue Ridge was wilder than that through which she usually had traveled. However, there was not much time in which to be frightened, for before any one could realize what was happening, Jim had leaped over the wagon wheel and plunged into the bushes.
“Hold on there, boy,” yelled his father. “You don’t know what you’ll be running into.” A shout of laughter reached him.
“Well, I’ll be lammed!” cried Jim. “I’ll be shingled, if it ain’t Hi!”
“High!” cried pa. “How high? What high? What you talking about, son?”
“Oh, it’s Hi! it’s Hi!” Azalea chorused, and in a flash she too was over the wagon wheel and in the brush.
Pa turned an angry face around on his wife. “Be them two children crazy?” he demanded.
At that moment three children instead of two shot their heads up above the dark green of the wild gooseberry bushes. There was Jim’s freckled, grinning phiz, Azalea’s long, lovely face, smiling, too, and the dark, odd little face of the show boy, Hi Kitchell.
“Well, what do you think of that?” groaned pa.
“He sneaked, pa,” Jim explained at the top of his voice. “When them show folks lit out, he just sneaked. Wasn’t he the ’cute one?”
“Goodness, ma, are we going to start an orphan asylum?” pa asked under his breath.
“Might do worse,” answered ma.
But Hi was not an orphan, but a young man out for himself, and after he had got into the wagon with the others and all were rolling once more toward Lee, he made that plain.
“I went straight to Mr. Hitchcock at the mill,” said he, “and told him I wanted to go to work. He said he’d take me on next Monday. Well, that was all right, only I didn’t have a cent in my pocket, but I someway didn’t like to tell him that. So I went down town, looking around, and the funniest thing you ever heard of, happened to me.”
“What?” demanded the other four at once.
“Well, there was a gentleman come riding in on horseback, and he had a little dog with him, a terrier. He was an awful cute little dog, and when the man went in the post office, I got to playing with him. The puppy didn’t know a trick—not a trick. Just plain ignorant, he was. The man was in the office a long time, so I got to teaching that dog some of the things he ought to know, and by and by the man come out and he see me, and he said I was giving that there dog the kind of schooling he ought to have.”
“Sho!” said pa.
“Then he up and asked me where I lived and whose boy I was, and I told him the whole story.”
“That was right,” said ma gently. “That was just what you ought to do, Hi.”
“And that gentleman said if I wanted I could come up to his house and sleep in the barn, and have my meals at the house till I got my first pay from the mill, all for teaching his dog tricks. So I went up and I’ve been staying there.”
“You don’t seem to be there now,” broke in pa. “Not so’s you could notice it.”
“Why,” cried the boy, “I had to come and tell you-all, didn’t I? I thought you-all would be wanting to know.”
“We do; sure we do,” ma said, reaching forward to pat the boy on the shoulder. “Pa’s just as glad as any one, Hi. Don’t you let him fool you, the way he speaks.”
“No’em.”
“I don’t see no especial reason for rejoicing that a poor little boy is going to be shut up in that mill,” growled pa. “Hain’t I heard the whistles blowing at five, dark mornings and all, rousting them young uns out of bed? And ain’t I seen ’em trudging home after dark come? All the day gone by, and no good to them! No, you don’t get no celebration out of me over any child or chick getting in that there mill!”
“Now, please sir,” broke in Hi, in a kind of free way he had, “don’t you worry about me none. I’m going in that mill, but I ain’t going to stay there—not unless I like it mighty well. I’m going to get on, if I can. I want to get back to my ma, or to have my ma and the kids come here. But I’m done with that there show and that Weary Willie way of living. I ain’t going to trouble you none, don’t you think it. I won’t even come up to the house if you don’t want me to. But I’m thankful to you for what you’ve done for Zalie, and for what you done for her poor ma, and it just come natural to tell you how I was getting on.”
“What made you run along in them there bushes the way you did?” asked pa. “Why didn’t you come out fair and square and holler at us and let us know who you was? Why, you like to scared my horses.”
Hi was usually ready with an answer, but now he drooped.
“Can’t you speak?” demanded pa.
“Tell us, Hi,” said ma gently.
“It was just that I wanted to see you-all riding along, with Zalie setting up there like she’d been born in the family,” Hi explained, blushing. “It done me good to think that there she was, with nice people like you, and her everybody’s slave a day or two ago. I hadn’t ought to have done it, I know. But honest, I’ve got in some sort of sneaking way, having always to dodge and hide and yarn to get on and have any peace.”
Pa turned on Hi almost fiercely.
“See here, you,” he said, “don’t you do no more hiding, nor sneaking, nor fibbing. We-all are friends to you, understand? You come up to we-all’s house like it was your own. Stick in the mill a while. It won’t hurt you. Mr. Hitchcock’s a good man—good’s he can be, I reckon. You spend your Sundays with us. You can meet us at church and ride up with us. Ma, what’s happening to that there fool calf? Acts like he knowed he was going to be slaughtered, don’t he? Poor little critter! Say, ma, you do the trading to-day—you and Azalea. Me and Hi and Jim will walk over to the mill and have a little talk. I want them overseers to know the boy’s got his friends.”
It was really pa’s way of getting out of facing his curious neighbors at the stores. But ma felt no such timidity. Her heart swelled with pride as Azalea leaped, light as a kitten, from the wagon and turned to help Mrs. McBirney down. Ma nodded right and left to the people gathered to do their Saturday “trading,” and she introduced Azalea, in her gentle, singing voice, to the women and girls who came up to meet her.
“This is my girl,” she would say. “Azalea McBirney. Come, Azalea, let’s go in and see if they have something that’ll do for the makings of a dress. How’d you like a green gingham—pale green you know? And that there white barred stuff ain’t but fifteen cents a yard. How d’ye do, Mr. Constance? Pretty day, ain’t it? Do you reckon you could take these here eggs and let me do a little trading with you? Yes, this is the girl. You can call her my girl, when you’re speaking of her. I’d like to get her outfitted here at your place if you’d be so kind, Mr. Constance.”
Azalea stood facing her new world, so to speak, and on every face she saw welcome.
“Jim,” cried Azalea, “my room’s done at last. Come see it, quick!”
“I’ve looked at that room and looked at it. I don’t believe it’s any different from what it was yesterday.”
“James Stuart McBirney, it is too! Ma’s hung a blue curtain over the place where my clothes hang, and she’s got a braided rug on the floor and a cheesecloth curtain at the window, and she’s covered my stand with blue and white print. The way she’s fixed up those cones and pine leaves, you’d never know the looking glass was broke. It’s the prettiest room I ever saw. Oh, Jim, do come!”
Jim pretended that he wasn’t interested, and stamped up the new stairs his father had built, and along the platform which led to the attic room which had been given Azalea for her own. Although Jim was supposed not to care anything about the room, he had, nevertheless, braided a hammock of warp such as his mother used on her loom, and this hammock had been swung out on the platform. Azalea could lie there and look straight up the mountain side. Jim had helped, too, with the making of the bedstead and the splint-bottomed chairs and the dresser, and in the bottom of his heart he thought it was just the kind of a room Azalea ought to have—she was so pretty and—well, Jim couldn’t quite find the word to describe her—but she reminded him of a pinky-white trillium. Not that he would have said so. He treated her just as if she had been his own sister, and that means that he led her rather a hard life at times. But that didn’t seem to bother Azalea at all. She would do anything for him, and she could tease back when she had a mind to, and when he “got her in a corner,” as he put it, she laughed her ringing laugh.
“Some girls would get mad to be treated the way Jim treats Azalea,” ma used to say. “But she’s got the sweetest disposition of anybody I ever saw.”
“Not too sweet to hold her own,” answered Thomas McBirney. “At first I thought to myself, have to pitch in and take that girl’s part, but after a time I says to myself, I reckon I’ll leave them two young uns to take care of theirselves.”
They used to buy each other to do things, by promising to tell stories. If Jim wanted Azalea to help him gather firewood, he offered to tell her a story in payment for her help. If Azalea wanted Jim to help her scrub the floor, she promised him a story of things that had happened to her when she was “on the road.” One day Jim told Azalea the story his father had told him that day on the mountain, about the old Atherton mansion, and how it had stood vacant for years and years, with the swallows flying in and out its chimneys, and the snakes and squirrels and birds having their way with it.
“There’s snakes in the grass and bats in the porches and wild doves in the barn,” said Jim. “A boy I know told me about it. He says you can’t count the squirrels and the catbirds and the robins and the thrushes. Some think it’s haunted, but I don’t reckon there’s much in that story. I’m not long on ghosts.”
“It might have a ghost,” said Azalea wistfully. “Anyway, I’d like to see it—the house, I mean. Oh, Jimmy, I’d just love to see it! Let’s ask ma if we-all can’t go picnicking down there.”
Ma was doubtful. She said she’d fooled away altogether too much time lately—that she’d never been so lazy. But at this her whole family laughed so, for they almost never caught her for a moment idle, that she gave in and agreed to go the next Saturday.
“Pa’ll be driving to town, and we-all will go along. We can get out at the Old Green Place and cut off across to the Atherton Place and eat our lunch there, and then pa, he can meet us at the Green Place again on the way home.
“The road to town used to run by the Atherton house,” pa said. “But it did seem as if it picked up every hill in the whole county, and now that the road ain’t been taken care of for a dozen years, it’s just a pesky lot of sink holes. Why, it’s as much as a horse’s life is worth to take it over that there road.”
Saturday morning came with the bluest of skies. Little soft white clouds floated over it like happy ships on a sea; and the wind was playful, too, and the sunshine friendly. The four got off very early and rattled down the mountain side in a manner to take the breath away from anyone who had not perfect confidence in Pa McBirney’s driving.
At last the “Old Green Place” was reached, and ma prepared to get out with the children. But pa objected.
“See here, I don’t think this is a fair deal, ma,” he said. “Me going off all by myself, eating my lunch alone in this tarnation old wagon, and you three picnicking! You come along with me, ma. I’m not fit to do trading by myself. You know you’ve often said that.”
Ma made a face at him, for she knew he had her there, but she really did think it rather dull for pa to drive on alone seven miles to town, and so, after she had made the children promise that they would be careful about this, that and the other thing, and be at the Green Place in the middle of the afternoon, she went on to Lee with pa.
“She ran out to meet me,” he cried
The two children turned their faces down an unknown road, overhung with great chestnuts and lindens, and cut into deep gulleys by the rains. The way looked lonely and beautiful and strange and Azalea felt her heart beating a little faster than usual. She was just going to say to Jim that they’d probably get lost, when something ran swiftly across their path.
“An adder!” cried Jim. “A gray adder! That’s the poisonest snake that lives anywhere here about. Don’t you go fooling with snakes like that, Zalie, whatever you do. Why, once I teased a gray adder till he got so mad he bit himself. And in three minutes he was dead.”
“Honest?”
“Honest! You say you’re sorry for snakes—I like ’em to kill!—but don’t you fool none around an adder.”
“You didn’t try to kill that one.”
“Well, if I hadn’t been going for a good time, I would. Somehow, when I’m going out for a good time, I don’t like to begin by killing something.”
Azalea laughed lightly, and the two went on along the shady road. Twice they crossed creeks—amber-colored, rippling streams that sang over the stones. One they jumped across; the other was too wide for that, but they found a narrow swinging bridge a little way upstream.
“Don’t it seem strange to think that there used to be people and people going along here,” mused Azalea, “and now almost no one comes here!”
Jim nodded. He hadn’t much time to think about things like that. He was wondering what he would find at the Atherton house.
After a time they came to a sunny piece of road, and along the side a clay bank punctured with little holes.
“Oh, doodle bug holes!” cried Jim. “Come, let’s get the doodle bugs out.” So the two children got down on their knees and blew into the holes where the bugs lived and called three times:
“Doodle bug, come out of your hole!”
And the doodle bugs came out politely, and ran about this way and that as if looking for the person who had called them.
“I spose we’re too large for them to see,” said Azalea.
They had been told to keep their lunch until noon, but they felt so hungry—at least Jim did—that they decided to eat it at once. So they got out the cold biscuit spread with honey and the bottle of milk and the cornbread sandwiches with the bacon between and ate it all. Not a scrap did they leave. Then they took a long drink of spring water and started on again.
“It’s about ten o’clock,” said Azalea. “By noon we’ll be hungry again, and by four o’clock we’ll be starved to death. Pa and ma will come along and find two heaps of bones at the Old Green Place, and they’ll never know it’s us, and they’ll go up the mountain weeping and gnashing their teeth.”
Jim looked at her admiringly.
“I don’t see how you think of so many things to say, Zalie. I can’t think of things to say.”
“Then take me along with you wherever you go, Jimmy.”
“All right,” said he.
At last they got in sight of the Atherton estate. Jim saw it first.
“Look there! Look there!” he cried. “Did you ever see such hedges?”
They ran through the trees, then along beside the great hedge as far as the gateway.
“Why, the gates are open, ain’t they, Jim?”
“Say, they are! Now what do you think of that? Zalie, there’s smoke coming out of the kitchen chimney—and the grass is cut. And, look there, a man is painting the house.”
“There’s folks living there, Jim. Maybe it’s ghosts—like I said.”
“No it ain’t. I smell the paint. And that’s old man Hendricks doing that painting. It wouldn’t be right to holler to him, would it, Azalea?”
“The folks might hear you. It’s queer pa didn’t know folks had moved in.”
“Well, pa ain’t been to town for three weeks, and anyway, he might not come on anybody that would tell him. Lots of rich folks comes to Lee now. They come down there because they think it’s pretty. That don’t seem much of a reason for coming to a place, does it?”
“Well, I reckon that’s why your pa and ma stopped away up on Tennyson mountain, Jim. It ain’t no way convenient to anything—just way off by itself. If it wasn’t that they stopped on account of prettiness, what was it?”
“Pshaw! Pa wouldn’t stop nowhere for prettiness.”
“I’ll bet he would! I’ll just bet he would.”
“I guess I know pa better than you do, Zalie. I’ve known him years, and you’ve known him weeks.”
“It ain’t the length of time you know a person that counts, Jim. It’s the looking in at their hearts and the understanding of them.”
“You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you? Knowing my pa better than I know him!”
“Oh, Jim, see! A girl!”
Their little pretense at quarreling—for it was only a pretense—was stopped by the appearance of a little girl on the portico of the great house.
She looked quite small to them at first, standing among the great pillars that ran up the front of the house, but as she walked on down the old brick walk toward the gateway, they saw that she was almost as tall as Azalea, and quite a little heavier. She was all russet brown—hair, eyes, frock, stockings and shoes, and in her arms she carried a little silky dog with long ears and wistful, bulging eyes.
“We ought to go away,” whispered Azalea. “We’ve no business to stand staring in at other folks’s yards like this. It ain’t polite.”
But though she said this, she did not move an inch, and as for Jim, he stood with his mouth open, watching that girl dance down the long brick walk between the box hedges.
Suddenly she saw the children and stopped. Her eyes rested on Jim a moment and she seemed to smile at his kind, freckled, jolly phiz. Then she saw Azalea and the look in her face changed to one of deeper interest. Azalea, standing slender and straight there in her clean blue frock, with her gray eyes shining and her long hair beautifully braided, certainly was good to look at. So the girl came on, not dancing now, but hastening along as if bent on business.
“How do you do?” she said sweetly, blushing a little with shyness.
“I’m very well, thank you,” said Azalea. “How are you?”
Jim made a noise in his throat to show that he meant well, but no one could tell what words he was trying to say.
“Do you live near here?” the little girl inquired.
Jim pointed over his shoulder.
“We come from up mountain.”
“You’re not brother and sister!” exclaimed the girl.
Jim wondered what Azalea would say. He was very proud of her. She seemed to him like a humming bird that had come to live among wrens, and he wondered if she would be ashamed of him? He was a happy boy, who wasted no time in thinking about uncomfortable things, but now, suddenly it came over him that he was rather a stupid chap, with trousers that were too long for him, and a waist that was too short in the sleeves, and bare feet and a freckled face. Azalea’s clothes were new, and anyway, his mother knew much more about dressing girls than she did about dressing boys. And then no matter how he dressed or how he tried he never could look like Azalea!
She was speaking now, and he put aside his thoughts to listen.
“Jim’s father and mother took me in,” she was saying softly, “and they treat me like I was their own. My mother died just a little while ago, and my father—well, I never saw him at all—and now I say my name is McBirney, just like Jim’s. He’s James Stuart McBirney. I’m Azalea—they let me be called Azalea McBirney.”
It was beautifully done—lovingly done. Her pleasant voice caressed the words, her gratitude put a little dew into her eyes. The other girl stood listening and looking and “Oh!” she said. Then she looked at Jim and smiled and said “Oh,” once more. And after that she murmured, “Azalea! How pretty! My name is Carin Carson, and we’ve just moved here. I don’t know anyone and I’m dreadfully lonesome. Couldn’t you come in and play for a little while?”
“Thank you,” said Azalea, “I s’pose we could. We really came down here to see this house, but we didn’t know anyone was living in it. We thought it would be such fun to see a house that no one had lived in for years and years.”
“Did you? Why, so did I. And so did papa and mamma. It’s a beautiful old house, isn’t it? We find something new about it almost every hour. Why, this morning what do you think we found?”
The children shook their heads.
“A secret staircase! Yes, we did. It runs up from a sitting room in that far wing to a bedroom above. There’s no door you can see—only panels that slide in the wainscoting. It’s more fun! Wouldn’t you like to see it?”
“I’d just love to see it. But your ma—would she like us to come in? I don’t believe I’d like to come in unless your ma said we might.”
“Well, you are particular,” laughed Carin. “You must have been very strictly brought up. I’ll go ask my mamma, if you’ll wait a minute. Come in and sit on this bench.”
And without waiting to see them seated under the wide-branching plane tree, she sped away up the walk. Azalea looked after her rather gloomily. What would this nice girl say if she knew that Azalea had been brought up with a traveling show—a miserable show, with coarse, profane men and women in it? And then she remembered, how, though her mother was one of them, and always seemed to want to stay with them and was frightened if any people from the towns tried to know her, yet her mother had been different from the others. And coarse and mean as the show people had been, they were nevertheless afraid of what she would think of them, in a way; and Azalea knew that no unkind or unlovely word ever had passed her lips. She had been most careful about her daughter’s manner and language, and as a matter of fact, Azalea knew how to use much better grammar than she usually employed. She talked carelessly because the people around her did so, and because she didn’t want to seem a bit finer than dear Pa and Ma McBirney. Whatever they said, somehow sounded right to her.
In a moment or two Azalea saw Carin coming back with a tall, slender lady. The lady was dressed in white and wore a white scarf that drifted back from her shoulders. Even her shoes and her parasol were white.
“That’s the ghost, if there is one, I reckon,” whispered Jim. Azalea arose as the lady drew near and bowed politely, and Jim did the same, because he saw Azalea doing it. The lady shook hands with them when Carin had introduced them, and talked with them a little while.
“How fortunate it is,” she said in a fluty voice, “that you and papa and I bought this house before Jim and his sister saw it, isn’t it? They’d have got it away from us I’m afraid.” She laughed lightly and looked down at them with large, warm brown eyes like her daughter’s. “Well,” she went on, “since we were the lucky ones, Carin, the only thing we can do is to show them our treasures.” And she led the way back to the house. Carin gave a little skip.
“Don’t you think she’s a dear?” she whispered to Azalea. “She’s the sweetest mother in the world!”
Azalea had a vision of her own tired, frail little mother in her silly show dresses, smiling and bowing to the crowds of common people that came to hear them, and she shivered as if a chilly wind had blown over her. Yet her mother might have looked as beautiful as this lady, she thought, if she could have walked about a lovely garden with a scarf like a cobweb floating from her shoulders.
They were taken into the wide hall which ran straight through the house and showed a garden in the rear, where a fountain played; and through the long drawing room, where as yet there were only piles of heaped-up furniture, then into a gay little room Mrs. Carson called the morning room, where bright birds were pictured on the curtains and the chair backs; and then into the sitting room in the far wing, where servants were putting hundreds of books on the shelves.
“Let me show them, mother!” cried Carin, and she ran forward to a piece of the high paneling which was not occupied by book shelves, and pushed a little spring, and whish! back into the casement flew the door.
“Look up! Look!” said Carin, dancing about in her delight. Azalea ran forward and looked up the dark narrow stairs.
“Who do you see coming down?” asked Mrs. Carson.
“A tall old man, with stooped shoulders and a dreadful frown,” said Azalea.
At that, Jim looked up.
“Why, Zalie,” he said, “I don’t see anyone!” Azalea was going to laugh, but she saw that Carin and Mrs. Carson didn’t laugh.
“It’s only our nonsense, Jim,” the lady said smilingly. “There isn’t one of course.”
She looked at her two visitors for a moment. Jim was inquisitive. He wanted to know all there was to know. He was out gunning, so to speak, for facts. Azalea was wandering along hoping to meet with fancies. She was the one with the imagination.
“I don’t know which I like best,” thought Mrs. Carson. “But I’m sure they make a good team.” Aloud she said: “What do you think of lunch in the garden? Everyone in the house save us is as busy as busy as can be. Shall we get our own lunch?”
So, hardly believing that it could all be true, Jim and his sister went with Mrs. Carson and Carin into the great cool pantry and helped spread the thin slices of bread, and to cut the cheese and dish the honey and slice the cold chicken. And then they sat where the cucumber oleanders shed their fragrance, and the sound of the fountain whispered in their ears, and ate and talked and laughed together.
Afterward they explored the garden and the barn—at least the children did—and then the hour came for the McBirneys to go.
“Could I see your mother?” asked Azalea. “Do you think she’s resting?”
“I’ll go see,” Carin said. Mrs. Carson came back with her and smiled upon the children.
“Happy days, happy days!” she sighed. “It’s nice to be as young as you are.”
“We certainly have been happy, ma’am,” Azalea said. “You’ve been so good to us, and we’re just strangers. I don’t see how you could be so good when you didn’t know us or anything.”
“My dear,” said the lady, “A few years ago something happened to me which made me decide to be happy whenever I had the chance, and to make other people happy in the same way. I saw you and wanted to know you. Carin wanted to know you. You wished to see our home. It was the kind of a home you would have picked out for your own if you could. It was the merest accident that I had it and you didn’t. Very well, I’ve shared it with you. See? Come again, come again! We keep open doors at The Shoals.”
Azalea got away somehow, her heart dancing with gratitude. Jim followed. They were late, and they ran along the uneven, shady road. Pa and Ma McBirney were already at the “Old Green Place,” a little tired of waiting but very good-natured notwithstanding. So, since everything was going well it seemed a little odd that Azalea should put her head down in Ma McBirney’s lap and softly weep.
Never did Azalea love this dear woman more than when she found that she was to be allowed to weep if she liked without being asked why. Mary McBirney stroked the soft hair and said nothing—was most careful in fact, not to call the attention of Jim and his father to her outburst. At last Azalea lifted her face, tear-stained and smiling.
“I’ve been so happy,” she whispered. “When we get home I’ll tell you all about it. Everything seems different.”
Jim had been rattling on to his father on the front seat, and Mrs. McBirney, who had managed to catch a part of what he was saying, had some idea of why the world seemed different. She, herself, thought that Azalea, the daughter of the wandering show woman, was really meant for a beautiful life like that of the Carson’s, rather than a life of work and poverty and hardship like her own.
“But I’ll give her what I can,” she thought. “I’ll give her love.”
That night Mary McBirney carried the candle up to the loft for Azalea and sat beside her while she undressed.
“I reckon you feel a little upset, honey,” she said in her gentle, motherly way. “You saw them grand folks with their fine ways, and beautiful home, and nice clothes, and it made you feel you wasn’t nobody. I know just how you feel. I was born up Blue River Valley way, and till I was fifteen I didn’t see nobody but folks of the same kind as mine. Then two ladies came driving through our country, writing up us mountain people, and telling all about the mountains and what trees and flowers was on ’em, and they asked me to go along to do the cooking for them, and shake down their beds for ’em and all that. So I went, and set up on the front seat of the carriage with the driver, and I heard all they had to say, and watched their way of doing things. Well, it set me back some. I found out that what I knew wouldn’t fill the thimble point of their knowing. They was wearing rough clothing for camping, but if I tried all my days I couldn’t make clothes look like that. I wouldn’t know how to buy them if I had the money. Me, I just did things anyhow, to get them done, but they had a right way for everything and rules about how to act in every kind of case. At first I tried to catch on to their ways, but at last I saw it was going to be too much for me, and I just settled down to be content in my own way with my own kind of folks. But my pillow was wet many a night, honey. Growing pains, they were. You’re having them now.”
“And so is Jim, I s’pose,” sighed the girl. “I s’pose he feels the same way—all mixed up.”
“He ain’t feeling nothing like you be,” declared ma. “Jim’s a boy, and matter of fact. He’s a leetle older than you, really, but not near so old in his feelings. Jim saw what there was to see on top—saw what was floating along the surface. But you think and feel in a different way, and your feelings go down deeper. Now mind, I don’t say that I think they always will. Jim’s tender and he’s true, and when men are tender and true they feel deeper than any woman can feel. At least no woman can get ahead of them that way. I’m waiting for Jim to get a little older before his feelings set, so to speak. Just now he ain’t got any more opinions than a nice soft bunny.”
“Oh, ma,” cried Azalea, “you don’t really know him if you think that! Jim does a lot of thinking, and he’s as tender-hearted as he can be.”
Ma McBirney blew out the candle and smiled to herself in the dark. She loved to hear her Jimmy praised. But he had seemed a little dull and backward in comparison with the girl, and in her silent jealousy for her boy, she had spoken of him in a fault-finding way. It healed her to hear him praised in that warm manner.
“We’re lucky ones, Thomas,” she said when she had gone downstairs, “to have two children like them. They’re pure gold.”
“So they be,” said pa. “So they be!”
And then he and ma walked silently out to the Pride of India tree beneath which their Molly and Azalea’s mother were buried, and stood there a few minutes before they closed up the house for the night.
The next week when pa went to town, he brought back great news.
“Them there Carsons down in the Atherton house,” he said to his family at supper, “are up to the greatest things you ever heard of. They’re making all the mountain folks welcome, and buying up their pieced bedquilts and their hand-weaving, and their baskets and chairs. Why, Mr. Carson, he and me was made acquainted by the grocer, and he asked me if I done anything in the way of hand work. Well, I allowed I made pretty good chairs, and he told me to bring down half a dozen big roomy ones for his porch. He said like as not some of his friends would want some too. Then I told him about your weaving and he said he’d like to drive his wife up to see it. Said he’d like to look over our place. I’d been telling him how sightly it was. They’ve got everybody humping. Cannaby’s making roads for him, and Fletcher’s making shoes, and he’s buying up fine hens—wants some of my guinea hens—and he’s looking for a good cow, and I don’t know what all. I ain’t seen things so lively down street since I can recollect.”
“If he comes up, he’ll bring Miss Carin, won’t he? Oh, ma, do you think he’ll bring Miss Carin?”
“Sure he will,” said Mary McBirney. “She wouldn’t let him come up here without her if she had her way, after all the liking she took to you.”
“And to Jim, ma. She liked Jim just as much as she did me.”
“Go along,” said Jim, “she wouldn’t ’a’ looked at me if you hadn’t been there, Zalie.”
“She would too! What makes him act like that, ma?”
“He’s naturally modest and retiring,” said pa with a twinkle in his eye. “He takes after me.”
“They must be awful good folks, them Carsons,” said ma admiringly.
“They’ve got plenty of goodness, but they ain’t blessed with any too much sense,” remarked pa.
“What makes you think that, Thomas?”
“Well, the folks was telling me how this Mr. Carson goes riding all over the mountain alone. He don’t seem to have no idea that he might stumble on something it would be best for him not to see. Any morning, if he gets up early, he can see a dozen streams of smoke rising from the mountain side, and if he’s got the sense of a mule, he’ll know that there’s a moonshine still at every one of them colyumns of smoke. Any baby’d know that. The sensible thing for folks to do in this part of the country, is to keep to the beaten track, and not to go too far on that. Them moonshiners is dreadful sensitive. They think folks is prying into their affairs when they ain’t no such intention and once they get that idea they make it mighty uncomfortable for whoever has come under suspicion.”
“You ought to warn him, pa: He can’t know our ways.”
“They ain’t my ways, I tell you that! Moon-shining ways ain’t my ways,” declared pa.
Azalea didn’t entirely understand about these “moonshiners” as they were called, though she had heard about them all her life. Pa explained to her that they were people who made crude whiskey from the corn and sold it without paying the government the tax which it had placed upon liquor, and that because they did not pay this tax they had to make their whiskey in secret. The officers of the government were always on the outlook for them, and so these people had to keep on an outlook for the officers, and they were liable to think that everyone who got anywhere near them was spying on them.
“On the face of it,” said pa meditatively, “I suppose it don’t seem so bad—making something you know how to make and selling it to them as wants to buy, without saying by-your-leave to no one. But the country can’t be run without money, and one of the ways it takes to raise money is by placing a big tax on liquor. As for me, I wouldn’t care if ’twas ten times bigger than it is. It’s done a heap more harm than good, to my mind, although I’m not so pigheaded as to deny that it can do good sometimes. But it ain’t just the making and selling of the whiskey in secret that hurts these moonshiners. It’s the setting themselves against the law, and getting to be outlaws, and keeping hate and fear and suspicion in their hearts early and late, and bringing up their children to the same ideas. It’s a wicked thing, Azalea, and it brings trouble beyond measuring to the folks down here.”
“And yet,” said ma, “I know some moonshiners who are very pleasant people.”
“Sure!” cried pa. “They’ll do anything for their friends and they’ll stand by each other through thick and thin. And you’re not to think that they’re all ignorant and unlearned. Some of them is smart as whips, and send their children away to school and take books out of the public library there at Lee. I could mention some not an hour’s ride from this very spot who do it. And I’ve known whole communities of moonshiners to be converted and join the church and turn from their evil ways, and they make pretty noisy church members, most of them. It seems like they take their religion hard. I’ve heard them at camp meeting and they was doing more hollering and shouting than all the rest put together. I reckon they thought the Lord had a good deal to forgive.”
“Why, pa!” murmured Mrs. McBirney. “How you talk! And before the children! But now you can see, Azalea, why I don’t want you wandering around alone on these mountains. You’re likely to run into one of them stills while they’re in operation, and while they wouldn’t do any harm to a girl, they’d think it up to them to give her a dreadful scare. So you stick to the places you know about. You hear?”
“Yessum.”
Azalea thought about the moonshiners a good deal after this. It seemed to her to be dreadful not to be able to live in a free and open way. She could think of nothing that she would hate worse than having to hide, or to be forever on the watch. In the old days when she had traveled with the show she often had been made to feel that people did not want them around. They had, in a way, been under suspicion, and houses were always locked up more carefully when the show people came to town. Not that there was any need of it, so far as she knew. They had not been thieves; but they had been careless and dirty and miserable enough. It was very different from the life she was leading now. Pa and Ma McBirney could look anybody in the face. They would go out from their door, smiling, to meet the people driving by, and would always beg them to stop and have some spring water or fresh milk; and Jim and she were proud to be with them. Everyone seemed to like the McBirneys. Everyone thought they were good—and Azalea knew they were and that it was an honor for her to bear their name.
At the same time, Azalea realized that she was somehow different from them. For example, ma had spoken of giving up trying to be like those ladies she traveled with. When she found they had so many rules and ways which she couldn’t understand, she made up her mind not to worry about all of these strange matters, but to be contented with her own people and their manner of doing things. Now Azalea felt sure that she, for her part, would not have given up.
“I’d have learned their way of doing things,” she said to herself. “I’d have found out about those things that they knew and I didn’t, ’deed I would. I just hate to have folks get ahead of me! I’m like old Nannie; I want to keep up with everything on the road. And Jim does too, I reckon. I hope pa and ma will let us go to school when it opens, though Jim says it’s a dreadful long walk. But I don’t mind walking. Mercy, if anybody knows how to walk, I’m the person!”
It was the very next Sunday that Azalea found out what the moonshiners would do even to a person they were not much afraid of. She had gone to the spring house early, to get the cream and butter, when she saw some one dashing out of the bushes. It was a boy, but it took her several moments to find out that it was some one she knew. When she made out that it was her old friend Hi Kitchell with that white face and those frightened eyes, she was amazed.
“Whatever ails you, Hi?” she called, running toward him. “You haven’t been bitten by a rattler have you?”
But Hi was too out of breath to answer at once, and he dropped down on the seat by the spring house while Azalea brought him a glass of water.