In Happy Valley Part 11

"Yes--of Europe--but not mine."

"Very well," he said, and, not knowing women, he asked:

"Why didn't you say 'Yes' the first time?"

"I don't know," she said.

II

She had lifted her voice first, one spring dawn, in a log cabin that clung to the steep bank of Clover Fork, and her wail rose above the rush of its high waters--above the song of a wood-thrush in the top of a poplar high above her. Somewhere her mother had heard the word Juno, and the mere sound of the word appealed to her starved sense of beauty as did one of the old-fashioned flowers she planted in her tiny yard. So the mother gave the child that name and, like the name, the child grew up, tall, slow, and majestic of movement, singularly gentle and quiet, except when aroused, and then her wrath and her might were primeval.

St. Hilda, the Mission teacher, was the first from the outside world to be drawn to her. She had stopped in at the cabin on Clover one day to find the mother of the family ill in bed, and twelve-year-old Juno acting as cook and mother for a brood of ten. A few months later she persuaded the father to let the girl come down to her school, and in the succeeding years she became St. Hilda's right hand and the mainstay in the supervision of the kitchen, housework, and laundry, and even in the management of the Mission's farm. No one had the subtle understanding of St. Hilda's charges as had Juno--no one could handle them quite so well. So that it was with real grief and great personal loss that St. Hilda opened the way for Juno to go to school in the Bluegra.s.s. And now, one sunset in mid-May, she was back at the Mission in Happy Valley, and the two were in each other's arms.

Happy Valley it was no longer, for throughout it the plague had spread fear or sickness or death in every little home. St. Hilda had gathered her own little sufferers in tents collected from a railway-camp over the mountains, a surveying party, and from the Bluegra.s.s. A volunteer doctor had come from the "settlements," and two nurses, and so Juno took to the outside work up and down the river, up every little creek, and out in the hills. All day and far into the night she was gone. Sometimes she did not for days come back to the Mission. Her face grew white and drawn, and her cheeks hollow from poor food, meagre s.n.a.t.c.hes of sleep, and untiring work. The doctor warned her, St. Hilda warned her, she got anxious warning letters from her husband, but on she went. And the inevitable happened.

One hot midday, as she watched by the bedside of a little patient with a branch of maple in her hand to keep the flies away, she drowsed, and one of the wretched little insects lighted on her moist red lips. Soon thereafter the "walking typhoid" caught her as she was striding past Lum Chapman's blacksmith-shop. Instinctively she kept on toward home, and reached there raving: "Don't let him come--don't let him come!" And when the news got about the heart of Happy Valley almost bled.

Only St. Hilda guessed what the mutterings of the sick girl meant, but she did not heed them, and the professor from New England soon crossed Mason and Dixon's line for the first time in his life. For the first time he fell under the spell of the Southern hills--graceful, gracious big hills, real mountains, densely wooded like thickets to their very tops--so densely wooded, indeed, that they seemed overspread with a great s.h.a.ggy green rug that swept on and on over the folds of the hills as though billowed up by a mighty wind beneath. And the lights, the mists, the drifting cloud shadows! Why had Juno not wanted him to see them? And when he took to horseback and mounted through that billowing rug, through ferns stirrup-high, with flowers innumerable nodding on either side of the trail and the air of the first dawn in his nostrils--mounted to the top of the Big Black, rode for miles along its gently waving summit, and saw at every turn of the path the majestic supernal beauty of the mighty green waves that swept on and on before him, in wonder he kept asking himself:

"Why--why?"

He had not come into contact yet with the humanity in those hills.

The log cabins he had seen from the train--clinging to the hillsides, nestling in little coves amid apple-trees, or close to the banks of rushing little creeks--had struck him as most picturesque and charming, and an occasional old mill, with its big water-wheel, boxed-in, gra.s.s-hung mill-race half hidden by weeping willows, had given him sheer delight; but now he was meeting the people in the road and could see them close at hand in doorway and porches of the wretched little houses that he pa.s.sed.

How mean, meagre, narrow, and poverty-stricken must be their lives!

At one cabin he had to stop for midday dinner, for the word "lunch," he found, was unknown. A slatternly woman with scraggling black hair, and with three dirty children clinging to her dirty ap.r.o.n, "reckoned she mought git him a bite," and disappeared. Flies swarmed over him when he sat in the porch. The rancid smell of bedding struck his sensitive nostrils from within. He heard the loud squawking of a chicken cease suddenly, and his hunger-gnawed stomach almost turned when he suddenly realized just what it meant. When called within, it was dirt and flies, flies and dirt, everywhere. He sat in a chair with a smooth-worn cane bottom so low that his chin was just above the table. The table-cover was of greasy oilcloth. His tumbler was cloudy, unclean, and the milk was thin and sour. Thick slices of fat bacon swam in a dish of grease, blood was perceptible in the joints of the freshly killed, half-cooked chicken, and the flies swarmed.

As he rode away he began to get a glimmer of light. Perhaps Juno--his Juno--had once lived like that; perhaps her people did yet.

There was another mountain to climb, and a stranger who was going his way offered to act as guide. The stranger was a Kentuckian, he said, from the Bluegra.s.s region, and he was buying timber through the hills.

He volunteered this, but the New England man made no self-revealment.

Instead he burst out:

"_How_ do these people live this way?"

"They have to--they're pretty poor."

"They don't have to keep--dirty."

"They've got used to it, and so would you if your folks had been living out in this wilderness for a hundred years."

From a yard that they pa.s.sed, a boy with a vacant face and retreating forehead dropped his axe to stare at them.

"That's the second one I've seen," said the professor.

"Yes, idiots are not unusual in these mountains--inbreeding!"

"Do they still have moonshining and feuds and all that yet?"

"Plenty of moonshining. The feuds are all over practically, though I did hear that the big feud over the mountain was likely to be stirred up again--the old Camp and Adkin feud."

A question came faintly from behind:

"Do you know any of the Camps?"

"Used to know old Red King Camp, the leader. He's in the penitentiary now for killing a man. What's the matter?" He turned in his saddle, but the New Englander had recovered himself.

"Nothing--nothing. It seems awful to a Northern man."

The stranger thought he had heard a groan behind him, and he had--King Camp was the name of the Northern man's father-in-law. Ah, he was beginning to understand; but why did Juno not want him to come for five years?

"Is--is Red King Camp--how long was his sentence?"

"Let's see--he's been in two years, and I heard he had three years more.

Yes, I remember--he got five years."

Once more the Bluegra.s.s man thought he heard a groan, but the other was only clearing his throat. The New Englander asked no more questions, and about two hours by sun they rode over a ridge and down to the bed of Clover Fork.

"Well, stranger, we part here. You go up to the head of the creek, and anybody'll tell you where Red King lives. There's plenty of moonshining up that way, and if anybody asks your name and your business--tell 'em quick. They won't bother you. And if I were you I wouldn't criticise these people to _anybody_. They're morbidly sensitive, and you never know when you are giving mortal offense. And, by the way, most offenses _are_ mortal in these hills."

"Thank you. Good-by--and thank you."

Everybody knew where old King Camp lived--"Fust house a leetle way down t'other side o' the mountain from the head of Clover." And n.o.body asked him his name or his business. Near dusk he was at the head of Little Clover and looking down on Happy Valley. The r.i.m.m.i.n.g mountains were close overhung with motionless wet clouds. Above and through them lightning flashed, and thunder cracked and boomed like encircling artillery around the horizon.

The wind came with the rush of mighty wings, and blackness dropped like a curtain. By one flash of lightning he saw a great field of corn, by another a big, comfortable barn, a garden, a trim picket-fence, a yard full of flowers, and a log house the like of which he had not seen in the hills--and a new light came--Juno's work! A torrent of rain swept after him as he stepped upon the porch and knocked on the door. A moment later he was looking at the kindest and most motherly face and into the kindest eyes he had ever seen.

"I'm Juno's husband," he said simply. For a moment she blinked up at him bewilderedly through bra.s.s-rimmed spectacles, and then she put her arms around him and bent back to look up at him again. Then, still without a word, she led him on tiptoe to an open door and pointed.

"She's in thar." And there she lay--his Juno--thin, white, unconscious, her beauty spiritualized, glorified. He sat simply looking at her--how long he did not know--until he felt a gentle touch on his shoulder. It was Juno's mother beckoning him to supper.

Going out he saw Juno's hand in everything--the hand-woven rag carpet, the curtains at the windows, the andirons at the log fire--for summer nights in those hills are always cool--saw it in the kitchen, the table-cloth, napkins, even though they were in rings, the dishes, the food, the neatness in everything. He could see the likeness of Juno to the gentle-voiced old woman who would talk of nothing but her daughter. In a moment she was calling him "Jim," and few others than his dead mother had ever called him that. And when at bedtime she said, "Don't let her die, Jim," he leaned down and kissed her--something her own sons when grown up had never done.

"No, mother," he said, and the word did not come hard.

III

Juno had been delirious since the day she was stricken. Her mutterings had been disjointed and unintelligible, but that night, while Mother Camp and the New Englander sat at her bedside, she said again:

"Don't let him come."

"She ain't said that for three days now," said Mother Camp. "Whut d'

you s'pose she means?" The husband shook his head.

Next morning the nurse for whom St. Hilda had sent arrived from the Bluegra.s.s, and the New Englander started down Little Clover to the settlement school to consult the doctor and see St. Hilda. It was a brilliant, drenched June day, and never, he believed, had his eyes rested on such a glory of green and gold. Already he had been heralded in the swift way common in the hills, and all who saw him coming knew who he was. He was Juno's man, and the people straightway called him--Jim.

When he stood on St. Hilda's porch her words and her drawn, anxious face went straight to his heart. There was n.o.body like Juno, and without Juno she did not know how she could get along. Her own little sufferers were in tents about her, and there was only one nurse for them. Juno, said the doctor, might be unconscious for a long time, and her nurse must be with her night and day: so who would take Juno's place throughout the hills she did not know. At once the New Englander, who knew a good deal about medicine and something of typhoid, found himself offering to do all he could. Then and there the Mission teacher gave him a list of patients, and then and there, with a thermometer in his pocket and a medicine-case in his hand, he started on his first round. The people were very shy with him at first. In a few days he was promoted to Doctor Jim, and soon he was plain "Doc" to all. By every mouth that opened he found Juno's name blessed, and many were the tales of what she had done. She had saved wild Jay Dawn's little girl and Lum Chapman's firstborn. She had brought old Aunt Sis Stidham back from the shadow of the grave, and had turned that tart, irreverent old person's erring feet back into the way of the Lord.

[Ill.u.s.tration]