Our Southern Highlanders Part 8

"Howdy?" she gasped.

"Who lives here?"

"Tom Kirby."

"Kirby? Oh! yes, I know him--we've been hunting together. Is your father at home?"

"No, he's out somewheres."

"Where is your mother?"

"She's in the field, up yan, gittin' roughness."

I took some pride in not being stumped by this answer. "Roughness," in mountain lingo, is any kind of rough fodder, specifically corn fodder.

"How far is it to the next house?"

"I don't know; maw, she knows."

"All right; I'll find her."

I went up to the field. No one was in sight; but a shock of fodder was walking away from me, and I conjectured that "maw's" feet were under it; so I hailed:

"h.e.l.lo!"

The shock turned around, then tumbled over, and there stood revealed a bare-headed, bare-footed woman, coa.r.s.e featured but of superb physique--one of those mountain giantesses who think nothing of shouldering a two-bushel sack of corn and carrying it a mile or two without letting it down.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Moonshine Still-House Hidden in the Laurel]

She flushed, then paled, staring at me round-eyed--frightened, I thought, by this apparition of a stranger whose approach she had not detected. To these people of the far backwoods everyone from outside their mountains is a doubtful character at best.

However, Mistress Kirby quickly recovered her aplomb. Her mouth straightened to a thin slit. She planted herself squarely across my path, now regarding me with contracted lids and a hard glint, till I felt fairly bayoneted by those steel-gray eyes.

"Good-morning. Is Mr. Kirby about?" I inquired.

There was no answer. Instead, the thin slit opened and let out a yell of almost yodel quality, penetrating as a warwhoop--a yell that would carry near half a mile. I wondered what she meant by this; but she did not enlighten me by so much as a single word. It was puzzling, not to say disconcerting; but, charging it to the custom of a country that still was new to me, I found my tongue again, and started to give credentials.

"My name is Kephart. I am staying at the Everett Mine on Sugar Fork----"

Another yell that set the wild echoes flying.

"I am acquainted with your husband; we've hunted together. Perhaps he has told you----"

Yell number three, same pitch and vigor as before.

By this time I was quite nonplussed. I waited for her to speak; but never a word did the woman deign. So there we stood and stared at each other in silence--I leaning on my rifle, she with red arms akimbo--till I grew embarra.s.sed, half wondering, too, if the creature were demented.

Suddenly a light flashed upon my groping wits. This amazon was on picket. Her three shrieks had been a signal to someone up the branch.

Her att.i.tude showed that there was no thoroughfare in that direction at present. Circ.u.mstances, whatever they were, forbade explanation.

Clearly, the woman thought that I could not help seeing how matters stood. Not for a moment did she suspect but that her yells, her belligerent att.i.tude, and her refusal to speak, were the conventional way, this world over, of intimating that there was a _contretemps_. She considered that if I was what I claimed to be, an acquaintance of her husband and on friendly footing, I would be gentleman enough to retire.

If I was something else--an officer, a spy--well, she was there to stop me until the captain of the guard arrived.

For one silly moment I was tempted to advance and see what this martial spouse would do if I tried to pa.s.s her on the trail. But a hunter's instinct made me glance forward to the upper corner of the field. There was thick cover beyond the fence, with a clear range of a hundred and fifty yards between it and me--too far for Tom to recognize me, I thought, but deadly range for his Winchester, I knew. One forward step of mine would put me in the status of an armed intruder. So I concluded that common sense would better become me at this juncture than a bit of fooling that surely would be misinterpreted, and that might end ingloriously.

"Ah, well!" I remarked, "when your husband gets back, tell him, please, that I was sorry to miss him; though I did not call on any special business--just wanted to say 'Howdy?' you know. Good day!"

I turned and went down the valley.

All the way home I speculated on this queer adventure. What was going on "up yan"?

A month before, when I had started for this wildest nook of the Smokies, a friend had intimated that I was venturing into a dubious district--Moonshine Land. It is but frank to confess that this prospect was not unpleasant. My only fear had been that I might not find any moonshiners, or that, having found them, I might not succeed in winning their confidence to the extent of learning their own side of an interesting story. As to how I could do this without getting tarred with the same stick, I was by no means clear; but I hoped that good luck might find a way. And now it seemed as if luck had indeed favored me with an excuse for broaching the topic to some friendly mountaineer, so I could at least see how he would take it.

And it chanced (or was it chance?) that I had no more than finished supper, that evening, when a man called at my lonely cabin. He was the one that I knew best among my scattered neighbors. I gave him a rather humorous account of my reception by Madame Kirby, and asked him what he thought she was yelling about.

There was no answering smile on my visitor's face. He pondered in silence, weighing many contingencies, it seemed, and ventured no more than a helpless "Waal, now I wonder!"

It did not suit me to let the matter go at that; so, on a sudden impulse, I fired the question point-blank at him: "Do you suppose that Tom is running a still up there at the head of that little cove?"

The man's face hardened, and there came a glint into his eyes such as I had noticed in Mistress Kirby's.

"Jedgmatically, I don't know."

"Excuse me! I don't want to know, either. But let me explain just what I am driving at. People up North, and in the lowlands of the South as well, have a notion that there is little or nothing going on in these mountains except feuds and moonshining. They think that a stranger traveling here alone is in danger of being potted by a bullet from almost any laurel thicket that he pa.s.ses, on mere suspicion that he may be a revenue officer or a spy. Of course, that is nonsense;[4] but there is one thing that I'm as ignorant about as any novel-reader of them all.

You know my habits; I like to explore--I never take a guide--and when I come to a place that's particularly wild and primitive, that's just the place I want to peer into. Now the dubious point is this: Suppose that, one of these days when I'm out hunting, or looking for rare plants, I should stumble upon a moonshine still in full operation--what would happen? What would they do?"

"Waal, sir, I'll tell you whut they'd do. They'd fust-place ask you some questions about yourself, and whut you-uns was doin' in that thar neck o' the woods. Then they'd git you to do some triflin' work about the still--feed the furnace, or stir the mash--jest so 's 't they could prove that you took a hand in it your own self."

"What good would that do?"

"Hit would make you one o' them in the eyes of the law."

"I see. But, really, doesn't that seem rather childish? I could easily convince any court that I did it under compulsion; for that's what it would amount to."

"I reckon you-uns would find a United States court purty hard to convince. The judge 'd right up and want to know why you let gra.s.s go to seed afore you came and informed on them."

He paused, watched my expression, and then continued quizzically: "I reckon you wouldn't be in no great hurry to do _that_."

"No! Then, if I stirred the mash and sampled their liquor, n.o.body would be likely to mistreat me?"

"Shucks! Why, man, whut could they gain by hurtin' you? At the wust, s'posin' they was convicted by your own evidence, they'd only git a month or two in the pen. So why should they murder you and get hung for it? Hit's all 'tarnal foolishness, the notions some folks has!"

"I thought so. Now, here! the public has been fed all sorts of nonsense about this moonshining business. I'd like to learn the plain truth about it, without bias one way or the other. I have no curiosity about personal affairs, and don't want to learn incriminating details; but I would like to know how the business is conducted, and especially how it is regarded from the mountain people's own point of view. I have already learned that a stranger's life and property are safer here than they would be on the streets of Chicago or of St. Louis. It will do your country good to have that known. But I can't say that there is no moonshining going on here; for a man with a wooden nose could smell it.

Now what is your excuse for defying the law? You don't seem ashamed of it."

The man's face turned an angry red.