CHAPTER VI

GROWING PAINS

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.

“It was men!” he managed to gasp at last. “It was men, Zalie. They was going to kill me, and I hadn’t done no manner of harm to them. I was walking up the trail—for I thought I might as well be here in time for breakfast, since Mrs. McBirney had asked me to spend the day—and I thought I’d take some short cuts. So plunk I went up the mountain, and the first thing I knowed, I had run plumb into a whole gang of men working like good fellows with a fire and coils of pipe and kettles, and I don’t know what all. Soon as my eyes lighted on to them I guessed it was a moonshiners’ still, and I tried to crawl away without anybody’s seeing me. But, sir, one fellow, he caught sight of me, and he grabbed his gun and started after me, and two others grabbed their guns, and I just hiked up the mountain and they after me. But laws, I couldn’t run with them fellows. Seems as if their legs was about three yards long. They got me in no time and they stood me up against a tree and backed off and pointed their guns at me and told me if I didn’t promise I’d never, never tell on them, they’d put so many holes into me my mother’d think I was a sieve. Well, I give my word I wouldn’t tell where their place was, nor anything about them, and they let me go, but they said if I wasn’t out of sight in two minutes they’d fire anyway. And they run after me a ways just to give me a start.”

He grinned up at Azalea, as if half ashamed of the whole affair, and she laughed back at him, reassuringly, though her face was rather white too.

“But you’ve told me, Hi,” she said. “And you’ve broken your promise.”

Hi frowned.

“Zalie,” he said sternly, “Don’t I tell you everything? Besides, you don’t know where their place is, and I ain’t going to tell, partly because I don’t want to, and partly because I don’t know. I don’t see how I ever found the way here at all, I was so mixed up. And what’s more, I don’t attach no importance to a promise that’s wrung out of a fellow like that. Of course I promised! I had to. But that’s a very different thing from a promise you give on your honor. I don’t want you to think I’d break a promise, Zalie—not a fair and square promise.”

“Oh, Hi! don’t I know you wouldn’t? I’m only teasing. I won’t say a word about it to anyone; but it shows ma was right. She said I must keep to the road and not go prowling off by myself. How are you getting on, Hi?”

“Oh, first-rate. I don’t like being shut up in the mill all day any too well, of course. You see, it comes hard on a fellow who’s been used to being out of doors early and late. But there’s little children there, Zalie—little, little children. It makes me feel dreadful to see them. I tell you, I’m not meaning to stay there long. I’m looking about all the time for some kind of an outdoor job. Mr. Carson, he’s got me to pulling weeds out of his brick walk. I have about half an hour after work and before it gets dark and that lets me do quite a lot at the Carsons; and then they give me my supper there.”

“But that makes such long hours, Hi,” Azalea protested. “You’ll wear yourself out.”

“No I won’t, Zalie. I’m made of cast iron. And then the working out of doors sort of rests me. It gives me an appetite too. And I tell you what, I want to please Mr. Carson. He’s a fine man to work for. He seems to kind of notice me, and I think maybe I can get took on there at his place.”

“The Carsons are like that. They notice everybody. They even noticed Jim and me.”

“Why, you goose, anybody would notice you!” cried Hi. “Don’t you know that yet? Jim’s a mighty pleasant-looking boy too. Looks as if he knew which end he was standing on, all right.”

But at that moment Ma McBirney’s voice, with a tone of impatience in it, came out to them.

“Azalea, child, where in the name of goodness have you gone? Don’t you know we’re waiting breakfast? Hurry up, child, do. Pa has just made up his mind to take us all to the Singing.”

“The Singing? What’s the Singing?” asked Azalea, as she and Hi ran toward the house with the butter and the milk in their hands.

“Don’t tell me you don’t know what a singing is,” said pa. Hi and Azalea shook their heads.

“Well, then,” said pa, “nobody is to tell you, and before long you’ll see for yourselves. Hustle now, we ought to have been on the road by this time. It slipped my mind this was the date, till the Groggings went by and reminded me.”

“My goodness,” sighed ma, “I’m glad our best dresses are fresh ironed, Azalea. Here, everybody pay strict attention to eating! We’ve got to get off if we’re to take any part in the doings!”