Chapter 4

"Ain't nobody who can ketch up Jeems Henery 'ceptin' me."

"Well, Willie, if this is more than I can handle, don't you think you'd better not go home but stay here and help me with James Henry?" The Angel did not even hesitate.

"I reckon I better," he said, and he visibly swelled with importance. "I had to lam' Jeems Henery this mornin', an' I reckon I'll have to keep on lammin' him 'most every day."

"Don't you lam' James Henry at all," said St. Hilda decisively.

"All right," said the Angel. "Jeems Henery, git about yo' work now."

Thereafter St. Hilda kept watch on James Henry and he was, indeed, a sly one. There was gambling going on. St. Hilda did not encourage tale-bearing, but she knew it was going on. Still she could not catch James Henry. One day the Angel came to her.

"I've got Jeems Henery to stop gamblin'," he whispered, "an' I didn't have to lam' him." And, indeed, gambling thereafter ceased. The young man who had come for the summer to teach the boys the games of the outside world reported that much swearing had been going on but that swearing too had stopped.

"I've got Jeems Henery to stop cussin'," reported the Angel, and so St. Hilda rewarded him with the easy care of the nice new stable she had built on the hillside. His duty was to clean it and set things in order every day.

Some ten days later she was passing near the scene of the Angel's new activities, and she hailed him.

"How are you getting along?" She called.

"Come right on, Miss Hildy," shouted the Angel. "I got ever'thing cleaned up. Come on an' look in the _furthest_ corners!"

St. Hilda went on, but ten minutes later she had to pass that way again and she did look in. Nothing had been done. The stable was in confusion and a pitchfork lay prongs upward midway of the barn door.

"How's this, Ephraim?" she asked, mystified. Ephraim was a fourteen-year-old boy who did the strenuous work of the barn.

"Why, Miss Hildy, I jes' hain't had time to clean up yit."

"_You_ haven't had time?" she echoed in more mystery. "That isn't your work--it's Willie's." It was Ephraim's turn for mystery.

"Why, Miss Hildy, Willie told me more'n a week ago that you said fer me to do _all_ the cleanin' up."

"Do you mean to say that you've been doing this work for over a week? What's Willie been doing?"

"Not a lick--jes' settin' aroun' studyin' an' whistlin'."

St. Hilda went swiftly down the hill, herself in deep study, and she summoned the Angel to the bar of her judgment. The Angel writhed and wormed, but it was no use, and at last with smile, violet eyes, and halo the Angel spoke the truth. Then a great light dawned for St. Hilda, and she played its searching rays on the Angel's past and he spoke more truth, leaving her gasping and aghast.

"Why--why did you say all that about your poor little brother?"

The Angel's answer was prompt. "Why, I figgered that you _couldn't_ ketch Jeems Henery an' _wouldn't_ ketch me. An'," the Angel added dreamily, "it come might' nigh bein' that-a-way if I just had----"

"You're a horrid, wicked little boy," St. Hilda cried, but the Angel would not be perturbed, for he was a practical moralist.

"Jeems Henery," he called into space, "come hyeh!" And out of space James Henry came, as though around the corner he had been waiting the summons.

"Jeems Henery, who was the gamblin'est, cussin'est, lyin'est boy on Viper?"

"My big brother Bill!" shouted Jeems Henery proudly.

"Who stopped gamblin', cussin', an' lyin'?"

"My big brother Bill!"

"Who stopped all these young uns o' Miss Hildy's from cussin' an' gamblin'?" And Jeems Henery shouted: "My big brother Bill!" The Angel, well pleased, turned to St. Hilda.

"Thar now," he said triumphantly, and seeing that he had reduced St. Hilda to helpless pulp he waved his hand.

"Git back to yo' work, Jeems Henery." But St. Hilda was not yet all pulp.

"Willie," she asked warily, "when did _you_ stop lying?"

"Why, jes' now!" There was in the Angel's face a trace of wonder at St. Hilda's lack of understanding.

"How did James Henry know?" The mild wonder persisted.

"Jeems Henery knows _me_!" St. Hilda was all pulp now, but it was late afternoon, and birds were singing in the woods, and her little people were singing as they worked in fields; and her heart was full. She spoke gently.

"Go on back to work, Willie," she was about to say, but the Angel had gone a-dreaming and his face was sad, and she said instead:

"What is it, Willie?"

"I know whut's been the matter with me, Miss Hildy--I hain't been the same since my mother died six year ago." For a moment St. Hilda took a little silence to gain self-control.

"You mean," she said sternly, "'come _might' nigh_ dyin',' Willie, and _two_ years ago."

"Well, Miss Hildy, hit 'pears like six." Her brain whirled at the working of his, but his eyes, his smile, and the halo, glorified just then by a bar of sunlight, were too much for St. Hilda, and she gathered him into her arms.

"Oh, Willie, Willie," she half-sobbed; "I don't know what to do with you!" And then, to comfort her, the Angel spoke gently:

"Miss Hildy, jes' don't do--nothin'."

THE POPE OF THE BIG SANDY

He entered a log cabin in the Kentucky hills. An old woman with a pair of scissors cut the tie that bound him to his mother and put him in swaddling-clothes of homespun. Now, in silk pajamas, with three doctors and two nurses to make his going easy, he was on his way out of a suite of rooms ten stories above the splendor of Fifth Avenue.

It was early morning. A taxi swung into the paved circle in front of the hotel below and a little man in slouch-hat and black frock coat, and with his trousers in his boots, stepped gingerly out. He took off the hat with one hand, dropped his saddle-pockets from the other, and mopped his forehead with a bandanna handkerchief.

"My God, brother," he said to the grinning driver, "I tol' ye to hurry, but I didn't 'low you'd _fly_! How much d' I owe ye an' how do I git in hyeh?"

A giant in a gold-braided uniform had picked up the saddle-pockets when the little man turned.

"Well, now, that's clever of ye," he said, thrusting out his hand, "I reckon you air the proprietor--how's the Pope?"

"Sure, I dunno, sor--this way, sor." The astonished giant pointed to the swinging door and turned for light to the taxi man who, doubled with laughter over his wheel, tapped his forehead. At the desk the little man pushed his hat back and put both elbows down.

"Whar's the Pope?"

"The Pope!" From behind, the giant was making frantic signs, but the clerk's brow cleared. "Oh, yes--front!"

The little man gasped and swayed as the elevator shot upward, but a moment later the little judge of Happy Valley and the Pope of the Big Sandy were hand in hand.

"How're yo' folks, judge?"

"Stirrin'--how're you, Jim?"

"Ain't stirrin' at all."

"Shucks, you'll be up an' aroun' in no time."

"I ain't goin' to git up again."

"Don't you git stubborn now, Jim."

A nurse brought in some medicine and the Pope took it with a wry face. The judge reached for his saddle-pockets and pulled out a bottle of white liquor with a stopper of corn-shucks.

"This'll take the bad taste out o' yo' mouth."

"The docs won't let me--but lemme smell it." The judge had whipped out a twist of long green and again the Pope shook his head:

"Can't drink--can't chaw!"

"Oh, Lord!" The judge bit off a mouthful and a moment later walked to the window and, with his first and second fingers forked over his lips, ejected an amber stream.

"Good Lord, judge--don't do that. You'll splatter a million people." He called for a spittoon and the judge grunted disgustedly.

"I'd hate to live in a place whar a feller can't spit out o' his own window."

"Don't you like it?"

"Hit looks like circus day--I got the headache already."

A telegram was brought in.

"Been seein' a lot about you in the papers," said the judge, and the Pope waved wearily to a pile of dailies. There were columns about him in those papers--about his meteoric rise: how he started a poor boy in the mountains, studied by candle-light, taught school in the hills: how a vision of their future came to him even that early and how he clung to that vision all his life, turning, twisting for option money on coal lands, making a little sale now and then, but always options and more options and sales and more sales, until now the poor mountain boy was a king among the coal barons of the land.

"Judge," said the Pope, "the votin's started down home."

"How's it goin'?"

"Easy."

"Been spendin' any money?"

"Not a cent."

"Ole Bill Maddox is."

"Why, judge, I'm the daddy an' grandaddy o' that town. I built streets and sidewalks for it out o' my own pocket. I put up two churches for 'em. I built the water-works, the bank, an' God knows what all. Ole Bill Maddox can't turn a wheel against _me_." The little judge was marvelling: here was a man who had refused all his life to run for office, who could have been congressman, senator, governor; and who had succumbed at last.

"Jim, what in blue hell do you want that office fer?"

"To make folks realize their duties as citizens," said the Pope patiently; "to maintain streets and sidewalks and water-works and sewers an' become an independent community, instead o' layin' back on other folks!"

"How about all them churches you been buildin' all over them mountains--air they self-sustainin'?"

"Well, they do need a little help now and then." The judge grunted.

Through the morning many cards were brought the Pope, but the doctors allowed no business. To amuse himself the Pope sent the judge into the sitting-room to listen to the million-dollar project of one sleek young man, and the judge reported:

"Nothin' doin'--he's got a bad eye."

"Right," said the Pope. At twelve o'clock the judge looked at his watch:

"Dinner-time." And the Pope ordered his old mountain friend cabbage, bacon, and greens.

"Judge, I got to sleep now. I've got a car down below. After dinner you can take a ride or you can take a walk."

"You can't git me into a automobile an' I'm afeard to walk. I'd git run over. I'll jus' hang aroun'."

Another telegram was brought in.

"Runnin' easy an' winnin' in a walk," said the Pope. "It's a cinch. You can open anything else that comes while I'm asleep."

The judge himself had not slept well on the train; so he took off his boots, put his yarn-stockinged feet in one chair, and sitting up in another took a nap. An hour later the Pope called for him. The last telegram reported that he was so far ahead that none others would be sent until the committee started to count ballots.

"I've made you an executor in my will, judge," he said, "an' I want you to see that some things are done yourself." The judge nodded.

"I want you to have a new church built in Happy Valley. I want you to give St. Hilda and that settlement school five thousand a year. An'"--he paused--"you know ole Bill Maddox cut me out an' married Sally Ann Spurlock--how many children they got now, judge?"

"Ten--oldest, sixteen."

"Well, I want you to see that every gol-durned one of 'em gits the chance to go to school."

Now, old Bill Maddox was running against the Pope, and was fighting him hard, and the judge hated old Bill Maddox; so he said nothing. The Pope too was silent a long while.

"Judge, I got all my money out o' the mountain folks. I robbed 'em right and left."

"You ain't never robbed nobody in Happy Valley," said the judge a little grimly, and the Pope chuckled.

"No, you wouldn't let me. I got all my money from 'em an' do you know what I'm goin' to do?"

"Git some more, I reckon."

The Pope chuckled again: "I'm a-goin' to give it back to 'em. Churches, schools, libraries, hospitals, good roads--any durned thing in the world that will do 'em any good. It's all in my will. An', judge," he added with a little embarrassment, "I've sort o' fixed it so that when you want to help out a widder or a orphan in Happy Valley you can do it without always diggin' down into yo' own jeans."

"Shucks, don't you worry about me or the folks in Happy Valley--you done enough fer them lettin' 'em alone; an' that durned ole Bill Maddox, he's a fightin' you right now afore yo' face an' behind yo' back. He's the meanest----"

"Makes no difference. His children ain't to blame an' thar's Sally Ann." The Pope yawned and his brow wrinkled with pain. "I better take a little more sleep, judge." A doctor came in and felt the Pope's pulse and the judge left the room worried by the physician's face and his whispered direction to the nurse to summon another doctor.

An hour later the Pope called him back, and his voice was weak:

"Bring in every telegram, judge."

"You mustn't bother," interposed the doctor firmly, and the Pope's mouth set and the old dominant gleam came into his eyes.

"Bring in every telegram," he repeated. Outside, in the hallway, the judge waylaid the doctor.

"Ain't he goin' to pull through?"

"One chance in a thousand," was the curt answer.

About three o'clock the judge got a telegram that made him swear fearfully, and thereafter they came fast. The Pope would use no money. The judge wired the Pope's manager warily offering a thousand of his own. The answer came--"Too late." At five o'clock they were running neck and neck. Ten minutes before the polls closed old Bill Maddox rounded up twenty more votes and victory was his. And all the while the judge was making reports to the Pope:

"Runnin' easy."

"It's a cinch."

"Ole Bill fighting tooth and toe-nail but you got him, Jim."

"Countin' the votes now."

"Air ye shore, Jim, you want to leave all that money fer ole Bill's brats?--he's a hound."

"Ole Bill comin' up a little, Jim."

And then came that last telegram, reporting defeat, and with it crushed in his hand the judge made his last report:

"All over. You've got 'em, Jim. Hooray! Can't you hear 'em yell?" The Pope's white mouth smiled and his eyelids flickered, but his eyes stayed closed.

"Jim, I wouldn't give _all_ that money to old Bill's brats--just some fer Sally Ann."

"All of it for old Bill's--for Sally Ann's children, the mountain folks, an' the old home town." The Pope opened his eyes and he spoke:

"All of you--nurses an' docs--git out o' here, please." And knowing that the end was nigh they quietly withdrew.

"Judge, you ain't no actor--you're a ham!"

"Whut you mean, Jim?" asked the judge, for in truth he did not understand--not just then. The roar of the city rose from below, but the sunset came through the window as through all windows of the world. The Pope's hand reached for the judge's hand. His lips moved and the judge bent low.

"Beat!" whispered the Pope; "beat, by God! Beat--for--councilman--in--my--own home town." And because he knew his fellow man, the good and the bad, the Pope passed with a smile.

THE GODDESS OF HAPPY VALLEY

I

The professor stood at the window of his study waiting for Her to come home. The wind outside was high and whipped her skirts close to her magnificent body as, breasting it unconcernedly, she came with a long, slow stride around a corner down the street. Now, as always whenever he saw her move, he thought of the line in Virgil, for even in her walk she showed the goddess. And Juno was her name.

He met her at the door and he did not have to stoop to kiss her. "What is it, dear?" he said quickly, for deep in her eyes, which looked level with his, he saw trouble.

She handed him a letter and walked to the window--looking out at the gathering storm. The letter was from her home away down in the Kentucky hills--from the Mission teacher in Happy Valley.

There was an epidemic of typhoid down there. It was spreading through the school and through the hills. They were without nurses or doctors, and they needed help.

"Too bad, too bad," he murmured, and he turned anxiously.

"I must go," she said, with a catch in her breath. "One cabin is built above another all the way up the creeks down there. The springs are by the stream. High water floods all of them, and the infection goes with the tide. And the poor things don't know--they don't know. Oh, I must go!"

For a moment he was silent, and then he got up and put his arms about her. He was smiling.

"Then, I'll go with you." She wheeled quickly.

"No, no, no! You can't leave your work, and--remember!"

He did remember how useless it had been to argue with her, and he knew it was useless now. Moreover, if she was going at all, it was like her to go at once--like her to go up-stairs at once to her packing and leave him in the darkened study alone.

They had been married two years. He had seen her first entering his own classroom, and straightway that Latin line took permanent quarters in his brain, so that he was almost startled when he learned her Olympic name. It was not long before he found himself irresistibly drawn to her big, serious eyes that never wandered in a moment's inattention, found himself expounding directly to her--a fact already discovered by every girl in the classroom except Juno herself; and she never did discover, for no one was intimate enough to tell her seriously, and there was that about her that forbade the telling in badinage. With all secrecy, and shyly almost, he set about to learn what he could about her, and that was little indeed.

She came from the mountains of Kentucky, she had won a scholarship in the bluegrass region of the same State, had come North, and was living with painful economy working her way through college, he heard, as a waitress in the dining-hall. He was rather shocked to hear of one incident. The girl who was the head of all athletics in college had once addressed rather sharp words to Juno, who had been persuaded to try for the basket-ball team. The mountain girl did not respond in kind. Instead, her big eyes narrowed to volcanic slits, she caught the champion shot-putter by the shoulders, shook her until her hair came down, and then, with fists doubled, had stood waiting for more trouble.

When the term closed the professor stayed on to finish some experiments he had on hand, and at dinner in his boarding-house the next night he nearly overturned his soup-plate, for it was the goddess who had placed it before him. She was there for the summer--not having money to go home--as a general helper in the household and living under the same roof. She too was going on with her studies, and he offered to help her.

He found her a source of puzzling surprises. While she was from the South, she was not Southern in speech, sentiments, ideas, or ideals. Her voice was not Southern and, while she elided final consonants, her intonation was not of the South. Indeed she would startle him every now and then by dropping some archaic word or old form of expression that made him think of Chaucer. Her feeling toward the negro was precisely what his was, and once when he halted in some stricture on the Confederacy and started to apologize she laughed.

"All my folks," she said, "fit fer the Union--as we say down there," she added with a smile.

So that gradually he began to realize that the Appalachian Range, while being parts of the Southern States, was not of them at all, but was a region _sui generis_, and that its inhabitants were the only Americans who had never swerved in fealty to the flag.

By midsummer it was all over with him, and he shocked his own reticent soul by blurting out one day: "I want you to marry me." The words had been shot from him by some inner dynamic force, and at the moment he would have given anything he had could he have taken them back. He waited in terror and very frankly and proudly she lifted her heavy lashes, looked straight into his eyes, and firmly said:

"No!"

He went away then, but his relief was not what he thought it would be. He could not forget that her mouth quivered slightly, and that there seemed to be a faint weakening in the depths of her eyes when he told her good-by. He could climb no mountain that he did not see her striding as from Olympus down it. He walked by no seashore that he did not see her rising from the waves, and again he went to her, and again he asked. And this time, just as frankly and proudly, she looked him in the eyes and said:

"Yes--on one condition."

"Name it."

"That you don't go to my home and my people for five years." He laughed.

"Why, you big, beautiful, silly young person, I know mountains and mountaineers."

"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 Bluegrass. 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 Bluegrass. 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 snatches 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.