squorl that had got hits eye peck' out by a jay. Them's the kind o' things!" I went at last to the sole woman as the only one who was likely to give me the real and gossipy truth, the real meat of the matter. "Will they send her away?" I said. "I don't know. But ef they do, like as not hit's true she'd pine to nothin'. Hit's this a-way: she's wild-like cause she don't know nothin'. Ef she was to marry she'd git rid o' all them foolish ways. Hit would larn her somethin'." Oh, Gulnare! Undine! Where was the creature in those mountains fit to marry, and by marrying to teach such a one! "Is there anyone she cares for?" "Who, her? No! She don't care for nobody. That's hit. But there's them that cares for her, only they hain't got no sense." This was all I could get out of her; but in my woman's way I thought I understood; nor was the case singular. I could see the youth of that land, even the more comely and strong ones, like those comely and strong Norman boys, ready for any fearful emergency, their Winchesters in their hands, He had two eyes, to be sure, instead of one like Tim, but they were badly crossed, in a kind of Cyclopean attempt at consolidation. Nevertheless, when he spoke, something genial, kindly, fairly overspread his features. He looked at me with great interest, and spoke with warmth. "I hyar," he said, "that you air a poet!" I was about to deprecate this when he said: "Wal, I'm a poet, too!" (Oh, strange, unlikely world!) "an' ef you'll come over to visit my mother in my cabin down yand' a piece, stid o' goin' back with the Jedge, I'll read you my pomes. My mother would jest love to hev you. Couldn't you come stay a month. She'd be glad. Then you could read me yore pomes and I could read you mine." I have always-many trials and difficulties to the contrary notwithstanding-found life endlessly lavish of good things. I have always believed it impossible to use even a hundredth part of her opportunities. They spill even from the most greedy, most grasping hands, these being inadequate to hold them. I have thought many times since what riches of experience and, no doubt, of the heart and spirit, lay for me in that little cabin "down yand' a piece," if only I could have taken advantage of them. A CHARACTERISTIC TYPE but transformed suddenly by her fairy powers into mere timid, clumsy shadow creatures, struck helpless, dumb. By and by they decided they would not send her to the hated Bluegrass, after all. That much was a comfort! But she was to be admonished, warned. That did not seem to me serious, since there were always her fairy powers to be reckoned on. We prepared now to leave. Before we did so, the judge brought up to me a lanky red-haired mountaineer who might have been the only-very-slightly-betterlooking brother of Tim, the postboy. He too had red hair, "like he was afire." When we got back a late supper was waiting for us. After it, Mrs. Tamby came up to my room and sat with me in the little upper verandah in the full moonlight. She let me tell of the day's happenings. "And what have you been doing?" I said at last. "Wal," she drew her hand over her face wearily, "we hain't had a good day. Hargis's men was about an' made trouble agin. They got one man. I dunno whether he'll die er not. You see he onct informed agin 'em. They done give him his chanct. They tole him to leave the town. But he was that contrary, he said he wouldn't." river; its waters not deep enough there to drown a man; but its greedy crawling fingers must seize a little child not two years old, and the only child, at that, of a little widow! "Wal, hit was a sight! I never seed nobody carry on the way she did. Look like she was plum crazy. Couldn't no"But it was his home," I said, sym- body do nary nothin' with her. She'd pathizing with him. fling her arms around an' scream; and when they brought that baby in you could a heard her a mile. Look like everybody tried to stop her. Everybody in town was thar, thick as bees, but she'd just moan an' scream, somethin' terrible. Look like I don't know what we'd ha' done cept fer Nell! You know Nell?" Oh, yes; I knew Nell. Of all the people in that tiny town, she had impressed me most. Mrs. Tamby spoke of her as "Nell" but "Snaggle-Tooth Nell" was the full appellation. She was a character that I think no man was precisely proud of, yet whom every one of them respected; and the women, I guess, in their hearts saluted her. She was big, broad shouldered, broad browed, with a kind of overwhelming mass of magnificent red hair, heaped up, on her head. Under the light of it her face showed very worn, but still beautiful. The first time I saw her, she was carrying a blacksnake whip. I had enquired of Mrs. Tamby, and had been told that if that was the case, then Nell was out looking for her drunken husband. She was the only, one who could manage him when he was roaring drunk with moonshine. The whip was only a kind of badge of office; it was never used; the mere sight of it sufficed. "She'd only so much as crack it and lay her hand on his shoulder, and he'd come along, meek too, not offerin' her a word. She's wonderful, Nell is." Wonderful indeed. And had this continued long? Oh, yes. Had they any children to witness so terrible a sight? "No," said Mrs. Tamby, "maybe that's part the matter. Children is like to be kind o' steadyin' to a man. And Jesse, he's like most drinkin' men, he likes children, an' he's kind to 'em, too, an' they like him." "Wal," said Mrs. Tamby now, ruminating on the day's events, the distraught widow, and the dead child, 'nobody knowed what to do; and then -along comes Nell. She'd got that old snake whip in her hand; and she raise it up an' she said, 'You-all git right out o' hyar,' like she was angry at them all crowdin' in to so little a place. An' they got out, too, one of 'em sort o' fallin' over another. An' she step inside thar whar 1 was, an' she close the door on 'em, an' she bolt hit. And the baby's maw, she shruck into a corner, an' she stayed thar just lookin' at Nell, not sayin' nary nothin', like she was feared of her. An' Nell, she went over to the table whar the baby was, an' I got her a clean rag or somethin', an' we smooth hits ha'r, an' we got some VOL. CXLV.-No. 868.-59 thin' clean to put over hit. An' hit look sweet. "An' Nell went over to the baby's maw, an' she tuk her gentle by the wrist, an' she says kind o' still, 'Come over hyar.' An' she come, quiet, like she was a child. An' Nell an' her they stud thar by the baby. I thought mebbe she was goin' to scream agin', but she didn't; but the tears they jus' begin runnin' down, runnin' down. An' bimeby, Nell she said, 'Whut air you cryin' fer, you that hev had a baby!' "Oh, yes; Nell knows; she knows how to manage folks. She's over thar now. Ain't nary nobody else could a got all them men out o' thar so quick." Two days later I left for the Bluegrass again; not only because it was time for me to be back, but it was just as well, too, no doubt. When I thought of leaving these people it was with a real sense of home-sickness, yet with a certain relief, too, relief that came only from the need of being a little sheltered for a while from the terribly real lives they led. My upbringing had made me temperamentally a tenderfoot, no doubt. Though I had made myself as simple as I could"a plain simple gal, jest like blood-kin" -yet all these experiences so stark, and in some ways so grim, had had their effect on me. These people lived on a larger, simpler scale of life than mine. "You're shorely comin' back agin, sometime!" Oh, yes, I surely, surely was, indeed. Could I live long, do you think, in that State and not go back among such people as these? But I did not live long in their State after that. I came away, and have not been back in all these years. I have told of these people often. Those who know. me, know them well; but I have never until now written of them. I think for a long time, it would have seemed to me too much like giving written accounts of my friends. The stories I meant to evolve are all, save two, unwritten, and probably will remain so. I had gone in search of local color. But one cannot, so far as I know, put the life that I saw into books. I have told of these people, just as they were, yet I realize that I have done them scant justice. Even their speech has slipped away from me a little, for I know that I have failed to reproduce their vivid English, so vivid that I felt often that I was listening to lines of the Elizabethan stage. I have said that I never went back to these people; but that is to speak only geographically. Impossible to say how often I have been back in spirit. It rather troubled me at first that though I had lived so to speak in his shadow, I had not seen Hargis. "Hargis's men is out." "Hargis's men is around." "I know, Honey; but when Hargis's men tells you to do a thing, you'd pret' nigh best do hit." Yet it was perhaps more romantic after all that I never saw Hargis, that only the ominous rumor of him ran beside the life in that community, like a dark planet. I do not know the mountains of that section now, nor the mountain people. Education and literacy have been carried to them and, I am told, have much benefited them. I hope so; yet there were many things I would not have had changed, and I cannot altogether forget the old mountaineer missionary's remark about those parts where civilization was comin' in and his warning to me not to trust myself alone "thar." passed before me, and imprinted themselves so indelibly on my memory. Some I can be fairly sure of. "Ol' Maltee" has to a certainty passed to the Maltese shades. There are more graves I think than those old Mrs. Norman and I stood by. "Hat" has grown up, "Tawm," I make no doubt, has come back; yes, and I think gone away again. Hargis was killed, as everyone knows, dramatically enough, perhaps fittingly enough, by his own son. MeCumber never got to New York, I feel fairly certain, yet continues successfully, pistols-and-knives and all, to live in it. There is only one concerning whom I can be in no way sure, even as to specu lation. Did she continue to dabble her hands blue with blackberries, until "hit was a sight?" And did she keep her wild sweet "onlikely" ways; and try to tame hurt creatures of the woods? And did she still go "laughing down them mountings," and continue to "sleep out yand' under the stars?" Or did some shy but finally determined youth of those parts at last marry her, tame her, and "larn her things?" I do not know. I cannot imagine. But there are times when I could hope that those strange powers which left her, a changeling-fair as the moon, clear as the sun-in that fantastically dreary community, may have rescued her from it; to allow her to go, after that, only aerially, laughing down the mountains, or to permit her to return in spirit only, unseen, almost unremembered, to her old haunts, and, I have thought, if it was Spring, with red-bud in her hair. (The end) Needless to say, I have speculated much about all those who in the mountains there in Estill and thereabouts FIFTY AND FIFTY BY THOMAS BEER THE crowd broke into whistles. Some one screamed, "Knockout!" Lads stood up on the sills of the high windows, and smoke was blown frantically by sudden gestures. The referee began to count, and Jason panted, hoping greatly that Timmy Coolan wouldn't rise from the mottled canvas. Sweat was bubbling on Jason's golden skin. The heat was astonishing for early June. He watched Timmy wriggle on the floor, and thought painfully of two farm hands sick in bed and eighty cows to be milked after sunrise. Thinking of this, his eyebrows were separate agitations, and his scowl was terrific. The referee said, "Eight." Timmy sat up with both gloves pressed to his stomach. Jason sighed. The referee said, "Ten," and Timmy lay down again, comfortably. Therewith hundreds of camp chairs scraped the wood; the show was over, and boys flooded the ring. Jason walked through the swirling herd with his arm about Timmy and modestly drawled, "Aw, hell!" against congratulations. His round, rather pretty face took on a look of absolute and vacant pleasure which didn't wane until he met his uncle Eben at the door of the dressing room. Uncle Eben was sure to say something disagreeable. He did. His great-uncle surveyed Jason and loudly reflected, "Your mamma ought to see you doin' this just onct, and then she'd put a stop on it.” "If you don't approve of it, what d' you come and see it for?" The thrust seemed effective. The old man said, "Well, get your duds on and I'll drive you home." "I'm walkin', thanks as much," Jason grunted and left his relative. A committee went to work on Timmy Coolan's bruises. Jason pulled off his wet shoes and trunks. He strolled into the lavatory and slid under a hot shower. His eyebrows were again separate agitations and he made himself into a pillar of soapsuds. It was all right to slug Timmy, who was composed of some singularly tough substance . . . but suppose he did break a less flexible youth's neck? It might happen. He sighed and got soap in his mouth. A suave and gentle voice addressed him through the shower: "Kid, I'd like to talk business with you a minute." Jason abolished the suds and stopped the shower. He saw a slim and handsome man whose straw hat was tilted directly down to one ear and whose "Jase, you hit that boy harder'n you'd clothes didn't come from Falksville. got to." "I didn't neither. Did I Timmy?" "Naw," said Timmy, gallantly, with his palm over a handsome and developing bruise below his ribs. The awful old man resumed, "Your mamma ought to put a stop on this fightin'. You're awful quick tempered, like your papa. You'll bust some boy's neck some time, and—” The person tapped a cigarette on a gold case and said, "I'm Abe Rosalsky, Cleveland. A guy told me there was a good light heavy showin' down here. So I blew down. . . . Now—” "Nothin' in it," Jason said, "I'm a amachoor and I'm goin' to stay so. I've talked to managers before." The handsome man wasn't daunted. He said, "Yeh. Sure. Didn't I |