Books: The Heart Of The Hills
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John Fox, Jr. >> The Heart Of The Hills
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20 Produced by Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
THE HEART OF THE HILLS
By John Fox, Jr.
Author of "The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come," "The Trail of the
Lonesome Pine," Etc.
With Four Illustrations By F. C. YOHN
IN
GRATEFUL MEMORY
OF
MY FATHER
WHO LOVED THE GREAT MOTHER, HER FORMS,
HER MOODS, HER WAYS.
TO THE END SHE LEFT HIM THE JOY OF YOUTH
IN THE COMING OF SPRING
June 28, 1912.
THE HEART OF THE HILLS
I
Twin spirals of blue smoke rose on either side of the spur, crept
tendril-like up two dark ravines, and clearing the feathery green
crests of the trees, drifted lazily on upward until, high above,
they melted shyly together and into the haze that veiled the
drowsy face of the mountain.
Each rose from a little log cabin clinging to the side of a little
hollow at the head of a little creek. About each cabin was a
rickety fence, a patch of garden, and a little cleared hill-side,
rocky, full of stumps, and crazily traced with thin green spears
of corn. On one hill-side a man was at work with a hoe, and on the
other, over the spur, a boy--both barefooted, and both in patched
jean trousers upheld by a single suspender that made a wet line
over a sweaty cotton shirt: the man, tall, lean, swarthy, grim;
the boy grim and dark, too, and with a face that was prematurely
aged. At the man's cabin a little girl in purple homespun was
hurrying in and out the back door clearing up after the noonday
meal; at the boy's, a comely woman with masses of black hair sat
in the porch with her hands folded, and lifting her eyes now and
then to the top of the spur. Of a sudden the man impatiently threw
down his hoe, but through the battered straw hat that bobbed up
and down on the boy's head, one lock tossed on like a jetblack
plume until he reached the end of his straggling row of corn.
There he straightened up and brushed his earth-stained fingers
across a dullred splotch on one cheek of his sullen set face. His
heavy lashes lifted and he looked long at the woman on the porch--
looked without anger now and with a new decision in his steady
eyes. He was getting a little too big to be struck by a woman,
even if she were his own mother, and nothing like that must happen
again.
A woodpecker was impudently tapping the top of a dead burnt tree
near by, and the boy started to reach for a stone, but turned
instead and went doggedly to work on the next row, which took him
to the lower corner of the garden fence, where the ground was
black and rich. There, as he sank his hoe with the last stroke
around the last hill of corn, a fat fishing-worm wriggled under
his very eyes, and the growing man lapsed swiftly into the boy
again. He gave another quick dig, the earth gave up two more
squirming treasures, and with a joyful gasp he stood straight
again--his eyes roving as though to search all creation for help
against the temptation that now was his. His mother had her face
uplifted toward the top of the spur; and following her gaze, he
saw a tall mountaineer slouching down the path. Quickly he
crouched behind the fence, and the aged look came back into his
face. He did not approve of that man coming over there so often,
kinsman though he was, and through the palings he saw his mother's
face drop quickly and her hands moving uneasily in her lap. And
when the mountaineer sat down on the porch and took off his hat to
wipe his forehead, he noticed that his mother had on a newly
bought store dress, and that the man's hair was wet with something
more than water. The thick locks had been combed and were
glistening with oil, and the boy knew these facts for signs of
courtship; and though he was contemptuous, they furnished the
excuse he sought and made escape easy. Noiselessly he wielded his
hoe for a few moments, scooped up a handful of soft dirt, meshed
the worms in it, and slipped the squirming mass into his pocket.
Then he crept stooping along the fence to the rear of the house,
squeezed himself between two broken palings, and sneaked on tiptoe
to the back porch. Gingerly he detached a cane fishing-pole from a
bunch that stood upright in a corner and was tiptoeing away, when
with another thought he stopped, turned back, and took down from
the wall a bow and arrow with a steel head around which was wound
a long hempen string. Cautiously then he crept back along the
fence, slipped behind the barn into the undergrowth and up a dark
little ravine toward the green top of the spur. Up there he turned
from the path through the thick bushes into an open space, walled
by laurel-bushes, hooted three times surprisingly like an owl, and
lay contentedly down on a bed of moss. Soon his ear caught the
sound of light footsteps coming up the spur on the other side, the
bushes parted in a moment more, and a little figure in purple
homespun slipped through them, and with a flushed, panting face
and dancing eyes stood beside him.
The boy nodded his head sidewise toward his own home, and the girl
silently nodded hers up and down in answer. Her eyes caught sight
of the bow and arrow on the ground beside him and lighted eagerly,
for she knew then that the fishingpole was for her. Without a word
they slipped through the bushes and down the steep side of the
spur to a little branch which ran down into a creek that wound a
tortuous way into the Cumberland.
II
On the other side, too, a similar branch ran down into another
creek which looped around the long slanting side of the spur and
emptied, too, into the Cumberland. At the mouth of each creek the
river made a great bend, and in the sweep of each were rich bottom
lands. A century before, a Hawn had settled in one bottom, the
lower one, and a Honeycutt in the other. As each family
multiplied, more land was cleared up each creek by sons and
grandsons until in each cove a clan was formed. No one knew when
and for what reason an individual Hawn and a Honeycutt had first
clashed, but the clash was of course inevitable. Equally
inevitable was it, too, that the two clans should take the quarrel
up, and for half a century the two families had, with intermittent
times of truce, been traditional enemies. The boy's father, Jason
Hawn, had married a Honeycutt in a time of peace, and, when the
war opened again, was regarded as a deserter, and had been forced
to move over the spur to the Honeycutt side. The girl's father,
Steve Hawn, a ne'erdo-well and the son of a ne'er-do-well, had for
his inheritance wild lands, steep, supposedly worthless, and near
the head of the Honeycutt cove. Little Jason's father, when he
quarrelled with his kin, could afford to buy only cheap land on
the Honeycutt side, and thus the homes of the two were close to
the high heart of the mountain, and separated only by the
bristling crest of the spur. In time the boy's father was slain
from ambush, and it was a Hawn, the Honeycutts claimed, who had
made him pay the death price of treachery to his own kin. But when
peace came, this fact did not save the lad from taunt and
suspicion from the children of the Honeycutt tribe, and being a
favorite with his Grandfather Hawn down on the river, and harshly
treated by his Honeycutt mother, his life on the other side in the
other cove was a hard one; so his heart had gone back to his own
people and, having no companions, he had made a playmate of his
little cousin, Mavis, over the spur. In time her mother had died,
and in time her father, Steve, had begun slouching over the spur
to court the widow--his cousin's widow, Martha Hawn. Straightway
the fact had caused no little gossip up and down both creeks,
good-natured gossip at first, but, now that the relations between
the two clans were once more strained, there was open censure, and
on that day when all the men of both factions had gone to the
county-seat, the boy knew that Steve Hawn had stayed at home for
no other reason than to make his visit that day secret; and the
lad's brain, as he strode ahead of his silent little companion,
was busy with the significance of what was sure to come.
At the mouth of the branch, the two came upon a road that also ran
down to the river, but they kept on close to the bank of the
stream which widened as they travelled--the boy striding ahead
without looking back, the girl following like a shadow. Still
again they crossed the road, where it ran over the foot of the
spur and turned down into a deep bowl filled to the brim with bush
and tree, and there, where a wide pool lay asleep in thick shadow,
the lad pulled forth the ball of earth and worms from his pocket,
dropped them with the fishing-pole to the ground, and turned
ungallantly to his bow and arrow. By the time he had strung it,
and had tied one end of the string to the shaft of the arrow and
the other about his wrist, the girl had unwound the coarse
fishing-line, had baited her own hook, and, squatted on her heels,
was watching her cork with eager eyes; but when the primitive
little hunter crept to the lower end of the pool, and was peering
with Indian caution into the depths, her eyes turned to him.
"Watch out thar!" he called, sharply.
Her cork bobbed, sank, and when, with closed eyes, she jerked with
all her might, a big shining chub rose from the water and landed
on the bank beside her. She gave a subdued squeal of joy, but the
boy's face was calm as a star. Minnows like that were all right
for a girl to catch and even for him to eat, but he was after game
for a man. A moment later he heard another jerk and another fish
was flopping on the bank, and this time she made no sound, but
only flashed her triumphant eyes upon him. At the third fish, she
turned her eyes for approval--and got none; and at the fourth, she
did not look up at all, for he was walking toward her.
"You air skeerin' the big uns," he said shortly, and as he passed
he pulled his Barlow knife from his pocket and dropped it at her
feet. She rose obediently, and with no sign of protest began
gathering an apronful of twigs and piling them for a fire. Then
she began scraping one of the fish, and when it was cleaned she
lighted the fire. The blaze crackled merrily, the blue smoke rose
like some joyous spirit loosed for upward flight, and by the time
the fourth fish was cleaned, a little bed of winking coals was
ready and soon a gentle sizzling assailed the boy's ears, and a
scent made his nostrils quiver and set his stomach a-hungering.
But still he gave no sign of interest--even when the little girl
spoke at last:
"Dinner's ready."
He did not look around, for he had crouched, his body taut from
head to foot, and he might have been turned suddenly to stone for
all the sign of life he gave, and the little girl too was just as
motionless. Then she saw the little statue come slowly back to
quivering life. She saw the bow bend, the shaft of the arrow
drawing close to the boy's paling cheek, there was a rushing hiss
through the air, a burning hiss in the water, a mighty bass leaped
from the convulsed surface and shot to the depths again, leaving
the headless arrow afloat. The boy gave one sharp cry and lapsed
into his stolid calm again.
The little girl said nothing, for there is no balm for the tragedy
of the big fish that gets away. Slowly he untied the string from
his reddened wrist and pulled the arrow in. Slowly he turned and
gazed indifferently at the four crisp fish on four dry twigs with
four pieces of corn pone lying on the grass near them, and the
little girl squatting meekly and waiting, as the woman should for
her working lord. With his Barlow knife he slowly speared a corn
pone, picking up a fish with the other hand, and still she waited
until he spoke.
"Take out, Mavie," he said with great gravity and condescension,
and then his knife with a generous mouthful on its point stopped
in the air, his startled eyes widened, and the little girl shrank
cowering behind him. A heavy footfall had crunched on the quiet
air, the bushes had parted, and a huge mountaineer towered above
them with a Winchester over his shoulder and a kindly smile under
his heavy beard. The boy was startled--not frightened.
"Hello, Babe!" he said coolly. "Whut devilmint you up to now?"
The giant smiled uneasily:
"I'm keepin' out o' the sun an' a-takin' keer o' my health," he
said, and his eyes dropped hungrily to the corn pone and fried
fish, but the boy shook his head sturdily.
"You can't git nothin' to eat from me, Babe Honeycutt."
"Now, looky hyeh, Jason--"
"Not a durn bite," said the boy firmly, "even if you air my
mammy's brother. I'm a Hawn now, I want ye to know, an' I ain't
goin' to have my folks say I was feedin' an' harborin' a
Honeycutt--'specially you."
It would have been humorous to either Hawn or Honeycutt to hear
the big man plead, but not to the girl, though he was an enemy,
and had but recently wounded a cousin of hers, and was hiding from
her own people, for her warm little heart was touched, and big
Babe saw it and left his mournful eyes on hers.
"An' I'm a-goin' to tell whar I've seed ye," went on the boy
savagely, but the girl grabbed up two fish and a corn pone and
thrust them out to the huge hairy hand eagerly stretched out.
"Now, git away," she said breathlessly, "git away--quick!"
"Mavis!" yelled the boy.
"Shet up!" she cried, and the lips of the routed boy fell apart in
sheer amazement, for never before had she made the slightest
question of his tyrannical authority, and then her eyes blazed at
the big Honeycutt and she stamped her foot.
"I'd give 'em to the meanest dog in these mountains."
The big man turned to the boy.
"Is he dead yit?"
"No, he ain't dead yit," said the boy roughly.
"Son," said the mountaineer quietly, "you tell whutever you please
about me."
The curiously gentle smile had never left the bearded lips, but in
his voice a slight proud change was perceptible.
"An' you can take back yo' corn pone, honey."
Then dropping the food in his hand back to the ground, he
noiselessly melted into the bushes again.
At once the boy went to work on his neglected corn-bread and fish,
but the girl left hers untouched where they lay. He ate silently,
staring at the water below him, nor did the little girl turn her
eyes his way, for in the last few minutes some subtle change in
their relations had taken place, and both were equally surprised
and mystified. Finally, the lad ventured a sidewise glance at her
beneath the brim of his hat and met a shy, appealing glance once
more. At once he felt aggrieved and resentful and turned sullen.
"He throwed it back in yo' face," he said. "You oughtn't to 'a'
done it."
Little Mavis made no answer.
"You're nothin' but a gal, an' nobody'll hold nothin' agin you,
but with my mammy a Honeycutt an' me a-livin' on the Honeycutt
side, you mought 'a' got me into trouble with my own folks." The
girl knew how Jason had been teased and taunted and his life made
miserable up and down the Honeycutt creek, and her brown face grew
wistful and her chin quivered.
"I jes' couldn't he'p it, Jason," she said weakly, and the little
man threw up his hands with a gesture that spoke his hopelessness
over her sex in general, and at the same time an ungracious
acceptance of the terrible calamity she had perhaps left dangling
over his head. He clicked the blade of his Barlow knife and rose.
"We better be movin' now," he said, with a resumption of his old
authority, and pulling in the line and winding it about the cane
pole, he handed it to her and started back up the spur with Mavis
trailing after, his obedient shadow once more.
On top of the spur Jason halted. A warm blue haze transfused with
the slanting sunlight overlay the flanks of the mountains which,
fold after fold, rippled up and down the winding river and above
the green crests billowed on and on into the unknown. Nothing more
could happen to them if they went home two hours later than would
surely happen if they went home now, the boy thought, and he did
not want to go home now. For a moment he stood irresolute, and
then, far down the river, he saw two figures on horseback come
into sight from a strip of woods, move slowly around a curve of
the road, and disappear into the woods again.
One rode sidewise, both looked absurdly small, and even that far
away the boy knew them for strangers. He did not call Mavis's
attention to them--he had no need--for when he turned, her face
showed that she too had seen them, and she was already moving
forward to go with him down the spur. Once or twice, as they went
down, each glimpsed the coming "furriners" dimly through the
trees; they hurried that they might not miss the passing, and on a
high bank above the river road they stopped, standing side by
side, the eyes of both fixed on the arched opening of the trees
through which the strangers must first come into sight. A ringing
laugh from the green depths heralded their coming, and then in the
archway were framed a boy and a girl and two ponies--all from
another world. The two watchers stared silently--the boy noting
that the other boy wore a cap and long stockings, the girl that a
strange hat hung down the back of the other girl's head--stared
with widening eyes at a sight that was never for them before. And
then the strangers saw them--the boy with his bow and arrow, the
girl with a fishing-pole--and simultaneously pulled their ponies
in before the halting gaze that was levelled at them from the
grassy bank. Then they all looked at one another until boy's eyes
rested on boy's eyes for question and answer, and the stranger
lad's face flashed with quick humor.
"Were you looking for us?" he asked, for just so it seemed to him,
and the little mountaineer nodded.
"Yes," he said gravely.
The stranger boy laughed.
"What can we do for you?"
Now, little Jason had answered honestly and literally, and he saw
now that he was being trifled with.
"A feller what wears gal's stockings can't do nothin' fer me," he
said coolly.
Instantly the other lad made as though he would jump from his
pony, but a cry of protest stopped him, and for a moment he glared
his hot resentment of the insult; then he dug his heels into his
pony's sides.
"Come on, Marjorie," he said, and with dignity the two little
"furriners" rode on, never looking back even when they passed over
the hill.
"He didn't mean nothin'," said Mavis, "an' you oughtn't--"
Jason turned on her in a fury.
"I seed you a-lookin' at him!"
"'Tain't so! I seed you a-lookin' at HER!" she retorted, but her
eyes fell before his accusing gaze, and she began worming a bare
toe into the sand.
"Air ye goin' home now?" she asked, presently.
"No," he said shortly, "I'm a-goin' atter him. You go on home."
The boy started up the hill, and in a moment the girl was trotting
after him. He turned when he heard the patter of her feet.
"Huh!" he grunted contemptuously, and kept on. At the top of the
hill he saw several men on horseback in the bend of the road
below, and he turned into the bushes.
"They mought tell on us," explained Jason, and hiding bow and
arrow and fishing-pole, they slipped along the flank of the spur
until they stood on a point that commanded the broad river-bottom
at the mouth of the creek.
By the roadside down there, was the ancestral home of the Hawns
with an orchard about it, a big garden, a stable huge for that
part of the world, and a meat-house where for three-quarters of a
century there had always been things "hung up." The old log house
in which Jason and Mavis's great-great-grandfather had spent his
pioneer days had been weather-boarded and was invisible somewhere
in the big frame house that, trimmed with green and porticoed with
startling colors, glared white in the afternoon sun. They could
see the two ponies hitched at the front gate. Two horsemen were
hurrying along the river road beneath them, and Jason recognized
one as his uncle, Arch Hawn, who lived in the county-seat, who
bought "wild" lands and was always bringing in "furriners," to
whom he sold them again. The man with him was a stranger, and
Jason understood better now what was going on. Arch Hawn was
responsible for the presence of the man and of the girl and that
boy in the "gal's stockings," and all of them would probably spend
the night at his grandfather's house. A farm-hand was leading the
ponies to the barn now, and Jason and Mavis saw Arch and the man
with him throw themselves hurriedly from their horses, for the sun
had disappeared in a black cloud and a mist of heavy rain was
sweeping up the river. It was coming fast, and the boy sprang
through the bushes and, followed by Mavis, flew down the road. The
storm caught them, and in a few moments the stranger boy and girl
looking through the front door at the sweeping gusts, saw two
drenched and bedraggled figures slip shyly through the front gate
and around the corner to the back of the house.
III
The two little strangers sat in cane-bottomed chairs before the
open door, still looking about them with curious eyes at the
strings of things hanging from the smoke-browned rafters--beans,
red pepper-pods, and twists of homegrown tobacco, the girl's eyes
taking in the old spinning-wheel in the corner, the piles of
brilliantly figured quilts between the foot-boards of the two beds
ranged along one side of the room, and the boy's, catching eagerly
the butt of a big revolver projecting from the mantel-piece, a
Winchester standing in one corner, a long, old-fashioned squirrel
rifle athwart a pair of buck antlers over the front door, and a
bunch of cane fishing-poles aslant the wall of the back porch.
Presently a slim, drenched figure slipped quietly in, then
another, and Mavis stood on one side of the fire-place and little
Jason on the other. The two girls exchanged a swift glance and
Mavis's eyes fell; abashed, she knotted her hands shyly behind her
and with the hollow of one bare foot rubbed the slender arch of
the other. The stranger boy looked up at Jason with a pleasant
glance of recognition, got for his courtesy a sullen glare that
travelled from his broad white collar down to his stockinged legs,
and his face flushed; he would have trouble with that mountain
boy. Before the fire old Jason Hawn stood, and through a smoke
cloud from his corn-cob pipe looked kindly at his two little
guests.
"So that's yo' boy an' gal?"
"That's my son Gray," said Colonel Pendleton.
"And that's my cousin Marjorie," said the lad, and Mavis looked
quickly to little Jason for recognition of this similar
relationship and got no answering glance, for little did he care
at that moment of hostility how those two were akin.
"She's my cousin, too," laughed the colonel, "but she always calls
me uncle."
Old Jason turned to him.
"Well, we're a purty rough people down here, but you're welcome to
all we got."
"I've found that out," laughed Colonel Pendleton pleasantly,
"everywhere."
"I wish you both could stay a long time with us," said the old man
to the little strangers. "Jason here would take Gray fishin' an'
huntin', an' Mavis would git on my old mare an' you two could jus'
go flyin' up an' down the road. You could have a mighty good time
if hit wasn't too rough fer ye."
"Oh, no," said the boy politely, and the girl said:
"I'd just love to."
The Blue-grass man's attention was caught by the names.
"Jason," he repeated; "why, Jason was a mighty hunter, and Mavis--
that means 'the songthrush.' How in the world did they get those
names?"
"Well, my granddaddy was a powerful b'arhunter in his day," said
the old man, "an' I heerd as how a school-teacher nicknamed him
Jason, an' that name come down to me an' him. I've heerd o' Mavis
as long as I can rickellect. Hit was my grandmammy's name."
Colonel Pendleton looked at the sturdy mountain lad, his compact
figure, square shoulders, well-set head with its shock of hair and
bold, steady eyes, and at the slim, wild little creature shrinking
against the mantel-piece, and then he turned to his own son Gray
and his little cousin Marjorie. Four better types of the Blue-
grass and of the mountains it would be hard to find. For a moment
he saw them in his mind's eye transposed in dress and environment,
and he was surprised at the little change that eye could see, and
when he thought of the four living together in these wilds, or at
home in the Blue-grass, his wonder at what the result might be
almost startled him. The mountain lad had shown no surprise at the
talk about him and his cousin, but when the stranger man caught
his eye, little Jason's lips opened.
"I knowed all about that," he said abruptly.
"About what?"
"Why, that mighty hunter--and Mavis."
"Why, who told you?"
"The jologist."
"The what?" Old Jason laughed.
"He means ge-ol-o-gist," said the old man, who had no little
trouble with the right word himself. "A feller come in here three
year ago with a hammer an' went to peckin' aroun' in the rocks
here, an' that boy was with him all the time. Thar don't seem to
be much the feller didn't tell Jason an' nothin' that Jason don't
seem to remember. He's al'ays a-puzzlin' me by comin' out with
somethin' or other that rock-pecker tol' him an'--" he stopped,
for the boy was shaking his head from side to side.
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