This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: And then came Azalea]
AZALEA
_The Story of a Girl_
_in the_
_Blue Ridge Mountains_
* * * * *
By
ELIA W. PEATTIE
* * * * *
_Illustrations by_
_Hazel Roberts_
* * * * *
[Picture: Publisher’s Logo]
* * * * *
The Reilly & Britton Co.
Chicago
* * * * *
Copyright, 1912
by
The Reilly & Britton Co.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE MCBIRNEYS 9
II NEW FRIENDS 28
III IN HIDING 47
IV NEW CLOTHES 69
V THE SHOALS 88
VI GROWING PAINS 108
VII THE SINGING 123
VIII THE KIDNAPPING 143
IX HAYSTACK THOMPSON 162
X THE ESCAPE 181
XI THE SUMMERS FAMILY 198
XII MA SAYS NO 215
XIII AT HOME AGAIN 236
XIV THE SACRIFICE 247
XV AZALEA CHOOSES 265
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
And then came Azalea _Frontispiece_
“She ran out to meet me,” he cried 92
“So that’s your story, missy.” 178
He stood there, straight and fierce 270
CHAPTER I
THE MCBIRNEYS
The guinea hens wanted everybody to get up. They said so right under the
bedroom window; and the turkey gobbler had the same wish and made it
known in his most important manner. Hours before, Mr. Rhode Island Red,
the rooster, had expressed his opinion on the subject, and from the first
pale hint of dawn till the sun swung up in the clear May sky, a great
company of tanagers, robins, martins, meadow larks and their friends had
suggested, each in his own way, that it was time to be awake.
But really, it didn’t need all of this clamor to get the McBirneys out of
bed. Since sunup, Thomas McBirney had been planting cotton on the red
clay terraces of his mountain farm; and Mary McBirney, his wife, had been
busied laying her hearth-fire, getting the breakfast and feeding the
crowing, cackling, gobbling creatures in the yard. And three times she
had thrust her head in at the door of the lean-to to say that if she were
a boy she’d get up and see what a pretty day it was.
James Stuart McBirney, otherwise Jim, thought his mother was right about
almost everything, but he did differ with her about getting up when a
fellow felt like a log and his eyes were as tight as ticks. He had heard
her say there was a time for everything, and it seemed to him that the
time to sleep was when a fellow was sleepy. Why should sensible people
send him to bed when he wasn’t sleepy and make him get up when he was?
Besides, something kept nagging away in the back of his mind. It was
something that he ought to remember, and couldn’t quite, on account of
being so sleepy. Or perhaps he didn’t want to remember it. At any rate,
it wouldn’t let him rest in comfort, but pecked away like a woodpecker at
a tree. So, in spite of himself, it all came back to him. Ma was out of
“fat pine” for kindling, and he must go hunting it.
Well, if he must—
“It don’t seem as you ought to be so long getting into such a few
clothes, Jimmy,” a soft voice called. “You’ll be falling into lazy
habits if you don’t set a watch on yourself, and you’ll never get shet of
them, long as you live.”
“Yessum,” said Jim.
“I can see your pa a-coming ’cross the fields now, and I reckon if you
don’t do some hustling he’ll catch you dawdling.”
“Yessum.”
“And, Jimmy!”
“Yessum?”
“I’ve been hearing that Aunt Nan Leiter’s got a making of that blue dye
like I’ve been wanting. I reckon after you’ve got the wood you’d better
walk over yon and get the bucket of it she promised to give me.”
“Yessum.”
“And, Jimmy, here’s your pa.”
“Yessum.”
“Ain’t you washed yet, son? Shame on you!”
There was a wild splashing of water on the back porch where the wash
basin stood, a gasping and panting, and then, with one last “Yessum,”
James Stuart McBirney stood in the door. His turned-up nose, his
freckles and his blue eyes all shone as if he had polished them, and his
curling, clay-colored hair had drawn itself up in tight ringlets about
his head.
He had been hoping that no one would pay any attention to him, and he had
his wish. Ma was setting breakfast on the table, steaming hot from the
hearth. Pa was standing outside the door shading his eyes with one hand.
“What all are you peering at that a-way, Pa McBirney?” asked his wife.
“Is it some one coming over the gap? I heard tell that Sam Bixby and his
brothers was about to bring over a string of horses from their place for
trading day at Lee. As like as not it’s them you’re seeing.”
“No it ain’t, Mary—and it ain’t nobody we ever set eyes on before.”
“Why, Thomas, how can you tell that, with them just coming over the top
of the gap?”
“Well!” said Pa McBirney, “I’ll be dumfoundered!”
At that Jim and his mother went to the door. They thought it was about
time to see what was ailing pa. The three had a way of sharing
everything; and it was no wonder that they did so, for they had only
themselves for company. Their cabin, with its two large rooms, its open
chamber between, and the lean-to, where Jim slept, sat on a pleasant
bench of Mount Tennyson, two thousand feet above the level of the sea.
Through their yard ran the road that carried people from over Burlingame
way, on the other side of the mountain, down to Lee, the town that lay
below them in the purple valley. Sometimes, when the wind was right,
they could hear the mill whistles blow at Lee, or the church bells ring;
and sometimes they could see the houses there as plain as anything. But
usually the little town looked to them as if it were wrapped around in
purple veils; and when the rain came, it was swallowed up in white
blankness.
The McBirneys thought they lived in a very pleasant and exciting place.
Sometimes as many as five or six teams passed their door in one day, and
it was seldom indeed that anyone drove by without stopping to pass the
time of day. If by chance the McBirneys were sitting down to a meal, the
travelers were asked to share it with them, and to water their horses and
take a little rest before going on down the mountain. Ma said it was a
fine thing for them, being taken unawares like that. It made them keep
the house tidy and themselves ready to see folks. But there were weeks
of rain or snow there on the mountain side when almost nobody passed, and
when the McBirneys couldn’t get to town; and the only sounds to be heard
were their own voices and the baying of the four hounds, or the crying of
the trees and the crackling of the fire on the hearth.
Not long ago, there had been four of them instead of three. There had
been Molly, Jim’s little sister, a little girl with hair the color of
corn silk, and eyes as dark as “spider lilies.” And now she was lying
under that tiny heap of earth beneath the Pride of India tree, and Jim’s
mother was different—quite different—from what she had been before. Her
face was sweeter, perhaps, but it looked so that Jim couldn’t keep from
crying, to himself, of course. And in spite of all they could do, all
three of them kept counting Molly in; and now as he ran to the door to
see what was going on up there at the gap, he couldn’t help thinking how
much more fun it would have been if he and Molly had been pushing and
scrambling and pretending to see which could get out first, in the old
way. In those old days his mother would have been calling out in the
laughing voice she used to have:
“Come along, children, something’s going on.”
But now father, mother and boy were silent as they stood together looking
up where the red road made its way through the forest over the gap.
Pa was the first to speak.
“As near as I can make out,” he said slowly, “it’s three wagons loaded to
the limit, and a lot of people on foot walking alongside.”
“Queer doings, ain’t it?” murmured ma.
“I allow I’d better run up the road a piece,” Jim said, slipping in his
words softly, as if he hoped they might go unnoticed, “and see what’s
doing.”
“And I allow,” said his father in his most downright voice, “that we-all
will just sit down and eat that there good breakfast ma has cooked, and
if we keep eating steady we’ll be through with the whole business before
them folks, whoever they be, gets anywhere nigh.”
“Oh, yes!” added ma, “I do wish you’d sit down and eat things while
they’re hot and fit for eating.”
So they sat down and went at their breakfast as if it were a piece of
hard work that must be got out of the way, and then, having finished and
slipped what was left to Molly’s cat and the four hounds, they got out of
doors as quickly as they could.
“The procession is hid around the bend of the road,” said ma.
But even as she spoke the words, the “procession” appeared, though it was
almost above the McBirney’s heads. Both men and animals were moving
along very slowly, as if—as pa put it—they were “dead beat.”
“It looks,” said ma softly, “like a funeral.”
“No, it don’t nuther, ma,” pa answered sharply. “It don’t look nothing
like a funeral. It looks like a family moving.”
“It’s a mighty large family then, Thomas.”
“Maybe it’s folks going down to work in the cotton mill at Lee,” Jim
suggested. “I heard Rath Rutherford saying there was agents going all
through the mountains, asking folks to go down and work.”
“Yes, folks with children,” snapped Pa McBirney. “That’s the kind they
want, and that’s the kind that’ll go—folks that can get their boys and
girls in the mill and make ’em work for ’em. I’d see _myself_ lying down
and letting my children put food in my mouth!”
“Well, as near as I can make out,” said Mary McBirney, “there’s only two
children in that company. All the rest is grown folks.”
The three wagons with their sagging cloth tops, swung around the next
curve and turned toward the McBirney cabin. The horses walked with
drooping heads; the people dragged their feet. Pa went forward to meet
them, and close behind him, trying hard to see and not to be seen, went
Jim. Ma McBirney went back and sat on a chair in the doorway, something
as a queen might go back and sit on her throne.
“Howdy,” said pa.
“Howdy,” responded the man who led the first pair of horses.
Pa asked no questions—that would not have been polite according to his
idea. He seemed not to look at the tired horses or the still more weary
men and women, or at the wagons with their queer load. All he said was:
“There’s a good spring of water over yon, if so be you’re wanting water;
and this here bench is a good one to rest on before going on down the
mountain.”
By “bench” he meant, of course, the level bit of land on the mountain
side.
Jim knew that his father was simply quivering inside, just as he was
himself, to know what those people were doing and what they were carrying
in their wagons.
The man looked at pa and nodded.
“We’re about tuckered out,” he admitted.
“Come far?” asked pa. It hurt his pride to ask the question, but he had
to do it. The man looked at pa impatiently.
“Why, we’re always on the road,” he said. “We’ve got a show here.”
A show! Jim felt something running up his spine—something that felt as
cold and swift as a lizard. It was really a thrill of excitement, but
Jim was afraid it was some sort of sickness. He was not used to the
feeling.
The queer procession came to a stop in the McBirney clearing. There were
three covered wagons, six thin horses, five men, two women, a boy and a
girl. All were walking. The man to whom pa had spoken was pale, fat and
tired looking, and while pa was looking him over in his quiet way the man
took off his hat and wiped the moisture from his head.
“We’re out of luck,” he said. “There’s a dying woman in that last
wagon—the smartest performer of the bunch. Sing or dance or anything.
That’s her girl there.” He pointed to a slender girl of about Jim’s own
age, who stood staring off into the valley, though Jim, who had seen that
same sort of a look in his mother’s face, knew she wasn’t really seeing
it. She wasn’t seeing anything, he decided.
“Sho!” murmured Pa McBirney. “Dying? Are you sure?”
The man thwacked a huge horsefly on his horse’s flank.
“Sure,” said he.
One of the women asked pa if they might cook their breakfast in the open
“rock” fireplace that stood there in the yard.
“Yes, ma’am,” said pa quickly. And then he called: “Here, ma, these
folks want to cook their breakfast here a-way. And they say there’s a
mighty sick woman in that tent-wagon yon.”
Mary McBirney, whose shyness had kept her sitting as still as if she were
under some spell, got up at once when she heard this, and came forward.
She nodded to the men and women without really looking at them, because
that was her way with strangers.
“Where’s the sick woman, please?” she asked in her soft voice. The girl
who had stood looking at the valley turned at this.
“I’ll show you, please ma’am,” she said, and her voice sounded so tired
that it made a lump come in Jim’s throat.
Mary McBirney reached down and took the girl’s thin brown hand in her
own, and the two went on to the wagon, the others watching them. They
saw her lean forward and look in the wagon, and then draw back with a
startled face.
“Why, it’s over!” she called. “Pa! Pa! The poor soul’s gone!”
At that the other women ran toward her.
“Why, she was breathing a mile or two back,” the one they called Betty
said. “I looked in at her and gave her a drink.”
“We didn’t stay in the wagon because it shut out the air,” explained the
other. “Zalie here, wanted to stay with her mamma, but we coaxed her not
to, for the poor thing needed all the air she could get.”
But the girl was in the wagon now, letting her tears rain on the face of
the only one in all the world she ever had called her own.
Betty Bowen began to call to her to come out, but Ma McBirney said: “Just
let her cry! Poor little thing—she’s just got to cry.”
Betty Bowen, and her friend Susan Hetter, began to sniffle a little too,
but Mary McBirney looking at them made up her mind that they were not
caring very much. They looked too dragged out to care about anything.
The dust of the road seemed to have got into their very skin; they looked
as if they never had slept in a proper bed or dressed in a proper room;
and though Mrs. McBirney did not like them, and could hardly keep from
drawing away from them, she felt very sorry for them too.
“Where’s the girl’s pa?” she asked them.
“We don’t know,” Betty Bowen said. “Mrs. Knox—that’s the dead woman,
ma’am—never said anything about him.”
“Ain’t she got no kin?” asked ma gently.
“None that we know of, ma’am.”
Jim stood looking on, his lips pressed hard together. The girl’s mother
was dead. _Her mother was dead_! Why, that must be like having the
world come to an end, pretty near. If your mother was dead, it didn’t
matter if you did belong to a show. But that boy over there, his mother
wasn’t dead, and yet he acted as “dumb” as a snail. Jim felt that if he,
himself, belonged to a show he’d be yelling and jumping and having a
whopping time. Every spare minute he’d be practicing up in his part.
But these folks acted as if they hardly had life enough to cross the
yard; and as for the horses, their heads hung down and their bones stuck
out as if they were ready for the buzzards to pick. Jim hated to have
that girl crying like that. There was no fun in having a show in your
yard when a girl was making such a noise. He tried to forget about it,
and walked around looking in the wagons—not the wagon where the girl was,
but the others—hoping to find some wild animals in cages. But the only
wild animals he saw were made out of wood.
“What’s them for?” he asked one of the men, pointing to a wooden zebra
and a somewhat faded tiger.
“For the merry-go-round,” said the man. “Ever see one?” Jim shook his
head, and the man tried to tell him what a merry-go-round was like. Jim
was disgusted to think how long he had lived without seeing anything like
that.
“I should think,” he said to the man, “that this here bench would be a
good place to set up your show.”
“Oh, fine!” answered the man with a disagreeable laugh. “Then all the
jack rabbits and spit cats in the whole neighborhood could come, couldn’t
they?”
“If you’d set it up, please sir,” said Jim, “I’d run all over the
mountain in no time, telling the folks about it. There’s lots of folks
on this mountain—more’n you’d think. They’d pay you money.”
But the head man, Sisson, had come up and begun talking about the dead
woman.
“I’m just figuring,” he said, “whether to take her down to a burying
ground in the next town, or to make a grave up here.”
Just then Jim’s father came up.
“My wife says for you-all to leave that poor woman right up here,” he
said. “She can be buried out there by that Pride of India tree beside
our little girl, and ma will keep everything looking fine—plant roses,
you know, and all that.”
The men didn’t seem to care much about roses.
“Thanks,” said Sisson shortly; “that’ll be all right.”
“How could it be ‘all right’?” Jim wondered. Now that he had stopped
talking about the show he could hear that girl again, and it made him
feel very, very queer. The lump came back in his throat and things sort
of shook before his eyes. He felt as if something in him was going to
burst. And just then some one touched him on the shoulder. He looked up
and saw his mother standing there. Her face seemed unusually thin and
white and her eyes very large, and there was something so kind—so
terribly, heart-breakingly kind—in them, that the something in him did
burst, and he found himself crying in his mother’s dress.
“I reckon if you feel as sorry as that for the poor girl, you’ll like to
do something to help.”
Jim nodded, not being able to speak.
“Well, you get a cup of fresh milk and carry it to my bedroom. I’m going
to get the poor child in there and coax her to lie down.”
Jim ran to the spring house—tormented all the while with those sobs in
his throat—and filled the tall horn cup with milk. When he carried it
into his mother’s room he found the girl lying on the bed, with Ma
McBirney bathing her face and talking to her softly.
“I’m unplaiting your hair, dear,” she was saying in a voice so soft that
it made Jim think of the pigeons out at the barn, “and I’m going to
smooth it. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No’m,” said the girl brokenly.
“And here’s the milk, all nice and cold. If it would please you to drink
a little of that!”
She half-lifted the little figure in her arms and held her so while the
girl let the cool milk run down her hot throat. Jim noticed that when
she lay down again, she took the edge of ma’s apron between her fingers
and held on to it. Jim understood why. He felt just like doing that
himself.
“My little girl that died,” said ma, still in that soft, cooing voice,
“had yellow hair. Yours is brown, but it’s just as pretty.”
The girl twisted ma’s apron in and out around her fingers; she could
think of nothing to say.
“My little Molly’s eyes was blue, but yours is just the color of Job’s
tears.”
“Job’s tears?” asked the girl. “What are they, please ma’am?”
“You don’t know what Job’s tears be, honey? Why they’re the prettiest
little things—sort of beans, they be—and folks dries and strings ’em.
Jimmy, you fetch that string from the bureau.”
Jim brought the string of softly polished gray beadlike things, and Ma
McBirney slipped them softly over the girl’s head.
“They just match your eyes, honey. You must wear them to remember me
by!”
“Thank you, ma’am. But I’ll remember you anyway. You’ll be taking care
of mamma for me.”
“Now here, honey, don’t you start crying again! You can do all the
crying you want by and by. But now I want you to listen to me. What
call have you got to go on with them show people?”
“What else can I do, ma’am? They’re all the people I know.”
“What do you do in the show?”
“Not much now since my pony died. I used to ride him, ma’am. Now I sell
things—peanuts or pictures or songs or anything.”
A wave of scarlet went over her face, and Jim knew she hated being with
the show and he wondered why. He would have liked to do that kind of
thing very well.
“Tell me—I won’t tell no one—be they good to you?” asked ma.
The girl turned her tear-darkened eyes on her.
“Oh, I don’t know—I don’t know!” she broke out. “Oh, I’m so tired! What
shall I do? What shall I do?”
Ma McBirney stooped down and put both arms tight about the girl’s shaking
form.
“I reckon you’d better stay right here with me,” she said. “I’m needing
a little girl terrible; and you’ve lost your ma. You stay right here
with me. What do you say to that?”
The girl sat up in bed and looked straight into Ma McBirney’s eyes.
“They’d never let me!” she cried.
“Now maybe they would, dear. Would you like it?”
“Oh!” sighed the girl; “Oh, ma’am!”
“What was that name I heard them calling you?”
“Zalie, ma’am. My name is Azalea.”