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.
Only St. Hilda guessed what the mutterings of the sick girl meant, but
she did not heed them, and the professor from New England soon crossed
Mason and Dixon's line for the first time in his life. For the first
time he fell under the spell of the Southern hills--graceful, gracious
big hills, real mountains, densely wooded like thickets to their very
tops--so densely wooded, indeed, that they seemed overspread with a
great shaggy green rug that swept on and on over the folds of the hills
as though billowed up by a mighty wind beneath. And the lights, the mists,
the drifting cloud shadows! Why had Juno not wanted him to see them? And
when he took to horseback and mounted through that billowing rug, through
ferns stirrup-high, with flowers innumerable nodding on either side of
the trail and the air of the first dawn in his nostrils--mounted to the
top of the Big Black, rode for miles along its gently waving summit,
and saw at every turn of the path the majestic supernal beauty of the
mighty green waves that swept on and on before him, in wonder he kept
asking himself:
"Why--why?"
He had not come into contact yet with the humanity in those hills.
The log cabins he had seen from the train--clinging to the hillsides,
nestling in little coves amid apple-trees, or close to the banks of
rushing little creeks--had struck him as most picturesque and charming,
and an occasional old mill, with its big water-wheel, boxed-in, grass-hung
mill-race half hidden by weeping willows, had given him sheer delight;
but now he was meeting the people in the road and could see them close at
hand in doorway and porches of the wretched little houses that he passed.
How mean, meagre, narrow, and poverty-stricken must be their lives!
At one cabin he had to stop for midday dinner, for the word "lunch," he
found, was unknown. A slatternly woman with scraggling black hair, and
with three dirty children clinging to her dirty apron, "reckoned she
mought git him a bite," and disappeared. Flies swarmed over him when
he sat in the porch. The rancid smell of bedding struck his sensitive
nostrils from within. He heard the loud squawking of a chicken cease
suddenly, and his hunger-gnawed stomach almost turned when he suddenly
realized just what it meant. When called within, it was dirt and flies,
flies and dirt, everywhere. He sat in a chair with a smooth-worn cane
bottom so low that his chin was just above the table. The table-cover
was of greasy oilcloth. His tumbler was cloudy, unclean, and the milk was
thin and sour. Thick slices of fat bacon swam in a dish of grease, blood
was perceptible in the joints of the freshly killed, half-cooked chicken,
and the flies swarmed.
As he rode away he began to get a glimmer of light. Perhaps Juno--his
Juno--had once lived like that; perhaps her people did yet.
There was another mountain to climb, and a stranger who was going his
way offered to act as guide. The stranger was a Kentuckian, he said,
from the Bluegrass region, and he was buying timber through the hills.
He volunteered this, but the New England man made no self-revealment.
Instead he burst out:
"_How_ do these people live this way?"
"They have to--they're pretty poor."
"They don't have to keep--dirty."
"They've got used to it, and so would you if your folks had been living
out in this wilderness for a hundred years."
From a yard that they passed, a boy with a vacant face and retreating
forehead dropped his axe to stare at them.
"That's the second one I've seen," said the professor.
"Yes, idiots are not unusual in these mountains--inbreeding!"
"Do they still have moonshining and feuds and all that yet?"
"Plenty of moonshining. The feuds are all over practically,
though I did hear that the big feud over the mountain was
likely to be stirred up again--the old Camp and Adkin feud."
A question came faintly from behind:
"Do you know any of the Camps?"
"Used to know old Red King Camp, the leader. He's in the penitentiary
now for killing a man. What's the matter?" He turned in his saddle,
but the New Englander had recovered himself.
"Nothing--nothing. It seems awful to a Northern man."
The stranger thought he had heard a groan behind him, and he had--King Camp
was the name of the Northern man's father-in-law. Ah, he was beginning to
understand; but why did Juno not want him to come for five years?
"Is--is Red King Camp--how long was his sentence?"
"Let's see--he's been in two years, and I heard he had three years more.
Yes, I remember--he got five years."
Once more the Bluegrass man thought he heard a groan, but the other
was only clearing his throat. The New Englander asked no more questions,
and about two hours by sun they rode over a ridge and down to the bed of
Clover Fork.
"Well, stranger, we part here. You go up to the head of the creek, and
anybody'll tell you where Red King lives. There's plenty of moonshining
up that way, and if anybody asks your name and your business--tell 'em
quick. They won't bother you. And if I were you I wouldn't criticise these
people to _anybody_. They're morbidly sensitive, and you never know when
you are giving mortal offense. And, by the way, most offenses _are_ mortal
in these hills."
"Thank you. Good-by--and thank you."
Everybody knew where old King Camp lived--"Fust house a leetle way down
t'other side o' the mountain from the head of Clover." And nobody asked
him his name or his business. Near dusk he was at the head of Little Clover
and looking down on Happy Valley. The rimming mountains were close overhung
with motionless wet clouds. Above and through them lightning flashed, and
thunder cracked and boomed like encircling artillery around the horizon.
The wind came with the rush of mighty wings, and blackness dropped like
a curtain. By one flash of lightning he saw a great field of corn, by
another a big, comfortable barn, a garden, a trim picket-fence, a yard
full of flowers, and a log house the like of which he had not seen in
the hills--and a new light came--Juno's work! A torrent of rain swept
after him as he stepped upon the porch and knocked on the door. A moment
later he was looking at the kindest and most motherly face and into the
kindest eyes he had ever seen.
"I'm Juno's husband," he said simply. For a moment she blinked up at him
bewilderedly through brass-rimmed spectacles, and then she put her arms
around him and bent back to look up at him again. Then, still without a
word, she led him on tiptoe to an open door and pointed.
"She's in thar." And there she lay--his Juno--thin, white, unconscious,
her beauty spiritualized, glorified. He sat simply looking at her--how
long he did not know--until he felt a gentle touch on his shoulder. It
was Juno's mother beckoning him to supper.
Going out he saw Juno's hand in everything--the hand-woven rag carpet,
the curtains at the windows, the andirons at the log fire--for summer
nights in those hills are always cool--saw it in the kitchen, the
table-cloth, napkins, even though they were in rings, the dishes,
the food, the neatness in everything. He could see the likeness of
Juno to the gentle-voiced old woman who would talk of nothing but her
daughter. In a moment she was calling him "Jim," and few others than
his dead mother had ever called him that. And when at bedtime she said,
"Don't let her die, Jim," he leaned down and kissed her--something her
own sons when grown up had never done.
"No, mother," he said, and the word did not come hard.