The cabin was still. Only the broken sobbing of the woman in the little
shed-room came faint and low on old Nance's ears.
She slipped from the kitchen into the shadows of a tree near the house
and listened until the sobbing ceased.
She crept close to the shed and stood silent and ghost-like beside its
daubed walls. Immovable as a cat crouching in the hedge to spring on her
prey, she waited until the waning moon had sunk behind the crags. She
laid her ear close to a crack in the logs from which she had once pushed
the red mud to let in the light. All was still at last. The sobbing had
stopped. The young wife was sound asleep.
She had wondered vaguely at first about the crying, but quickly made
up her mind that it was only a lover's quarrel. She was glad of it. The
girl would bar her door and sulk all night. So much the better. There
would be no danger of her entering the living-room where Jim slept.
She would wait a little longer to make sure she was asleep. A half hour
passed. The white-shrouded figure stood immovable, her keen ears tuned
for the slightest sounds from within.
The stars were shining in unusual brilliance. She could see her way
through the shadows even better than in full moon. A wolf was crying
again for his mate from a distant crag. She had grown used to his howls.
He had come close to her cabin once in the day-time. She had tried to
creep on him and show her friendliness. But he had fled in terror at the
first glimpse of her dress through the parting underbrush.
An owl was calling from his dead tree-top down the valley. She smiled at
his familiar, tremulous call. Her own eyes were wide as his tonight.
No sight or sound of Nature among the crags about her cabin had for her
spirit any terror. The night was her mantle.
She added to the meager living which she had wrung from her mountain
farm by trading with the illicit distillers of the backwoods of Yancey
County. Too ignorant to run a distillery of her own, she had stored
their goods with such skill that the hiding-place had never been
discovered. She loved good whiskey herself. She had tried to find in its
fiery depths the dreams of happiness life had so cruelly denied her.
The hiding-place of this whiskey had puzzled the revenue officers of
every administration for years. They had watched her house day and
night. Not one of them had ever struck the trail to her storehouse.
The game had excited her imagination. She loved its daring and
danger. That there was the slightest element of wrong or crime in her
association with the moonshiners of her native heath had never for a
moment entered her mind. It was no crime to make whiskey. This was the
first article of the creed of the true North Carolina mountaineer.
They had from the first declared that the tax levied by the Federal
Government on the product of their industry was an infamous act of
tyranny. They had fought this tyranny for two generations. They would
fight it as long as there was breath in their bodies and a single load
of powder and buckshot for their rifles.
Nance considered herself a heroine in the pride of her soul for the
shrewd and successful defiance she had given the revenue officers for so
many years.
She had been too cunning to even allow one of her own people to know the
secret of her store house. For that reason it had never been discovered.
She always stored the whiskey temporarily in the potato shed or under
the cabin floor until night and then alone carried it to the place she
had discovered.
She laughed softly at the thought of this deep hiding-place tonight.
Its temperature never varied winter or summer. Not a track had ever been
left at its door. She might live a hundred years and, unless some spying
eye should see her enter, its existence could never be suspected.
She tipped softly into the kitchen, walked to the door of the
living-room and listened to the even, heavy breathing of the man on the
couch.
Once more the faint echo of a sob in the shed beyond came to her keen
ears. She stood for five minutes. It was not repeated. She had only
imagined it. The girl was still asleep.
She turned noiselessly back into the kitchen, put a box of matches in
her pocket, felt her way to the low shelf on which she had placed the
battered lantern, picked it up and shook it to make sure the oil was
sufficient.
She stepped lightly into the yard, pushed open the gate of the
split-board garden fence, walked along the edge to the corner and
selected a spade from the tools that leaned against the boards.
Carrying the spade and unlighted lantern in her left hand, she glided
from the yard into the woods. Her right hand before her to feel for
underbrush or overhanging bough, she made her way rapidly to the
swift-flowing mountain brook.
Arrived at the water whose musical ripple had guided her steps, she
removed her shoes and placed them beside a tree. She wore no stockings.
The faded skirt she raised and tucked into her belt. She could wade knee
deep now without hindrance.
Seizing the spade and lantern, she made her way slowly and carefully
downstream for three hundred yards and paused beside a shelving ledge
which projected half-way across the brook.
She paused and listened again for full ten minutes, immovable as the
rock on which her thin, bony hand rested. The stars were looking, but
they could only peep through the network of overhanging trees.
Feeling her way along the rock until the ledge rose beyond her reach,
she bent low and waded through a still pool of eddying water straight
under the mountain-side for more than a hundred feet. Her extended right
hand had felt for the stone ceiling above her head until it ran abruptly
out of reach.
She straightened her body and took a deep breath. Ten steps she counted
carefully and placed her bare feet on the dry rock beyond the water.
Carefully picking her way up the sloping bank until she reached a
stretch of soft earth, she sank to her hands and knees and crawled
through an opening less than three feet in height.
“Thar now!” she laughed. “Let 'em find me if they can!”
She lighted her lantern and seated herself on a boulder to rest--one
hundred and fifty feet in the depths of a mountain. The cavern was ten
feet in height and fifty feet in length. The projecting ledges of rock
made innumerable shelves on which a merchant might have displayed his
wares.
The old woman was too shrewd for that. Her jugs were carefully planted
in the ground behind two fallen boulders, and their hiding-place
concealed by a layer of drift which she had gathered from the edge
of the water. She had taken this precaution against the day when some
curious explorer might stumble on her secret as she had found it hunting
ginsing roots in the woods overhead. Her foot had slipped suddenly
through a hole in the soft mould. She peered cautiously below and could
see no bottom. She dropped a stone and heard it strike in the depths.
She made her way down the side of the crag and found the opening through
the still eddying waters. The hole through the roof she had long ago
plugged and covered with earth and dry leaves.
She carried her lantern and spade to the further end of her storehouse
and dug a hole in the earth about two feet in depth. The earth she
carefully placed in a heap.
“That's the place!” she giggled excitedly.
She left her lantern burning, dropped again on the soft, mould-covered
earth and quickly emerged on the stone banks of the wide, still pool.
Her hand high extended above her head, she waded through the water until
she touched the heavy ceiling, lowered her body again to a stooping
position and rapidly made her way out into the bed of the brook.
She passed eagerly along the babbling path and stopped with sure
instinct at the tree beside whose trunk she had placed her shoes.
In five minutes she had made her way through the woods and reached
the house. She tipped into the kitchen and stood in the doorway or the
living-room watching her sleeping guest. The even breathing assured her
that all was well. Her plan couldn't fail. She listened again for the
sobs in the shed-room.
She was sure once that she heard them. Five minutes passed and still she
was uncertain. To avoid any possible accident she tipped back through
the kitchen, circled the house and placed her ear against the crack in
the logs.
The girl was sobbing--or was she praying? She crouched beside the wall,
waited and listened. The night wind stirred the dead leaves at her feet.
She lifted her head with a sudden start, laughed softly and bent again
to listen.