Judith of the Cumberlands. MacGowan Alice
did not confine her practice to what she would have called humans, but doctored a horse or a cow with equal success. One cold spring a little chicken had its feet frozen in the wet barnyard so badly that it lost one of them, and Nancy, who had taken the poor mite into the house and nursed it till she loved it, constructed for it a wooden leg consisting of a small, light peg strapped to the stump. And thereafter Nicodemus, a rooster who must now belie the name since he could not cling to a perch with his single foot, became an institution in the Card household.
Jephthah Turrentine was a natural bone-setter, and was sent for far and near to reduce a dislocation or bandage a broken limb. In the pursuit of this which came to be almost a profession, he acquired a good knowledge of tending upon the sick, and the bitterness of rival practitioners was added to the score between him and Nancy. The case of Nicodemus furnished the man with a chance to call the woman a chicken doctor, and the name appealing to the humorous side of mountain character stuck to her, greatly to her disgust.
Aunt Nancy’s dooryard was famous for its flowers, being a riot of pied bloom from March till December. Even now fire-in-the-bush and bridal wreath made gay the borders.
“Good land, Jude Barrier!” called Nancy herself. “You’re as wet as a drownded rat. ’Light and come in.”
Old Turrentine permitted his niece to clamber from Selim, and secure him and both mules.
“Whar’s the boys?” he inquired in a great, sonorous bass, the deep, true-pitched voice promised by the contours of strong bony arches under heavy brows and the strong nose-bridge.
“In jail,” responded Judith laconically, turning to enter the gate. Then, as she walked up the hard-trodden clay path between the tossing, dripping heads of daffodils, “Uncle Jep, did you know Creed Bonbright’s daddy?”
“In jail!” echoed Nancy Card, making a pretence of trying to suppress a titter, and thereby rendering it more offensive. “Ain’t they beginnin’ ruther young?”
Tall old Jephthah got to his feet, knocked the ashes from his pipe and put it in his pocket.
“Who tuck ’em?” he inquired briefly, but with a fierce undernote in his tones. “What was they tuck fer?”
“I never noticed,” said Judith, standing on the step before them, wringing the wet from her black calico riding skirt. “Nobody named it to me what they was tuck fer. I was talkin’ to Creed Bonbright, and he ’lowed to find out. He said that was his business.”
“Creed Bonbright,” echoed her uncle; “what’s he got to do with it? He’s been livin’ down in Hepzibah studyin’ to be a lawyer—did he have Jeff and Andy jailed?”
Judith shook her head. “He didn’t have nothing to do with it,” she answered. “He ’lowed they would be held for witnesses against some men Haley had arrested. But he’s goin’ to come back and live on Turkey Track,” she added, as though that were the only thing of importance in the world. “He says we-all need law in the mountings, and he’s a-goin’ to bring it to us.”
“Well, he’d better let my boys alone if he don’t want trouble,” growled old Jephthah but half appeased.
“I reckon a little touch of law now an’ agin won’t hurt yo’ boys,” put in Nancy Card smoothly. “My chaps always tuck to law like a duck to water. I reckon I ain’t got the right sympathy fer them that has lawless young ’uns.”
“Yo’ Pony was arrested afore Andy and Jeff,” Judith remarked suddenly, without any apparent malice. “He was the first one I seen comin’ down the road, and Dan Haley behind him a-shootin’ at him.”
Jephthah Turrentine forebore to laugh. But he deliberately drew out his old pipe again, filled it and stepped inside for a coal with which to light it.
“Mebbe yo’ sympathies will be more tenderer for me in my afflictions of lawless sons after this, Nancy,” he called derisively over his shoulder.
“Hit’s bound to be a mistake ’bout Pony,” declared the little old woman in a bewildered tone. “Pone ain’t but risin’ sixteen, and he’s the peacefullest child——”
“Jest what I would have said about my twin lambs,” interrupted old Jephthah with twinkling eye, as he appeared in the doorway drawing mightily upon the newly lighted pipe, tossing his great beard from side to side of his mighty chest. “My chaps is all as peaceful as kittens; but some old woman gits to talkin’ and gives ’em a bad name, and it goes from lip to lip that the Turrentine boys is lawless. Hit’s a sad thing when a woman’s tongue is too long and limber, and hung in the middle so it works at both ends; the reppytations hit can destroy is a sight.”
“But a body’s own child—they’ son! They’ bound to stan’ up for him, whether he’s in the right or the wrong,” maintained Nancy stoutly.
“Huh,” grunted Jephthah, “offspring is cur’ous. Sometimes hit ’pears like you air kin to them, and they ain’t kin to you. That Pony boy of your’n is son to a full mealsack; he’s plumb filial and devoted thataway to a dollar, if so be he thinks you’ve got one in yo’ pocket. The facts in the business air, Nancy, that you’ve done sp’iled him tell he’s plumb rotten, and a few of the jailings that you so kindly ricommend for my pair won’t do him no harm.”
Nancy tossed up her head to reply; but at the moment a small boy, followed by a smaller girl, coming around the corner of the house, created a diversion. The girl, a little dancing imp with a frazzle of flying red hair and red-brown eyes, catching sight of Judith ran to her and flung herself head foremost in the visitor’s lap, where Judith cooed over her and cuddled her, rumpling the bright hair, rubbing her crimson cheek against the child’s peachy bloom.
“Little Buck and Beezy,” said Nancy Card, addressing them both, “Yo’ unc’ Pony’s in jail. What you-all goin’ to do about it?”
The small brown man of six stopped, his feet planted wide on the sward, his freckled face grave and stern as became his sex.
“Ef the boys goes down for to git him out, I’m goin’ along,” Little Buck announced seriously. “Is they goin’, granny?”
“I’ll set my old rooster on the jail man, an’ hit’ll claw ’im,” announced Beezy, reckless of distance and likelihood. “My old rooster can claw dest awful, ef he ain’t got but one leg.”
Nancy chuckled. These grandchildren were the delight of her heart.
The rain had ceased for the moment; the old man moved to the porch edge, sighting at the sky.
“I don’t know whar Blatch is a-keepin’ hisself,” he observed. “Mebbe I better be a-steppin’.”
But even as he spoke a tall young mountaineer swung into view down the road, dripping from the recent rain, and with that resentful air the best of us get from aggressions of the weather. Blatchley Turrentine, old Jephthah’s nephew, was as brown as an Indian, and his narrow, glinting, steel-grey eyes looked out oddly cold and alien from under level black brows, and a fell of stiff black hair.
When the orphaned Judith, living in her Uncle Jephthah’s family, was fourteen, the household had removed from the old Turrentine place—which was rented to Blatchley Turrentine—to her better farm, whose tenant had proved unsatisfactory. Well hidden in a gulch on the Turrentine acres there was an illicit still, what the mountain people call a blockade still; and it had been in pretty constant operation in earlier years. When Jephthah abandoned those stony fields for Judith’s more productive acres, he definitely turned his own back upon this feature, but Blatch Turrentine revived the illegal activities and enlisted the old man’s boys in them. Jeff and Andy had a tobacco patch in one corner where the ground suited, and in another field Jim Cal raised a little corn. Aside from these small ventures, the place was given over entirely to the secret still. The father held scornfully aloof; his attitude was characteristic.
“Ef I pay no tax I’ll make no whiskey,”