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"I won't tell you how unless you'll help me; and if you will, I'll pay you more money than you can make in this business in a thousand years." The moonshiner's eyes gleamed. "Bill Davis is sure after us an' that thar' means trouble every time," he said slowly. "Ye heard him say as how he'd see me agin, an' I never knowed him ter miss befo'." He looked at the bullet mark on the tree again.
He shivered in his thin little white linen dress, meant for indoor wear only, with its smart red leather belt clasped low and loose about it, and the hardship of cold and hunger tamed him. He was glad to nestle close to the pasty-faced Holvey, who had not yet recovered the normal glow of complexion, and to stick his yellow head under the moonshiner's arm for warmth while he steered the craft.
With corn selling at seventy-five cents to a dollar a bushel, as it did in our settlement, and taking into account that the average sales of a little moonshiner's still probably did not exceed a gallon a day, and that a bootlegger must be rewarded liberally for marketing the stuff, it will be seen that there was no fortune in this mysterious trade, before prohibition raised the price.
The scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners' fall under the spell of "The Blight's" charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of the mountaineers.
Since, in Joralemon and Plato, he had been brought up on melodrama, he believed as much as did the audience in the plays. It was a real mountain cabin from which he fired wonderfully loud guns in "The Moonshiner's Daughter"; and when the old mountaineer cried, "They ain't going to steal mah gal!"
Little things, atoms of suggestion, were separating themselves from the mass of things disregarded to cluster thickly on this nucleus of revealment: the old story of his companying with Nan on the mountain; his uncle's and Japheth's accusation at the time; and now the old moonshiner's enmity, Japheth's meaning look and distrustful silence, Nan's appearance with a child bearing his own name, the glances askance in Hargis's store when he was buying the little stock of necessaries for the poor outcast.
Indeed, as he who really had caused the uproar was, now, well on a cautious backward way along the path by which he had come up, and the girl and Layson were the only folk in sight, the young moonshiner's mistake was natural. Madge, almost as much disturbed as Lorey was by the crashing in the thickets, was looking in the direction whence the noise had come, and, at first, did not see him.
Fannie gave Shotwell the place beside her, and so on. Even Johanna, by taking a child in her lap, got a seat. But Ravenel and Colonel Proudfit had to stand up beside Fannie and Barbara. Thus it fell out that when everyone laughed at a moonshiner's upsetting on a pile of loose telegraph poles, Ravenel, looking out from over the swarm of heads, saw something which moved him to pull the bell-cord.
His voice thrilled with the intensity of his emotion, and, suddenly, he caught his rifle up, again, into his crooked elbow, where it rested ready for quick usage. "If you plans to warn him " he began. "Warn him!" said the older man, with a bitterness, real or counterfeited, whichever it might be, as fierce as that which rang in the young moonshiner's own voice, "I hate him as much as you.
The boys saw him enter the cave and look sharply around, then he disappeared as suddenly and completely as if he had walked into the solid rock. "We're getting all the stage effects!" Frank whispered. "That man ducked into a moonshiner's establishment!" "He ducked in somewhere, all right," Ned answered. "I wish we could get across there without exhibiting ourselves to the whole country."
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