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Our schoolmaster, composing a form of oath for the new mail-carrier, remarked: "Let me study this thing over; then I can edzact it" a verb so rare and obsolete that we find it in no American dictionary, but only in Murray. A remarkable word, common in the Smokies, is dauncy, defined for me as "mincy about eating," which is to say fastidious, over-nice.
Their dislike of negroes is simply an instinctive racial antipathy, plus a contempt for anyone who submits to servile conditions. A neighbor in the Smokies said to me: "I b'lieve in treatin' niggers squar. The Bible says they're human leastways some says it does and so there'd orter be a place for them. But it's some place else not around me!" That is the whole thing in a nutshell.
"The Blue Ridge!" repeated Bumpus, as if to see just how it sounded. "Say, I've read a lot about the Alleghanies, the Big Smokies, and the Blue Ridge mountains down there in North Carolina, where Bob White came from; but honest now, I never expected to find myself there, at least not till I grew up. The Blue Ridge!
The broad and undulating valley fifty miles across was backed by another mountain wall which towered opposite to that from whose battlements we were gazing, not a long and level ridge like so many of those in the Alleghanies, but a picturesque Alpine mountain scene, with peaks snow-clad and dazzling in the sunlight, the Great Smokies, the noblest of all the mountain groups of the Appalachian chain.
Heavy dews remain on the bushes until about the same hour. The winters are short. What Northerners would call cold weather is not expected until Christmas, and generally it is gone by the end of February. Tornadoes are unknown here, but sometimes a hurricane will sweep the upper ranges. On April 19, 1900, a blizzard from the northwest struck the Smokies. In twenty minutes everything was frozen.
But as they drove slowly on over the submerged range of the Great Smokies, and across the valleys of Eastern Tennessee, and then over the Cumberland range, and so out above the lowlands, they could not keep their thoughts from turning to what lay beneath that fearful ocean. And occasionally something floated to the surface that wrenched their heart- strings and caused them to avert their faces.
The last we had known of the drivers was that they had been beyond Thunderhead, six miles of hard travel to the westward. There was fog on the mountain. We did some uneasy speculating. Then Granville and Matt took the lantern and set out for Briar Knob. "Doc" was too stiff for travel, and I, being at that time a stranger in the Smokies, would be of no use hunting amid clouds and darkness.
The bears were in full possession of the property, and we could get no information in the settlements, as the settlers do not travel this line. They did not know the names of the peaks other than as tops of the Great Smokies knew nothing of the character of the country except that it was rough.
Once, as an experiment, I took a backwoodsman from the Smokies to Knoxville, and put him up at a good hotel. Was he self-conscious, bashful? Not a bit of it. When the waiter brought him a juicy tenderloin, he snapped: "I don't eat my meat raw!" It was hard to find anything on the long menu that he would eat.
Elsewhere, elsewhere, elsewhere, beyond the sky-line, under larger stars, where men ride jesting and women smile. Names alluring to the American he repeated Shenandoah, Santa Ynez, the Little Big Horn, Baton Rouge, the Great Smokies, Rappahannock, Arizona, Cheyenne, Monongahela, Androscoggin; cañon and bayou; sycamore and mesquite; Broadway and El Camino Real.... He hurled along into Plato.