April was in the mountains. All the vast timbered slopes and tablelands of the Cumberlands were one golden dapple, as yet differentiated by darker greens and heavier shadows only where some group of pine or cedar stood. April in the Cumberlands is the May or early June of New England. Here March has the days of shine and shower; while to February belongs the gusty turbulence usually attributed to March. Now sounded the calls of the first whippoorwills in the dusk of evening; now the first mocking-bird sang long before day, very sweetly and softly, and again before moonrise; hours of sun he filled with bolder rejoicings, condescending in his more antic humour to mimic the hens that began to cackle around the barn. Every thicket by the water-courses blushed with azaleas; all the banks were gay with wild violets.
Throughout March’s changeful emotional season, night after night in those restless vehement impassioned airs, the cedar tree talked ardently to Judith. Through April’s softer nights she wakened often to listen to it. It went fondly over its first assurances. And the time of Creed Bonbright’s advent was near at hand now. Thought of it made light her step as she went about her work.
“Don’t you never marry a lazy man, Jude.”
The wife of Jim Cal Turrentine halted on the doorstep, a coarse white cup containing the coffee she had come to borrow poised in her hand as she turned to harangue the girl in the kitchen.
“I ain’t aimin’ to wed no man. Huh, I say marry! I’m not studyin’ about marryin’,” promptly responded Judith in the mountain girl’s unfailing formula; but she coloured high, and bent, pot-hooks in hand, to the great hearth to shift the clumsy Dutch oven that contained her bread.
“That’s what gals allers says,” commented Iley Turrentine discontentedly. “Huldy’s forever singin’ that tune. But let a good-lookin’ feller come in reach and I ’low any of you will change the note. Huldy’s took her foot in her hand and put out—left me with the whole wash to do, and Jim Cal in the bed declarin’ he’s got a misery in his back. Don’t you never wed a lazy man.”
“Whar’s Huldy gone?” inquired Judith, sauntering to the door and looking out on the glad beauty of the April morning with fond brooding eyes. The grotesque bow-legged pot-hooks dangled idly in her fingers.
“Over to Nancy Cyard’s to git her littlest spinnin’ wheel—so she said. I took notice that she had a need for that wheel as soon as ever she hearn tell that Creed Bonbright was up from Hepzibah stayin’ at the Cyards’s.”
Had not Iley been so engrossed with her own grievances, the sudden heat of the look Judith turned upon her must have enlightened her.
“Huldy knowed him right well when she was waitin’ on table at Miz. Huffaker’s boarding-house down at Hepzibah,” the woman went on. “I ain’t got no use for these here fellers that’s around tendin’ to the whole world’s business—they’ own chil’en is mighty apt to go hongry. But thar, what does a gal think of that by the side o’ curly hair and soft-spoken ways?”