“I don’t see how it hurts the boys for us to have a dance,” rejoined Judith with asperity. “If we was all to set and cry our eyes out, it wouldn’t fetch ’em back on the mountain any quicker.” Then with a teasing flash, “I’ll tell ’em when they git home what you said, though.”
“Now, Jude, you’re real mean,” pleaded Cliantha Lusk sinking to her knees beside Judith and raising thin little arms to clasp that young woman around the waist. “You ain’t a-goin’ to tell them fool boys any sech truck as that, air ye? Pendrilly jest said it for a sayin’. We’d love to come to yo’ play-party, whenever it is. I say Andy and Jeff! Let ’em git out of the jail the way they got in.”
This is the approved attitude of the mountain virgin; yet Cliantha’s voice shook sadly as she uttered the independent sentiments, and Pendrilla furtively wiped her eyes in promising to attend the play-party.
All this was in April. By the time May came in, that dread of a belated frost which amounts almost to terror in the farmer of the Cumberlands was ended; the Easter cold and blackberry winter were over, and all the garden truck was planted. Everybody began whole-heartedly to enjoy the time of year. The leaves were full size, but still soft; the wind made hardly any noise among them. In the pasture lot and fence corners near the house, meadow flowers began to star the green. The frog chorus, so loud and jubilant in early spring, had subsided now except at night, when their treble was accompanied by the bass “chug-chug” of the bull-frogs. The mornings were vocal with the notes of yellow hammer, cuckoos; the cooing of doves, the squawk of the jay, and the drum of the big red-headed woodpecker sounded through the summer woods; while always in the cool of the day came the thrush’s song. The early corn was in by mid April. About the first full moon of May the main crop was planted.
Early in June Judith, walking in the wood, brought home the splendid red wood lily, and a cluster too of “ratsbane,” with its flowers like a little crown of white wax.
The spring restlessness was over throughout all the wild country; life no longer stirred and rustled; the leaves hung still in the long sunny noons. The air was clear, rinsed with frequent showers; the woods were silent except for birds and cow bells. The crops were laid by. The huckleberries ripened; the “sarvices” hung thick in the forest. Even the blackberries were beginning to turn and Andy and Jeff had been back at home more than a week, when Judith finally succeeded in getting her forces together and her guests promised. Many of them would have to walk four or five miles to sing and play for a few hours, tramping back at midnight to lie down and catch what sleep they could before dawn waked them to another day of toil. Thursday evening was set for the event. On Wednesday the Lusk girls coming in to discuss, found Judith with shining eyes and crimson cheeks, attacking the simple housework of the cabin.
“I wish’t you’d sing while I finish my churnin’,” the girl said, “I’m so flustered looks like I can’t sca’cely do anything right.”
The sisters clasped hands and raised their childish faces. Cliantha had a thin, high piping soprano like a small flute, and Pendrilla sang “counter” to it. They were repositories of all the old ballads of the mountains—ballads from Scotland, from Ireland, from England, and from Wales, that set the ferocities and the love-making of Elizabeth’s time or earlier most quaintly amidst the localities and nomenclature of the Cumberlands.
“Sing ‘Barb’ry Allen,’” commanded Judith as she swung the dasher with nervous energy.
The July sunshine filtered through the leaves of the big muscadine vine that covered and sheltered the tiny side porch. Bees boomed about the ragged tufts of clover and Bouncing Bet that fringed the side yard. The old hound at the chip pile blinked lazily and raised his head, then dropped it and slumbered again. Within, the big room was dim and cool. The high, thin, quavering voices celebrated the love and woe of cruel Barbara Allen. Judith’s dark eyes grew soft and brooding; the nervous strokes of her dasher measured themselves more and more to the swing of the old tune.