"Nuthin' crazy thar 'ceptin' you-uns!—one fool gal—that's all!" said her grandmother, with her knitting-needles and her spectacles glittering in the fire-light. "That is a pest camp. Ye mought hev cotch the smallpox. I be lookin' fur ye ter break out with it any day. When the war is over an' the men come back to the Cove, none of 'em will so much as look at ye, with yer skin all pock-marked—fair an' fine as it is now, like a pan of fraish milk."
"But, granny, it won't be sp'ilt! The camp war too fur off—an' thar warn't a breath o' wind. I never went a-nigh 'em."
"I dun'no' how fur smallpox kin travel—an' it jes' mulls and mulls in ye afore it breaks out—don't it, S'briny?"
"Don't ax me," said Mrs. Brusie, with a worried air. "I ain't no yerb doctor, nor nurse tender, nuther. Ethelindy is beyond my understandin'."
She was beyond her own understanding, as she sat weeping slowly, silently. The aspect of those forlorn graves, that recorded the final ebbing of hope and life at the pest camp, had struck her recollection with a most poignant appeal. Strangers, wretches, dying alone, desolate outcasts, the terror of their kind, the epitome of repulsion—they were naught to her! Yet they represented humanity in its helplessness, its suffering, its isolated woe, and its great and final mystery; she felt vaguely grieved for their sake, and she gave the clay that covered them, still crude red clods with not yet a blade of grass, the fellowship of her tears.
A thrill of masculine logic stirred uneasily in the old man's disused brain. "Tell me one thing, Ethelindy," he said, lifting his bleared eyes as he clasped his tremulous hands more firmly on the head of his stick—"tell me this—which side air you-uns on, ennyhow, Ethelindy?"
"I'm fur the Union," said Ethelinda, still weeping, and now and then wiping her sapphire eyes with the back of her hand, hard and tanned, but small in proportion to her size. "I'm fur the Union—fust an' last an' all the time."
The old man wagged his head solemnly with a blight of forecast on his wrinkled, aged face. "That thar sayin' is goin' ter be mighty hard ter live up to whilst Jerome Ackert's critter company is a-raidin' of Tanglefoot Cove."
The presence of the "critter company" was indeed calculated to inspire a most obsequious awe. It was an expression of arbitrary power which one might ardently wish directed elsewhere. From the moment that the echoes of the Cove caught the first elusive strain of the trumpet, infinitely sweet and clear and compelling, yet somehow ethereal, unreal, as if blown down from the daylight moon, a filmy lunar semblance in the bland blue sky, the denizens of Tanglefoot began to tremulously confer together, and to skitter like frightened rabbits from house to house. Tanglefoot Cove is some four miles long, and its average breadth is little more than a mile. On all sides the great Smoky Mountains rise about the cuplike hollow, and their dense gigantic growths of hickory and poplar, maple and gum, were aglow, red and golden, with the largesse of the generous October. The underbrush or the jungles of laurel that covered the steeps rendered outlet through the forests impracticable, and indeed the only road was invisible save for a vague line among the dense pines of a precipitous slope, where on approach it would materialize under one's feet as a wheel track on either side of a line of frosted weeds, which the infrequent passing of wagon-beds had bent and stunted, yet had not sufficed to break.
The blacksmith's shop, the centre of the primitive civilization, had soon an expectant group in its widely flaring doors, for the smith had had enough of the war, and had come back to wistfully, hopelessly haunt his anvil like some uneasy ghost visiting familiar scenes in which he no more bears a part;—a minié-ball had shattered his stanch hammer-arm, and his duties were now merely advisory to a clumsy apprentice. This was a half-witted fellow, a giant in strength, but not to be trusted with firearms. In these days of makeweights his utility had been discovered, and now with the smith's hammer in his hand he joined the group, his bulging eyes all a-stare and his loose lips hanging apart. The old justice of the peace, whose office was a sinecure, since the war had run the law out of the Cove, came with a punctilious step, though with a sense of futility and abated dignity, and at every successive note of the distant trumpet these wights experienced a tense bracing of the nerves to await helplessly the inevitable and, alas! the inexorable.