“Mr. Summers was for you-all stopping down at Bee Tree for the night. You could ‘a’ put up at Mis’ Casey’s by turning her step-ma out’n her bed. But even then it would have took some studying, for the three of you would have had to bunk together, and that looked to me a leetle like crowding the mourners. So I said to Mis’ McEvoy I’d better haul you right up home and settle you in our spare room.”
“That was very good of you,” said Miss Zillah heartily. “It’s a shame that you had to wait so long for the train. I’m afraid Mrs. McEvoy will have cooked supper for us hours ago, and that she’ll be quite discouraged by this time.”
“No’m, she won’t,” said McEvoy placidly. “She’s been laying in stores for you-all these two or three days past. All I’m to do is to whoop when we hit Rattlesnake Turn, and she’ll put the kettle to b’iling.”
“What,” asked Carin from somewhere down in her throat, “is Rattlesnake Turn, Mr. McEvoy, please?”
“’Tain’t nothin’ but a crook in the road, miss. A few rattlers has been kilt there on and off, and the folks like to keep the name. It makes it sound kind of exciting like, and there ain’t so many things to cause excitement hereabouts. We have to make the most of them we’ve got.” He gave a little chuckle, and Carin drew a sigh of relief.
“I know,” she said under her breath to Miss Zillah, “that I wouldn’t be afraid of lions. At least, not terribly afraid. I’d be willing to go hunting wild beasts if I had a good rifle, but I certainly do hate snakes.”
“Snakes?” murmured Mr. McEvoy pensively. “Snakes don’t like to be rubbed the wrong way. Nuther do folks. Take things easy, I say—snakes included. Go your way and let them go their’n. Of course if they show fight, why, scotch ’em. I seem to understand snakes.”
His musical drawling voice died away languidly, and no one made any reply. But Azalea, who knew the mountain people, smiled a little in the darkness, thinking to herself that Mr. McEvoy’s kind treated their neighbors much as he did his snakes.
All things come to an end, and the mountain ride was no exception to the rule. Tired, rather stiff and very hungry, Miss Zillah and the two girls were helped out on a horse block made of the huge bole of a chestnut tree, and were ushered by “Mis’ Cassie McEvoy,” into the brightness of her mountain cabin. (She was given the benefit of her full name by the neighbors to distinguish her from her sister-in-law who lived “over beyant.”)
Mrs. McEvoy had the table set, the fire blazing on the open hearth, and the kettle simply leaping among the coals.