She was quiet and shy, but she wanted her visitors to feel at home and she told them so in a voice even softer and slower than her husband’s. She led them into the second room in the cabin—there were only two—and here, sure enough, was the “company room,” with its two beds heaped high with feather ticks and covered with hand-woven counterpanes. The walls were decorated with large framed patent medicine advertisements, very strong in color, and quite entertaining in subject. One showed St. George slaying the dragon, the legend below advertising some oil that was warranted to cure man of almost all his pains and aches. Another pictured a knight in coat of mail, mounted on a charger, rushing at the fell castle of Disease, his lance in rest. There were many others, and in a moment or two Azalea discovered that these went with the rows of bottles—three deep—upon the mantel shelf. Tall and dark, squat and ruddy, all much labeled and sampled, they stood there to bear witness to the chief interest of Mis’ Cassie McEvoy’s life.
“She didn’t look sickly to me,” said Miss Zillah anxiously. “At least no more so than the mountain women usually do.”
But Mis’ McEvoy did not long leave Miss Zillah in ignorance of her complaint.
“Anybody’d think,” she said while she busied herself setting her supper before them, “that I was trying to p’isen ’em, to look at them medicine bottles in thar. I said to Miles it was a pity I didn’t have no other place to put ’em—”
“And I told her,” broke in her husband, “that a chimney shelf was whar folks set out the most costly stuff they had, and by that I reckoned them medicine bottles was whar they belonged.”
“I’ve been ailing,” said Mis’ McEvoy, looking straight past her husband at Miss Pace, “for nigh on fifteen years. Nobody,” she said proudly, “can make out what it is that does ail me. Some says it’s this and some says it’s that. Some says take this and some says take that.”
“And she heeds ’em,” said McEvoy, with a sound in his throat between a laugh and a groan. “So if you’ve got anything that’s good for what ails her, Miss Pace, ma’am, if you’d be so kind as to mention the name of it I would get it the next time I’m down to the town.”
“Them pictures you see on the wall in the company room,” went on Mis’ McEvoy, “come with the medicine.”
“They do so,” said her husband, passing the chicken to Carin.
Carin and Azalea were just tired enough to feel silly. Each girl knew if she but caught the eye of the other, she would be off in a fit of laughter, and this was no time for them to disgrace themselves when they had come up as bearers of learning and manners, so to speak. So they looked anywhere except at each other, and only Miss Zillah noticed that they were choking over their food as they strangled their giggles.