The girl sat up in bed and looked straight into Ma McBirney’s eyes.
“They’d never let me!” she cried.
“Now maybe they would, dear. Would you like it?”
“Oh!” sighed the girl; “Oh, ma’am!”
“What was that name I heard them calling you?”
“Zalie, ma’am. My name is Azalea.”
CHAPTER II
NEW FRIENDS
How does news spread on the mountain side? Who carried the word to the little lonely cabins on the wide sides of old Tennyson mountain that there were “things going on” at the McBirney’s? Did the buzzards wing the message—or the bald-headed eagle that kept eyrie in the blasted Norway pine above the ginseng lot? Or the martins that made their home in the dried gourds that had been swung for them on the high crosstrees before the McBirney’s door?
However that may be, by noon the people began to arrive. Some of them rode their mules or horses; some drove in their carts or wagons; but the greater number came on foot, slipping along the steep paths on the pine needles, or leaping among the rocks, sure of foot, long of limb, and caring nothing for distance.
They were quiet folk with soft voices and with their hearts in the right place. So, though they wanted as much as if they had been children, to see the merry-go-round and all the rest of the show, they would not so much as hint at it because of the dead woman who lay all clean and decent on the ironing board laid across two sawhorses, there in the open room between the bedroom and the kitchen, in Mary McBirney’s house. Over her a fresh sheet fell. On her bosom lay branches of wild azalea, for her name, too, had been Azalea.