The mistress of the house went about with a strange look on her face. She listened to all that was said to her, but she seemed not really to hear.
“Your ma hadn’t ought to be seeing all these folks and going through this experience,” Thomas McBirney said to his boy Jim. “It’s getting on her mind.”
“It’s that there girl,” Jim whispered. “I heard her asking her if she didn’t want to live here with us.”
“Sho!” said pa. “That’s how the land lays! And what did the little girl say?”
“We might go for some fresh water to the spring,” said Jim, “and then we can talk.”
So these two good friends set off together, and Jim told his father all that he had heard his mother and Azalea say to each other.
“There’s a good deal of whiskey being passed around on the quiet among them show folks,” said pa. “It ain’t only the men that’s taking it neither. I hold with your ma that we’ve got a call to see to that girl. What if our Molly had been left like that and she’d fallen to the care of them that was evil in their ways, and been let go to destruction by Christians that might have saved her and wouldn’t on account of blind self-seeking?”
On their way back from the spring they saw old Elder Mills coming along on his tall mule. Some one had summoned him to preach the funeral sermon. Jim knew just how he would do, shouting out in his wild singsong till the mountains echoed, and filling the people with fear. He looked like a giant as he rode toward them, his thick, curling iron-gray hair standing out all over his head and his dark eyes burning like fires in their deep sockets.
“Look a-here, Elder,” Pa McBirney said; “before we get up where the folks is, I’ve a request to make of you. You size up them there show people. You’ve had experience and you know the good from the bad.”
“Judge not that ye be not judged!” roared the elder. “It is the Lord’s business to divide the sheep from the goats.”