“It’s all right, honey bird, all right,” cried a voice near them. “That there sarpent can’t do you no manner of harm now. You jest sit still a minute or two and get over your scare, and then I’ll escort you back to your folks.”
Carin and Azalea both turned and looked into the eyes of a wonderful old man—looked into eyes, large, dark, and soft, half hidden beneath bushy eyebrows, and set beneath a beetling brow. His hair was iron-gray, curling and thick, and it stood up on his head in such a way as to make him look two or three inches taller than he really was, and that was quite unnecessary, for he stood, as he was quick to declare, six feet and four inches in his stocking feet. He was very thin, and when he walked he seemed on the point of falling to pieces, because he had what is known as double joints, so that his arms and legs swung about in almost any way he wished to have them, and his head turned about with wonderful ease on his long neck.
He stooped now and it was an amazing thing to see him do it—and picked up a fiddle which he had laid against the trunk of a tree.
“It certainly was a mighty convenient thing, having that gun along,” he said. “Old brother sarpent, he never would have waited for me to get after him with a stick. A bullet was the only thing that could put him out of business, and I wa’n’t sure I could hit him at that distance—couldn’t have, I reckon, if the case hadn’t been so pressing.”
Carin got up and ran toward him with her hands outstretched.
“Thank you! Thank you, sir!” she said, in that pretty eager way of hers. “I know what you’ve done for me, and I must take you to see my papa and mamma. Why, it was wonderful! I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”
“Steady on, steady on,” said the man. “Knocking the head off a tarnation rascal like that is no new business with me. Glad, though, to have served you, little miss.”
He bowed low, and the girls watched him, fascinated.
“I didn’t hear you playing this morning, sir,” went on Carin. “Weren’t you in at the Singing? I should think they’d love to have you play.”
“My innings are coming, Miss Honey Bird,” replied the man smiling. “There ain’t been a singing at Friendly Church for thirty years that hain’t had old Haystack Thompson there, a fiddling. But I was late getting here to-day. I’ve been farming it away up on Rabbit Nose Mountain, and I had to hoof it down here. I started early enough, but I got lazy like and laid down and dozed off. When I woke, the sun was high overhead and I just piked along, but even then I found myself late.”