“Take keer, I say!” she repeated, and shook him impatiently. “I tell ye I heerd him come in at the lower gate. He’ll be here direckly. Git shet of that fiddle, boy!”
She bent on him a pair of deep-set hazel eyes, sharp as those of some wild creature. Her voice had in it a half-masculine dominance. Every movement of her stooped and broken body bespoke a creature full of resolution, fearless, fierce.
“Gawd knows why he’s back so soon,” she went on, “but he’s here. Give him time to turn old Molly loose and git a few years of corn, an’ he’ll be right in. Onct he hears that fiddle he’ll raise trouble, that’s what he’ll do. I reckon I know a preacher, an’ most of all yore daddy. For him thar hain’t nothin’ sinfuller’n a fiddle; he’s pizen on ’em—all preachers is—him wust of all. What does he know about music? Now, if he was French an’ Irish, like me, it mought be different. But then——”
“I kain’t hep it, Granny,” said the young man, still slowly, still unchanged, his fingers still trailing across the strings. “‘Barbara Allen’—do ye call that wicked, even on a Sunday? Besides, this is the fust time I’ve ever strung this fiddle up full. I couldn’t git the strings till jest now. Melissa says——”
“Never mind what Meliss’ says neither—she’s a triflin’ sort, even if she is yore own wife. For all that, ye’d orter be home this minute, like enough.”
“As if ye understood!” said the young man, sighing now and dropping the instrument to his knee. For the first time a shade of sadness crossed his face, giving to his features a certain sternness and masculine vigor.
“Why shouldn’t I understand, Davy? Listen—ye hain’t for these hills. Ye’re a throw-back somehow, ye don’t belong here. I say that, though yore daddy is my own son. Don’t I know him—he’d skin us alive if he found us two here fiddlin’ on Sunday atternoon. He certainly would shake us out over hell fire, boy! When he gits started to exhortin’ and damnin’ around here, he certainly is servigerous. Ye know that. Hist, now!”
The young man himself now heard the sound of heavy footsteps slopping on the sodden earth, the slam of the slat gate’s wooden latch as someone entered. There followed the stamp of heavy feet on the broken gallery, where evidently someone was stopping for an instant to kick off the mud.
Before the newcomer could enter the young man arose, and with one stride gained the opening that led up to the loose-floored loft of the single-storied log house. He reached up a long arm and laid the offending fiddle back out of sight upon the floor.
Just as he turned there entered the person against whose advent he had been warned—a tall man, large of frame, bushy and gray-white of hair and as to a beard whose strong, close-set growth gave him a look of singular fierceness. As he stood he might have seemed fifty years old. In reality he was past seventy. The young man who faced him now—his son—was twenty-eight. A stalwart breed this, housed here in this cabin in a cove of the ancient Cumberlands. The old dame who stood now, her eyes turning from one to the other, would never see her ninetieth birthday again.