Then another of the women told how she had been selling Bibles in the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee, and one of the wheels of her carriage became dished from the bad roads. She had tried to put up with a mountaineer who would not take her in, and gave her the choice of sleeping in the barn with the team and the driver, or to occupy a room in a deserted Negro “quarters” across the road.
All night long she had been annoyed by her candles being blown out and the door blowing open, though she locked it time and again.
It was a commonplace sort of a ghost story, and one of the hunters yawned at its conclusion. The evening’s reminiscences might have ended then and there if the third woman traveler, the youngest and sturdiest of the lot, who thus far had been the quietest, turned to the landlord, who sat smoking in the settle, with a couple of his guests, asking him if he remembered the Big Calf.
“What do you know about the Big Calf?” he said, quizzically, looking at the woman in order to see if he could recognize her.
“I know as much as you do, I reckon,” she said. “I lived in this town for a year learning millinery with Emilie Knecht.” “said the landlord.
“I surely am,” responded the woman, “and I knew you well, Jakey Kleckner, in those days.” “said the boniface, sitting up very straight.
INTERIOR OF SCHELLSBURG CHURCH
“Long years ago,” began the business woman, "when this public house was first opened, the landlord’s cow gave birth to an unusual calf. At six weeks it was as big as most heifers of six months, and it was handsome and intelligent, a brown-gray color–‘Brown Swiss’ they called the breed. All the drovers and cattle buyers in the mountains wanted that calf for a show, and her fame spread all over the ‘five counties.’
"There were two buyers from out about Greensburg that came in all the ways to get her, but the price was too steep. They hung around all day, drinking with the landlord in the tap room, and though he took too much in this drunken bout, kept enough of his wits with him to refuse to lower the price one shilling. The next morning he had to go away on important business, and in the afternoon the drovers returned, telling the landlord’s wife that they had met her husband on the road, and he had consented to accept a lower figure.