By this time I was quite nonplussed. I waited for her to speak; but never a word did the woman deign. So there we stood and stared at each other in silence—I leaning on my rifle, she with red arms akimbo—till I grew embarrassed, half wondering, too, if the creature were demented.
Suddenly a light flashed upon my groping wits. This amazon was on picket. Her three shrieks had been a signal to someone up the branch. Her attitude showed that there was no thoroughfare in that direction at present. Circumstances, whatever they were, forbade explanation. Clearly, the woman thought that I could not help seeing how matters stood. Not for a moment did she suspect but that her yells, her belligerent attitude, and her refusal to speak, were the conventional way, this world over, of intimating that there was a contretemps. She considered that if I was what I claimed to be, an acquaintance of her husband and on friendly footing, I would be gentleman enough to retire. If I was something else—an officer, a spy—well, she was there to stop me until the captain of the guard arrived.
For one silly moment I was tempted to advance and see what this martial spouse would do if I tried to pass her on the trail. But a hunter’s instinct made me glance forward to the upper corner of the field. There was thick cover beyond the fence, with a clear range of a hundred and fifty yards between it and me—too far for Tom to recognize me, I thought, but deadly range for his Winchester, I knew. One forward step of mine would put me in the status of an armed intruder. So I concluded that common sense would better become me at this juncture than a bit of fooling that surely would be misinterpreted, and that might end ingloriously.
“Ah, well!” I remarked, “when your husband gets back, tell him, please, that I was sorry to miss him; though I did not call on any special business—just wanted to say ‘Howdy?’ you know. Good day!”
I turned and went down the valley.
All the way home I speculated on this queer adventure. What was going on “up yan”?
A month before, when I had started for this wildest nook of the Smokies, a friend had intimated that I was venturing into a dubious district—Moonshine Land. It is but frank to confess that this prospect was not unpleasant. My only fear had been that I might not find any moonshiners, or that, having found them, I might not succeed in winning their confidence to the extent of learning their own side of an interesting story. As to how I could do this without getting tarred with the same stick, I was by no means clear; but I hoped that good luck might find a way. And now it seemed as if luck had indeed favored me with an excuse for broaching the topic to some friendly mountaineer, so I could at least see how he would take it.
And it chanced (or was it chance?) that I had no more than finished supper, that evening, when a man called at my lonely cabin. He was the one that I knew best among my scattered neighbors. I gave him a rather humorous account of my reception by Madame Kirby, and asked him what he thought she was yelling about.
There was no answering smile on my visitor’s face. He pondered in silence, weighing many contingencies, it seemed, and ventured no more than a helpless “Waal, now I wonder!”
It did not suit me to let the matter go at that; so, on a sudden impulse, I fired the question point-blank at him: “Do you suppose that Tom is running a still up there at the head of that little cove?”