“I believe I'll ask that good-looking one to 'set up' with me.” “Settin' up” is what courting is called in the hills. The couple sit up in front of the fire after everybody else has gone to bed. The man puts his arm around the girl's neck and whispers; then she puts her arm around his neck and whispers—so that the rest may not hear. This I had related to the Blight, and now she withered me.
“You just do, now!”
I turned to the girl in question, whose name was Mollie. “Buck told me to ask you who Dave Branham was.” Mollie wheeled, blushing and angry, but Buck had darted cackling out the door. “Oh,” I said, and I changed the subject. “What time do you get up?”
“Oh, 'bout crack o' day.” I was tired, and that was discouraging.
“Do you get up that early every morning?”
“No,” was the quick answer; “a mornin' later.”
A morning later, Mollie got up, each morning. The Blight laughed.
Pretty soon the two girls were taken into the next room, which was a long one, with one bed in one dark corner, one in the other, and a third bed in the middle. The feminine members of the family all followed them out on the porch and watched them brush their teeth, for they had never seen tooth-brushes before. They watched them prepare for bed—and I could hear much giggling and comment and many questions, all of which culminated, by and by, in a chorus of shrieking laughter. That climax, as I learned next morning, was over the Blight's hot-water bag. Never had their eyes rested on an article of more wonder and humor than that water bag.
By and by, the feminine members came back and we sat around the fire. Still Mart did not appear, though somebody stepped into the kitchen, and from the warning glance that Mollie gave Buck when she left the room I guessed that the newcomer was her lover Dave. Pretty soon the old man yawned.
“Well, mammy, I reckon this stranger's about ready to lay down, if you've got a place fer him.”