“I reckon she'd never git away, if my boy Dave had the sayin' of it.” There was a subdued titter at this, but Bub had come in from the stable and had dropped on the edge of the porch. He broke in hotly:
“You jest let June alone, Aunt Tilly, you'll have yo' hands full if you keep yo' eye on Loretty thar.”
Already when somebody was saying something about the feud, as June came around the corner, her quick eye had seen Loretta bend her head swiftly over her work to hide the flush of her face. Now Loretta turned scarlet as the step-mother spoke severely:
“You hush, Bub,” and Bub rose and stalked into the house. Aunt Tilly was leaning back in her chair—gasping—and consternation smote the group. June rose suddenly with her string of dangling beans.
“I haven't shown you my room, Loretty. Don't you want to see it? Come on, all of you,” she added to the girls, and they and Loretta with one swift look of gratitude rose shyly and trooped shyly within where they looked in wide-mouthed wonder at the marvellous things that room contained. The older women followed to share sight of the miracle, and all stood looking from one thing to another, some with their hands behind them as though to thwart the temptation to touch, and all saying merely:
“My! My!”
None of them had ever seen a piano before and June must play the “shiny contraption” and sing a song. It was only curiosity and astonishment that she evoked when her swift fingers began running over the keys from one end of the board to the other, astonishment at the gymnastic quality of the performance, and only astonishment when her lovely voice set the very walls of the little room to vibrating with a dramatic love song that was about as intelligible to them as a problem in calculus, and June flushed and then smiled with quick understanding at the dry comment that rose from Aunt Tilly behind:
“She shorely can holler some!”
She couldn't play “Sourwood Mountain” on the piano—nor “Jinny git Aroun',” nor “Soapsuds over the Fence,” but with a sudden inspiration she went back to an old hymn that they all knew, and at the end she won the tribute of an awed silence that made them file back to the beans on the porch. Loretta lingered a moment and when June closed the piano and the two girls went into the main room, a tall figure, entering, stopped in the door and stared at June without speaking:
“Why, howdye, Uncle Rufe,” said Loretta. “This is June. You didn't know her, did ye?” The man laughed. Something in June's bearing made him take off his hat; he came forward to shake hands, and June looked up into a pair of bold black eyes that stirred within her again the vague fears of her childhood. She had been afraid of him when she was a child, and it was the old fear aroused that made her recall him by his eyes now. His beard was gone and he was much changed. She trembled when she shook hands with him and she did not call him by his name Old Judd came in, and a moment later the two men and Bub sat on the porch while the women worked, and when June rose again to go indoors, she felt the newcomer's bold eyes take her slowly in from head to foot and she turned crimson. This was the terror among the Tollivers—Bad Rufe, come back from the West to take part in the feud. HE saw the belt and the stockings and the shoes, the white column of her throat and the proud set of her gold-crowned head; HE knew what they meant, he made her feel that he knew, and later he managed to catch her eyes once with an amused, half-contemptuous glance at the simple untravelled folk about them, that said plainly how well he knew they two were set apart from them, and she shrank fearfully from the comradeship that the glance implied and would look at him no more. He knew everything that was going on in the mountains. He had come back “ready for business,” he said. When he made ready to go, June went to her room and stayed there, but she heard him say to her father that he was going over to the Gap, and with a laugh that chilled her soul: