"Well, I hope so," said Rich; "but forewarned is forearmed, and I thought you ought to know the talk."
"I want to know about it quick as they come," spoke up Nucky, hastily; "you can't no way get along without me to keep lookout."
Blant turned sternly upon him. "No matter what the news is, son," he admonished, "you stay right there where you air, and don't dare to leave and come home. You know maw's desires in regards to your getting l'arning. I promised her I'd carry 'em out, and now I aim to do it. You stay over there, or you'll have me to reckon with. I got Rich here to help me if need be, and likewise Uncle Billy's boys,—what I haint able to tend to myself."
Nucky's face flushed angrily; but he said no more.
When bed-time came, the family slept downstairs—besides the three beds in one room, there was another in the kitchen—and I was shown up to a comfortable feather-bed in the great loft. Long after everybody else was asleep, I heard the poor little babe wailing pitiably below, and Blant softly walking the floor with it, jolting it back and forth in his chair, and trotting it on his knees before the fire. No wonder the little creature suffered agonies after eating the things it got for supper.
After breakfast in the morning, Nucky invited me to go for a walk. We ascended one of the spurs of the mountain in the rear of the house,—never have I seen a more beautiful site for a home than in that hollow—and a third of the way up, on a small "bench," came upon what appeared to be a play-village. Beneath spreading trees, were a dozen or more diminutive houses, with latticed sides and roofs of riven oak boards. Some were crumbling into decay, some new and substantial. The one to which Nucky led me was still yellow. "Here's where Maw lays," he said, almost in a whisper (I judge that one reason he finds it so hard to speak of her is his feeling that he, or rather, her desire for his education, was in a way the cause of her death), and I knew that this must be the family burying-ground, and these the grave-houses once so necessary for the protection of the dead from wild beasts, and still surviving here in the customs of the mountain country.
Near the grave-house of his mother were three smaller ones, still good and new. "Our three young uns betwixt Blant and me died of typhoid one summer, about five year' gone," Nucky explained. China-asters were blossoming gaily among the weeds about these grave-houses. "Maw she sot 'em there," Nucky said, "she liked to come here and rest a spell when she was hoeing corn, and set with these young uns."
The tragedy of the life of Nucky's mother was brought forcibly before me as I stood there. An eager-minded, loving-hearted woman, shut off from all opportunity, the bringer of ten new lives into the world, laboring and drudging as only these mountain women know how to for the sustenance and clothing of her family, suffering constant anxiety as to the very lives of her loved ones by reason of the family "war," and finally having to go out into the darkness of death and bid them all farewell,—surely it is a sad and tragic history.
As we turned away, Nucky added, "With them three young uns around her, I allow she haint so lonesome as she would be all by herself."
"No," I said, "having her loved ones with her, she is happier far, even in heaven. For it is that which makes heaven."