They followed Troublesome for a couple of miles, then turned up the winding branch that bore the name, Noah's Run. Less than a mile from its mouth was a small store, with nags tied to limbs outside, and men sitting on the puncheon benches in front. The storekeeper's home, a neat, weatherboarded house, was the first visited. The wife welcomed the women as old friends, having visited them on the hill, and her nine children also having attended the classes pretty regularly. They asked her, among other things, if typhoid had as yet appeared up her branch; there were already two or three cases of it in the village, where it seemed to be expected as confidently as the coming of summer. She said it had not yet begun on Noah's Run, though everybody was looking for it any day.
"Everybody on the branch is a-trying to stave hit off by dosting up on corn-liquor. A dram all around is what me and my man and all our young-uns takes of a morning and of a night."
To their suggestions that drinking-water be boiled and flies be kept away from food, she was impervious. "Corn-liquor's the shorest way," she said.
Hers was the only house on the branch which had a window, the others being all windowless log cabins.
At the first of these, the mother, fat, flabby, and dirty, claimed to have been unable to visit the hill because of poor health. "I got the breast complaint—some calls hit the galloping consumpt'," she informed them, proudly.
She sat complacently on the small, rotting porch, fanning herself with a turkey-wing, while a dozen tow-headed children (boys wearing a single garment,—a cotton shirt,—girls in ragged cotton dresses) gathered around to stare with steady, unblinking eyes at the strangers; and numerous chickens and ducks, and a large litter of young pigs wandered at will through porch and house.
"I have heared a sight about you quare women, and have longed to lay eyes on you," the invalid said. "The quarest thing I heared was that not nary one of you had a man."
They admitted the truth of this rumor, and she gave them another searching inspection, remarking afterward: "Don't none of you appear to be pining, though—I allow you have got past hit. I've heared old maids has a mighty happy time when they git through strugglin'."
What did she do for her "breast complaint"? Well, a nip of corn-liquor was the "clearingest" thing known for breast and neck. Was it hard to get? Oh, not now, since the crap was laid by.
Were her children in school? No, indeed, there wasn't any school to go to on Noah's Run—never had been. She would like to see her boys get larning—hit holped a man along; but as for gals, she herself had got on without any, and she allowed women were in general better off without it. "Not meaning no disrespect to you that have got hit," she hastened to add. "But you see yourself how hit is—a woman that sets out to ketch larning is mighty apt not to ketch her a man."