Steve stumbled up the hillside and through a garden path to a crazy porch overhung by a gourd vine. Here a lean mountain woman met him. “Better be keerful!” she said. “The dawg’s awful fierce! Here, dawg!”
The dog came, bristling. Steve retreated a few steps. “I ain’t nothin’ but a poor Confederate soldier!—’n’ I’m jest about dead for hunger ’n’ tiredness. There’s been an awful big battle ’n’ I got my wounds. If you’d jest let me rest a bit here, ma’am, ’n’, for God’s sake, give me somethin’ to eat—”
“Well,” said the woman, “you kin rest, an’ then you kin pay by helpin’ me stack the corn. My husband was killed over in Hampshire, bushwhackin’, an’ the dawg an’ I an’ a gun air livin’ together.”
Steve slept all day in the lean-to, beneath a quilt of bright patchwork. He had cornbread and a chicken for supper, and then he wrapped himself luxuriously in the quilt again and slept all night. The next day he helped the mountain woman stack the corn.
“You live so out of the way,” he said, “I don’t reckon Sheridan’ll never come burnin’ ’n’ slayin’ up here! You got chickens ’n’ a cow ’n’ the fat of the land.”
“It air a peaceful mountain,” agreed the woman. “I ain’t never seen a Yankee an’ I don’t know as I want to. Thar’s a feud on between the folks in the Cove an’ the folks on Deer Mountain, but my husband was a Hampshire man, an’ I’m out of it. Don’t nobody give me any trouble an’ I get along. Yaas, the cow’s a good milker an’ I got a pig an’ plenty of chickens.”
“Don’t you get lonesome, livin’ this way by yourself—’n’ you a fine-lookin’ woman, too?”
“Am I fine-lookin’?” said the mountain woman. “I never knew that before.”
They stacked the corn all day, and at dark Steve had another chicken and more cornbread and an egg for supper.
“Tell me about your folks,” said the woman, “an’ how life’s done you, an’ about soldiering.”