He looked at me long, as though the obligation of hospitality did not involve conversation. He spoke at last: “I fought, but I could not help it. It was for home, or against home. I fought for this cabin.”
“It is a beautiful cabin.”
He relented a bit. “We have kept it just so, ever since my great-grandfather came here with his pack-mule and made his own trail. I—I hated the war. We did not care anything about the cotton and niggers of the fire-eaters. The niggers never climbed this high.”
I changed the subject. “This is the largest fireplace I have seen in the South. A man could stand up in it.”
He stiffened again. “This is not the South. This is the Blue Ridge.”
An inner door opened. It was plain the woman who stood there was his wife. She had the austere mouth a wife’s passion gives. She had the sweet white throat of her youth, that made even the candle-flame rejoice. She looked straight at me, with ink-black eyes. She was dumb, like some one struggling to awake.
“Everything is ready,” she said at length to her husband.
He turned to me: “Your supper is now in the kitchen, ‘if what we have is good enough.’” It was the usual formula for hospitality.
I turned to the wife. “My dear woman, I did not know that this was going on. It is not right for you to set a new supper at this hour. I had enough on the road.”
“But you have walked a long way.” Then she uttered the ancient proverb of the Blue Ridge. “‘A stranger needs takin’ care of.’”