THE HEART OF THE HILLS
I
Twin spirals of blue smoke rose on either side of the spur, crept
tendril-like up two dark ravines, and clearing the feathery green
crests of the trees, drifted lazily on upward until, high above,
they melted shyly together and into the haze that veiled the
drowsy face of the mountain.
Each rose from a little log cabin clinging to the side of a little
hollow at the head of a little creek. About each cabin was a
rickety fence, a patch of garden, and a little cleared hill-side,
rocky, full of stumps, and crazily traced with thin green spears
of corn. On one hill-side a man was at work with a hoe, and on the
other, over the spur, a boy--both barefooted, and both in patched
jean trousers upheld by a single suspender that made a wet line
over a sweaty cotton shirt: the man, tall, lean, swarthy, grim;
the boy grim and dark, too, and with a face that was prematurely
aged. At the man's cabin a little girl in purple homespun was
hurrying in and out the back door clearing up after the noonday
meal; at the boy's, a comely woman with masses of black hair sat
in the porch with her hands folded, and lifting her eyes now and
then to the top of the spur. Of a sudden the man impatiently threw
down his hoe, but through the battered straw hat that bobbed up
and down on the boy's head, one lock tossed on like a jetblack
plume until he reached the end of his straggling row of corn.
There he straightened up and brushed his earth-stained fingers
across a dullred splotch on one cheek of his sullen set face. His
heavy lashes lifted and he looked long at the woman on the porch--
looked without anger now and with a new decision in his steady
eyes. He was getting a little too big to be struck by a woman,
even if she were his own mother, and nothing like that must happen
again.
