Argosy All-Story Weekly, June 13, 1925 — page 31: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

FLIGHT TO frames, and this was a scaling and poisonous pink. A narrow porch of rough and broken boarding went across its front, and here and there inside the palings, which one crossed by a rotting stile, lay odds and ends of farming gear exposed to the weather and red with rust. Wade Murrell drew the team to a hait at the stile and halloed a greeting to which he had no response. ‘“ There doesn’t seem to be anybody at home,” suggested Cynthia nepetwy: She felt somehow that wherever else they might have to go, the chances were bright for an improvement over this stopping place. But the man had jumped down and nodded to her to follow. ‘“T reckon they hain’t fur away,” he said. “We'll jest sot us a couple of cheers an’ tarry twell some person shows up ter bid us welcome.” On the porch, he left her alone with two kittens and a puppy—all afflicted with mange—and a small pet lamb, while he himself went off to unharness and stable the team. Cynthia sat gingerly in a broken rocker. The reeking uwncleanliness of the place nauseated her with its attack upon eye and nostril. Already in the face of such present afflictions, she was beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t better to be a defendant charged with murder in civilization than to be a free agent here. She didn’t know whether they hanged ‘or electrocuted in North Carolina, but they didn’t exile one among savages. But she could not go back now. There was no way of going back. She had no money beyond a few fives and twos. She thought with a bitter irony of the thirty thousand dollars upon which she had pillowed her head last night. Thirty thousand dollars which belonged to a back- woods boob—thirty thousand dollars which would have spelled independence to her and made her safe from such things as that which had happened yesterday. ‘“ My God,” she groaned, ‘‘ and they talk about the East Side!”’ She looked down at her torn stockings and the finery which was already be- THE HILLS. 903 draggled. She glanced shudderingly about at the squalor of this place, and then she epened the bag to which she had so tenaciously clung even after she had lost her hat, took out her vanity case and studied her own face in its small hand mirror. Sitting there alone in the shadow of the Great Smokies, she sought, according to her lights, to remedy the ravages of demoraliz- ing hardship. She restored the effaced scarlet exaggeration about her lips, re- pencilled her eyebrows, set little spots of flaring color on her cheeks and powdered her nose—but she felt like a crippled bird preening its feathers among cats. Around the corner of the house appeared a tow-headed child in a single garment. It stood staring at her for a moment with wide, amazed eyes, then turned incontin- ently and fled. Around the other corner came Wade Murrell, and at his side walked a girl who looked about twenty, but who was probably fifteen. She was a tall, deep- bosomed girl with a comeliness as full and transient as that of a morning glory; the brief beauty of womanhood nurtured in drudgery and doomed before its blossoming. ‘This is Tom Ike’s youngest gal, Ivy,” began Murrell. He stopped abruptly and stood staring at the woman he had taken under his protection. She knew that he was taking in the transformation of her hasty make-up and she read a sudden gusty blackness in his eyes. Whatever were the thoughts that gave birth to that scowl, he repressed them and went on where he had broken off. “ Ivy’s accounted ter be ther purtiest gal along this hyar creek-—but she’s barefoot, though.” The mountain girl looked at him in sur- prise. “ Why wouldn’t I be barefoot?” she inquired. “ Hit’s summer time, hain’t hit?” The man Jaughed and put a question of his own. ‘“Whar’s yore mammy an’ pappy?” ‘* Mammy, she’s pickin’ a bait of salat,” came the response in a matter-of-fact drawl. ‘An’ pappy, he’s hoe-workin’ in ther corn patch. I reckon they'll be hyar d’reckly. Thar comes mammy now.” A raw-boned, elderly woman appeared clooolK