NANCE'S STOREHOUSE
The cabin was still.Only the broken sobbing of the woman in the little shed-room came faint and low on old Nance's ears.
She slipped from the kitchen into the shadows of a tree near the house and listened until the sobbing ceased.
She crept close to the shed and stood silent and ghost-like beside its daubed walls.Immovable as a cat crouching in the hedge to spring on her prey, she waited until the waning moon had sunk behind the crags.She laid her ear close to a crack in the logs from which she had once pushed the red mud to let in the light.All was still at last.The sobbing had stopped.The young wife was sound asleep.
She had wondered vaguely at first about the crying, but quickly made up her mind that it was only a lover's quarrel.She was glad of it.The girl would bar her door and sulk all night.So much the better.There would be no danger of her entering the living- room where Jim slept.
She would wait a little longer to make sure she was asleep.A half hour passed.The white-shrouded figure stood immovable, her keen ears tuned for the slightest sounds from within.
The stars were shining in unusual brilliance.She could see her way through the shadows even better than in full moon.A wolf was crying again for his mate from a distant crag.She had grown used to his howls.He had come close to her cabin once in the day-time.She had tried to creep on him and show her friendliness.But he had fled in terror at the first glimpse of her dress through the parting underbrush.
An owl was calling from his dead tree-top down the valley.She smiled at his familiar, tremulous call.Her own eyes were wide as his tonight.No sight or sound of Nature among the crags about her cabin had for her spirit any terror.The night was her mantle.
She added to the meager living which she had wrung from her mountain farm by trading with the illicit distillers of the backwoods ofYancey County.Too ignorant to run a distillery of her own, she had stored their goods with such skill that the hiding-place had never been discovered.She loved good whiskey herself.She had tried to find in its fiery depths the dreams of happiness life had so cruelly denied her.
The hiding-place of this whiskey had puzzled the revenue officers of every administration for years.They had watched her house day and night.Not one of them had ever struck the trail to her storehouse.
The game had excited her imagination.She loved its daring and danger.That there was the slightest element of wrong or crime in her association with the moonshiners of her native heath had never for a moment entered her mind.It was no crime to make whiskey.This was the first article of the creed of the true North Carolina mountaineer.They had from the first declared that the tax levied by the Federal Government on the product of their industry was an infamous act of tyranny.They had fought this tyranny for two generations.They would fight it as long as there was breath in their bodies and a single load of powder and buckshot for their rifles.
Nance considered herself a heroine in the pride of her soul for the shrewd and successful defiance she had given the revenue officers for so many years.
She had been too cunning to even allow one of her own people to know the secret of her store house.For that reason it had never been discovered.She always stored the whiskey temporarily in the potato shed or under the cabin floor until night and then alone carried it to the place she had discovered.
She laughed softly at the thought of this deep hiding-place tonight.Its temperature never varied winter or summer.Not a track had ever been left at its door.She might live a hundred years and, unless some spying eye should see her enter, its existence could never be suspected.
She tipped softly into the kitchen, walked to the door of the living- room and listened to the even, heavy breathing of the man on the couch.
Once more the faint echo of a sob in the shed beyond came to her keen ears.She stood for five minutes.It was not repeated.She had onlyimagined it.The girl was still asleep.
