The shock turned around, then tumbled over, and there stood revealed a bare-headed, bare-footed woman, coarse featured but of superb physique--one of those mountain giantesses who think nothing of shouldering a two-bushel sack of corn and carrying it a mile or two without letting it down.
[Illustration: Moonshine Still-House Hidden in the Laurel]
She flushed, then paled, staring at me round-eyed--frightened, I thought, by this apparition of a stranger whose approach she had not detected. To these people of the far backwoods everyone from outside their mountains is a doubtful character at best.
However, Mistress Kirby quickly recovered her aplomb. Her mouth straightened to a thin slit. She planted herself squarely across my path, now regarding me with contracted lids and a hard glint, till I felt fairly bayoneted by those steel-gray eyes.
"Good-morning. Is Mr. Kirby about?" I inquired.
There was no answer. Instead, the thin slit opened and let out a yell of almost yodel quality, penetrating as a warwhoop--a yell that would carry near half a mile. I wondered what she meant by this; but she did not enlighten me by so much as a single word. It was puzzling, not to say disconcerting; but, charging it to the custom of a country that still was new to me, I found my tongue again, and started to give credentials.
"My name is Kephart. I am staying at the Everett Mine on Sugar Fork----"
Another yell that set the wild echoes flying.
"I am acquainted with your husband; we've hunted together. Perhaps he has told you----"
Yell number three, same pitch and vigor as before.
By this time I was quite nonplussed. I waited for her to speak; but never a word did the woman deign. So there we stood and stared at each other in silence--I leaning on my rifle, she with red arms akimbo--till I grew embarrassed, half wondering, too, if the creature were demented.
Suddenly a light flashed upon my groping wits. This amazon was on picket. Her three shrieks had been a signal to someone up the branch. Her attitude showed that there was no thoroughfare in that direction at present. Circumstances, whatever they were, forbade explanation. Clearly, the woman thought that I could not help seeing how matters stood. Not for a moment did she suspect but that her yells, her belligerent attitude, and her refusal to speak, were the conventional way, this world over, of intimating that there was a _contretemps_. She considered that if I was what I claimed to be, an acquaintance of her husband and on friendly footing, I would be gentleman enough to retire. If I was something else--an officer, a spy--well, she was there to stop me until the captain of the guard arrived.