“White smoke,” Johnny said slowly. “And it’s cold. That’s odd!”
“You’d have thought it was odd!” Ballard gave vent to a low chuckle. “I stood with my leg against one of those jugs—if that’s what they are—once and all of a sudden my leg tingled and went sort of dead. I jumped away quick, but not quick enough. Three or four days after that, the skin all peeled off the side of my leg.”
“How—how long’s he been doing it?” Johnny asked.
“A year!” Johnny whistled. “And you never asked him what it was he was bringing up nor how he got it?”
“No-o.” The other boy smiled a queer smile. “He pays me for my work here, keeping the grinding mill going, pays me well and besides—” He hesitated. “Well, you know, we mountain folks don’t like for other people to ask us too many questions so, naturally, we don’t ask too many ourselves.
“Not,” he added hastily, “that there are not people round about here who are burning up to know all about it. There are. But up to now nary a one of ’em’s learned anything worth telling.”
“You’re a good watchman,” Johnny laughed.
“I sleep here at the mill,” the mountain boy said simply. “And the lower part of the mill, down where he makes that—that stuff, whatever it is, is boarded up pretty tight, all two inch planks, spiked good and plenty. You see—” Ballard broke off. “Wait a little. There’s Aunt Sally Ann Setser out there. She’s got rheumatism, sort of stiff in her joints. I’ll take down her bag of corn to her.”
Left to himself, Johnny allowed his eyes to roam about the place. This was no ordinary grinding mill. It was much larger. Before the stranger came with his unusual hissing machinery or pumps, and his more unusual something that was produced apparently from water, or air, or just nothing at all, it had been used in other ways. He remembered hearing Cousin Bill say it had been a sawmill, that logs had been floated down to it in the spring when the water was high. But now there were no more logs and no sawmill.
Johnny’s eyes strayed through the open door and up to the crest of the rocky ridge known as Stone Mountain. “Worth exploring,” he told himself. “Caves up there I’ve heard,—and bears. Sometimes the natives hunt them. Boy! Fellow’d have to watch out!” Johnny heaved a sigh of contentment. He loved these slow-going mountain people, loved the mountains as well. In the spring when all the little streams, and the big ones too, went rushing and roaring by, when the birds sang to the tune of those rushing waters and white dogwood blossoms lay like snow banks against the hills, that was wonderful!