408 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Sept. 15, 1906. 
The Mountain Moonshiner. 
I.—Getting Acquainted. 
I was hunting alone in the mountains, and ex¬ 
ploring the ground that was new to me. About 
noon, while descending from a high ridge into 
a creek valley, to get some water, I became en¬ 
meshed in a rhododendron “slick,” and, to some 
extent, lost my bearings. 
After floundering about for an hour or two, I 
suddenly came out upon a little clearing. Giant 
hemlocks, girdled and gaunt, rose from a steep 
cornfield of ten acres, beyond which loomed the 
primeval forest of the Great Smoky Mountains. 
Squat in the foreground sat one of the rudest 
log huts I had ever seen, a tiny one-room shack, 
without window, cellar, or loft, and without a 
sawed board showing in its construction. A thin 
curl of smoke rose from one end of the cabin, not 
from a chimney, but from a mere semi-circle of 
stones piled four feet high around a hole cut 
through the log wall. The stones of this fire¬ 
place were not even plastered together with 
mud, nor had the builder ever intended to raise 
the pile as high as the roof to guard his premises 
against the imminent risk of fire. Two low 
doors of riven boards stood wide open, opposite 
each other. These, helped by wide crevices be¬ 
tween tbe unchinked logs, served to let in some 
sunlight, and quite too much of the raw Novem¬ 
ber air. The surroundings were squalid and 
filthy beyond anything I had hitherto witnessed 
in the mountains. As I approached, wading 
ankle-deep in muck that reached to the door- 
sill, two pigs scampered 'out through the op¬ 
posite door. 
Within the hut I found only a slip of a girl, 
rocking a baby almost as big as herself, and 
trying to knit a sock at the same time. She 
was toasting her bare toes before the fire, and 
crooning in a weird minor some mountain ditty 
that may have been centuries old. 
I shivered as I looked at this midget, com¬ 
paring her only garment, a torn calico dress, 
with my own stout hunter’s garb that seemed 
none too warm for such a day as this; but my 
sympathy was wasted; she was of a breed that, 
although pure white and of colonial ancestry, can 
go half naked through tjie severe winters of the 
Appalachians and suffer little discomfort. 
Knowing that the sudden appearance of a 
stranger would startle the girl, I chose the 
quickest way to reassure her by saluting in the 
vernacular: 
“Howdy?” 
“Howdy?” she gasped. 
“Who lives here?” 
“Bill Kirby.” 
“Kirby? Oh! yes, I know him—we’ve been 
bear hunting together. Is your father at home?’.’ 
“No, he’s out somewhars.” 
“Where is your mother?” 
“She’s in the field, up yan, gittin’ roughness.” 
I took some pride in not being stumped by 
this answer. “Roughness,” in mountain lingo, 
is any kind of rough fodder, specifically corn 
fodder. 
“How far is it to the next house?” 
“I don’t know; maw, she knows.’ 
“All right; I'll find her.” 
I went up to the field. No one was in sight; 
but a shock of fodder was walking away from 
me. and I conjectured that “maw’s” feet were 
under it; so I hailed: 
“Hello!” 
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. 
She flushed, then paled, staring at me round¬ 
eyed—frightened, I thought, by this apparition 
of a stranger whose approach she had not de¬ 
tected. To these people of the far backwoods 
every one fronr outside their mountains, whether 
he be from north, south, east or west, is a 
“furriner,” which is as much as' saying a bar¬ 
barian, 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 own 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 embar¬ 
rassed, 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 some one up the 
branch. Her attitude showed that there was 
no thoroughfare in that direction at present. 
Circumstances, whatever they were, forbade ex¬ 
planation. 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. 
For one silly moment I was tempted to ad¬ 
vance and see what this martial spouse would 
do if I tried to pass her on the trail. But a 
hunter’s instinct made me glance forward to the 
upper corner of the field. There was thick 
cover beyond the fence, with a clear range of a' 
hundred and fifty yards between it and me-—• 
too far for Bill to recognize me, I thought, but 
deadly range for his Winchester, I knew. One 
forward step of mine would put me in the status 
of an armed intruder. So I concluded that 
common sense would better become me at this 
juncture than a bit of fooling that surely would 
be misinterpreted, and that might end in- 
gloriouslv. 
•“Ah! well,” I remarked, “when your hus¬ 
band gets back, tell him, please, that I was 
sorry to miss him; though I did not call on any 
special business—just wanted to say ‘Howdy?’ 
you know. Good day!” 
I turned and went down the valley. 
All the way home I speculated on this queer 
adventure. What was going on “up yan”? 
A month before, when I had started for this 
wildest nook of the Smokies, to spend a year 
alone in its solitudes, a friend had intimated that 
I was venturing into a dubious district—Moon¬ 
shine Land. It is but frank to confess that this 
prospect was not unpleasant. My only fear 
had been that I might not find any moonshiners, 
or that, having found them, I might not succeed 
in winning their confidence to the extent of 
learning their own side of an interesting story. 
As to how I could do this without getting tarred 
with the same stick, I was by no means clear; 
but I hoped that good luck might find a way. 
And now it seemed as if luck had indeed favored 
me with an excuse for broaching the topic to 
some 'friendly mountaineer, so I could at least 
see how he would take it. 
And it chanced (or was it chance?) that I had 
no more than finished supper, that evening, 
when a man called at my lonely cabin. He was 
the one that I knew best among my scattered 
neighbors. I gave him a rather humorous ac¬ 
count of my reception by Madame Kirby, and 
asked him what he thought she was yelling 
about. 
There was no answering smile on my visitor’s 
face. He pondered in silence, weighing many 
contingencies, it seemed, and ventured no more 
than a helpless “Wall, now I wonder!” 
It did not suit me to let the matter go at 
that; so, on a sudden impulse, I fired the ques¬ 
tion point-blank at him: “Do you suppose that 
Bill is running a still up there at the head of 
that little cove?” 
The man’s face hardened, and there came a 
glint into his eyes as I had noticed in Mistress 
Kirby’s. 
“Jedgmatically, I don't know.” 
“Excuse me! I don’t want to know, either. 
But let me explain just what I am driving at. 
People up North, and in the lowlands of the 
South as well, have a notion that there is little 
or nothing going on in these mountains except 
feuds and moonshining. They think that a 
stranger traveling here alone is in danger of 
being potted by a bullet from almost any laurel 
thicket that he passes, on mere suspicion that he 
may be a revenue officer or spy. Of course, that 
is nonsense; but there is one thing that I’m as 
ignorant about as any novel-reader of them all. 
tou know my habits; I like to explore—I never 
take a guide—and when I come to a place that’s 
particularly wild and primitive, that’s just the 
place I want to peer into. Now the dubious 
point is this: Suppose that, one of these days 
when I’m out hunting, or looking for rare 
plants, I should stumble upon a moonshine still 
in full operation—what would happen? What 
would they do? 
“Wall, sir, I'll tell you wlmt they’d do. They’d 
fust-place ask you some questions about your¬ 
self, and whut you'uns was doin’ in that thar 
neck o’ the woods. Then they’d git you to do 
some triflin’ work about the still—feed the 
