Short Fiction

how we’d laugh, Harry, when we’d get it out of his pocket and read aloud a page of material. And how frantic he used to get?”

“Wild! He was such a kid about his writing.”

They were both silent a moment, and then Harry said:

“We were to have a place out here, too. Do you remember? We were to buy the adjoining twenty acres. And the parties we were going to have!”

Again there was a pause, broken this time by a low question from Roxanne.

“Do you ever hear of her, Harry?”

“Why⁠—yes,” he admitted placidly. “She’s in Seattle. She’s married again to a man named Horton, a sort of lumber king. He’s a great deal older than she is, I believe.”

“And she’s behaving?”

“Yes⁠—that is, I’ve heard so. She has everything, you see. Nothing much to do except dress up for this fellow at dinnertime.”

“I see.”

Without effort he changed the subject.

“Are you going to keep the house?”

“I think so,” she said, nodding. “I’ve lived here so long, Harry, it’d seem terrible to move. I thought of trained nursing, but of course that’d mean leaving. I’ve about decided to be a boardinghouse lady.”

“Live in one?”

“No. Keep one. Is there such an anomaly as a boardinghouse lady? Anyway I’d have a negress and keep about eight people in the summer and two or three, if I can get them, in the winter. Of course I’ll have to have the house repainted and gone over inside.”

Harry considered.

“Roxanne, why⁠—naturally you know best what you can do, but it does seem a shock, Roxanne. You came here as a bride.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “that’s why I don’t mind remaining here as a boardinghouse lady.”

“I remember a certain batch of biscuits.”

“Oh, those biscuits,” she cried. “Still, from all I heard about the way you devoured them, they couldn’t have been so bad. I was so low that day, yet somehow I laughed when the nurse told me about those biscuits.”

“I noticed that the twelve nail-holes are still in the library wall where Jeff drove them.”

“Yes.”

It was getting very dark now, a crispness settled in the air; a little gust of wind sent down a last spray of leaves. Roxanne shivered slightly.

“We’d better go in.”

He looked at his watch.

“It’s late. I’ve got to be leaving. I go East tomorrow.”

“Must you?”

They lingered for a moment just below the stoop, watching a moon that seemed full of snow float out of the distance where the lake lay. Summer was gone and now Indian summer. The grass was cold and there was no mist and no dew. After he left she would go in and light the gas and close the shutters, and he would go down the path and on to the village. To these two life had come quickly and gone, leaving not bitterness, but pity; not disillusion, but only pain. There was already enough moonlight when they shook hands for each to see the gathered kindness in the other’s eyes.

Jemina, the Mountain Girl

This don’t pretend to be “Literature.” This is just a tale for red-blooded folks who want a story and not just a lot of “psychological” stuff or “analysis.” Boy, you’ll love it! Read it here, see it in the movies, play it on the phonograph, run it through the sewing-machine.

A Wild Thing

It was night in the mountains of Kentucky. Wild hills rose on all sides. Swift mountain streams flowed rapidly up and down the mountains.

Jemina Tantrum was down at the stream, brewing whiskey at the family still.

She was a typical mountain girl.

Her feet were bare. Her hands, large and powerful, hung down below her knees. Her face showed the ravages of work. Although but sixteen, she had for over a dozen years been supporting her aged pappy and mappy by brewing mountain whiskey. From time to time she would pause in her task, and, filling a dipper full of the pure, invigorating liquid, would drain it off⁠—then pursue her work with renewed vigor.

She would place the rye in the vat, thresh it out with her feet and, in twenty minutes, the completed product would be turned out.

A sudden cry made her pause in the act of draining a dipper and look up.

“Hello,” said a voice. It came from a man clad in hunting boots reaching to his neck, who had emerged.

“Can you tell me the way to the Tantrums’ cabin?”

“Are you uns from the settlements down thar?”

She pointed her hand down to the bottom of the hill, where Louisville lay. She had never been there; but once, before she was born, her great-grandfather, old Gore Tantrum, had gone into the settlements in the company of two marshals, and had never come back. So the Tantrums, from generation to generation, had learned to dread civilization.

The man was amused. He laughed a light tinkling laugh, the laugh of a Philadelphian. Something in the ring of it thrilled her. She drank off another dipper of whiskey.

“Where is Mr. Tantrum, little girl?” he asked, not without kindness.

She raised her foot and pointed her big toe toward the woods. “Thar in the cabing behind those thar pines. Old Tantrum air my old man.”

The man from the settlements thanked her and strode off. He was fairly vibrant with youth and personality. As he walked along he whistled and sang and turned handsprings and flapjacks, breathing in the fresh, cool air of the mountains.

The air around the still was like wine.

Jemina Tantrum watched him entranced. No one like him had ever come into her life before.

She sat down on the grass and counted her toes. She counted eleven. She had learned arithmetic in the mountain school.

A Mountain Feud

Ten years before a lady from the settlements had opened a school on the mountain. Jemina had no money, but she had paid her way in whiskey, bringing a pailful to school every morning and leaving it on Miss Lafarge’s desk. Miss Lafarge had died of delirium tremens after a year’s teaching, and so Jemina’s education had stopped.

Across