rail. And the voice of
the tree in the eager spring airs said to her waiting heart--whispered it
softly, shouted and tossed it abroad so that all might have heard it had
they been awake and known the shibboleth, murmured it in tones of
tenderness that penetrated her with bliss--that Creed was
coming--coming--coming to her, through the April woods.

Chapter III

Suitors

April was in the mountains. All the vast timbered slopes and tablelands
of the Cumberlands were one golden dapple, as yet differentiated by
darker greens and heavier shadows only where some group of pine or cedar
stood. April in the Cumberlands is the May or early June of New England.
Here March has the days of shine and shower; while to February belongs
the gusty turbulence usually attributed to March. Now sounded the calls
of the first whippoorwills in the dusk of evening; now the first
mocking-bird sang long before day, very sweetly and softly, and again
before moonrise; hours of sun he filled with bolder rejoicings,
condescending in his more antic humour to mimic the hens that began to
cackle around the barn. Every thicket by the water-courses blushed with
azaleas; all the banks were gay with wild violets.

Throughout March's changeful emotional season, night after night in those
restless vehement impassioned airs, the cedar tree talked ardently to
Judith. Through April's softer nights she wakened often to listen to it.
It went fondly over its first assurances. And the time of Creed
Bonbright's advent was near at hand now. Thought of it made light her
step as she went about her work.

"Don't you never marry a lazy man, Jude."

The wife of Jim Cal Turrentine halted on the doorstep, a coarse white cup
containing the coffee she had come to borrow poised in her hand as she
turned to harangue the girl in the kitchen.

"I ain't aimin' to wed no man. Huh, I say marry! I'm not studyin' about
marryin'," promptly responded Judith in the mountain girl's unfailing
formula; but she coloured high, and bent, pot-hooks in hand, to the great
hearth to shift the clumsy Dutch oven that contained her bread.

"That's what gals allers says," commented Iley Turrentine discontentedly.
"Huldy's forever singin' that tune. But let a good-lookin' feller come in
reach and I 'low any of you will change the note. Huldy's took her foot
in her hand and put out--left me with the whole wash to do, and Jim Cal
in the bed declarin' he's got a misery in his back. Don't y