sm. "That belt's got power," Noah boasted. And young boys in
the neighborhood admitted it. More than one who had eaten too many green
apples and lay groveling under the tree, drawn in a knot with pain,
screamed in his misery for Noah. If Noah was within hearing he went on a
run, fast as his long legs could carry him. And the young sufferer
reaching out a hand touched the rattlesnake belt and quicker than you
could bat an eye his griping pains left and the next thing he was up
playing around.

However, it was his power to find water that was Noah Buckley's pride.
He took a twig from a peach tree, held a prong in each hand, and with
head bent low he stumbled about here and there mumbling:

Water, water, if you be there,
Bend this twig and show me where.

If the twig bent low to the earth you could count on it that was the
spot where the well should be dug. To mark the spot Noah stuck the twig
at once into the earth. Mischievous boys sometimes slipped around,
pulled up the peach branch and threw it away. Again there would be a
doubting Thomas who sought to test the water witch's power by stealing
away the peach branch and dropping in its place a pebble. But Noah was
not to be defeated. He forthwith cut another branch, repeated the
ceremony, and located the exact spot again. Whereupon neighbor menfolk
pitched in and dug the well. Not all in one day, of course. It took
several days but their labors were always rewarded with clear, cold
water at last.

A well once dug where Noah directed never went dry. That was his boast
as long as he lived.

However, it was not so much his power to find water that strengthened
the faith of people in the water witch. It was what happened on Dog
Slaughter Creek. The Mosleys, a poor family, had squatted on a miserable
place there. One day the baby of the lot toddled off without being
missed by the other nine children of the flock. When Jake Mosley and his
wife Norie came in from the tobacco patch they began to search
frantically for the babe, screaming and crying as they dashed this way
and that. They looked under the house, in the well, in the barn. They
even went to neighbors' pig lots; the Mosleys had none of their own.
"I've heard of a sow or a boar pig too eating up the carcass of a
child," a neighbor said. "Maybe the babe's roamed off into Burdick's
pasture and the stallion has tromped her underfoot," Jake opined. With
lighted pine sticks to gu