her girls, but I've always made men
keep their distance."

Hettie shrugged her shoulders, as if to throw off some unpleasant idea.

"Oh, I don't care. I'd do it over again. Lord, I couldn't help it. I
love him so, and he is so sweet and good when he tries to be. He
thinks I'm all right, too, in some ways. He says I'm just the girl to
marry a dare-devil like he is. Did you ever know it was me that helped
get him away from the revenue men the night he had a barrel o' whiskey
on his wagon?" Hettie laughed impulsively, and her graceful little
body shook all over.

"Mother thought you had a hand in it," answered Harriet, with an
appreciative smile.

"It was fun," giggled Hettie. "Toot drove nipitytuck down the street
from the Hawkbill as fast as he could lick it, and them a-gallopin'
after 'im. I had been on the front porch talkin' to his father, who
was anxious about 'im and wanted to see 'im. Toot pulled up at the
side gate an' said: 'No use, Het, damn it; I can't make it, and they'll
know my horse and wagon an' prove it on me.' Then I thought what to
do; the men wasn't in sight back there in the woods. Quicker 'n
lightnin', I made Toot push the whiskey across the porch into the
kitchen an' shet the door, an' when the revenue men stopped at the gate
Toot was settin' up as cool as a cucumber in his wagon talkin' to me
over the fence. I think he was asking me to get in the wagon and go
out home with him. I never seed--saw 'im so scared, though, in my
life; but la me! it was fun to me, an' I had more lies on my tongue 'n
a dog has fleas.

"'Did you have a barrel on that wagon a minute ago?' one of the two men
asked.

"'What'n the hell are you talkin' about?' asked Toot. 'I haven't
seed--seen no barrel.'" Hettie was trying to speak correctly, but the
spirit of the narrative ran away with her meagre ideas of grammar.

"'Oh,' said I, 'you've got the wrong sow by the ear; a wagon went
whizzin' by here a minute ago like it was shot out of a gun.'

"'Which way?' the officer asked, rippin' out an oath that 'u'd a-took
the prize at a cussin'-bee.

"I pointed down the road and said: 'I hear it a-clatterin' now,' and
off they galloped. Well, Toot soon loaded the whiskey again and drove
off up the mountain, but he's laughed about that a hundred times and
told the moonshiners about it. Whenever I meet one in the road--I know
the last one of 'em--they ask me if I've seen a whiskey wagon anywheres
about. Harr