“She would too! What makes him act like that, ma?” “He’s naturally modest and retiring,” said pa with a twinkle in his eye. “He takes after me.” “They must be awful good folks, them Carsons,” said ma admiringly. “They’ve got plenty of goodness, but they ain’t blessed with any too much sense,” remarked pa. “What makes you think that, Thomas?” “Well, the folks was telling me how this Mr. Carson goes riding all over the mountain alone. He don’t seem to have no idea that he might stumble on something it would be best for him not to see. Any morning, if he gets up early, he can see a dozen streams of smoke rising from the mountain side, and if he’s got the sense of a mule, he’ll know that there’s a moonshine still at every one of them colyumns of smoke. Any baby’d know that. The sensible thing for folks to do in this part of the country, is to keep to the beaten track, and not to go too far on that. Them moonshiners is dreadful sensitive. They think folks is prying into their affairs when they ain’t no such intention and once they get that idea they make it mighty uncomfortable for whoever has come under suspicion.” “You ought to warn him, pa: He can’t know our ways.” “They ain’t my ways, I tell you that! Moon-shining ways ain’t my ways,” declared pa. Azalea didn’t entirely understand about these “moonshiners” as they were called, though she had heard about them all her life. Pa explained to her that they were people who made crude whiskey from the corn and sold it without paying the government the tax which it had placed upon liquor, and that because they did not pay this tax they had to make their whiskey in secret. The officers of the government were always on the outlook for them, and so these people had to keep on an outlook for the officers, and they were liable to think that everyone who got anywhere near them was spying on them. “On the face of it,” said pa meditatively, “I suppose it don’t seem so bad—making something you know how to make and selling it to them as wants to buy, without saying by-your-leave to no one. But the country can’t be run without money, and one of the ways it takes to raise money is by placing a big tax on liquor. As for me, I wouldn’t care if ’twas ten times bigger than it is. It’s done a heap more harm than good, to my mind, although I’m not so pigheaded as to deny that it can do good sometimes. But it ain’t just the making and selling of the whiskey in secret that hurts these moonshiners. It’s the setting themselves against the law, and getting to be outlaws, and keeping hate and fear and suspicion in their hearts early and late, and bringing up their children to the same ideas. It’s a wicked thing, Azalea, and it brings trouble beyond measuring to the folks down here.” “And yet,” said ma, “I know some moonshiners who are very pleasant people.”