“Sure!” cried pa. “They’ll do anything for their friends and they’ll stand by each other through thick and thin. And you’re not to think that they’re all ignorant and unlearned. Some of them is smart as whips, and send their children away to school and take books out of the public library there at Lee. I could mention some not an hour’s ride from this very spot who do it. And I’ve known whole communities of moonshiners to be converted and join the church and turn from their evil ways, and they make pretty noisy church members, most of them. It seems like they take their religion hard. I’ve heard them at camp meeting and they was doing more hollering and shouting than all the rest put together. I reckon they thought the Lord had a good deal to forgive.” “Why, pa!” murmured Mrs. McBirney. “How you talk! And before the children! But now you can see, Azalea, why I don’t want you wandering around alone on these mountains. You’re likely to run into one of them stills while they’re in operation, and while they wouldn’t do any harm to a girl, they’d think it up to them to give her a dreadful scare. So you stick to the places you know about. You hear?” “Yessum.” Azalea thought about the moonshiners a good deal after this. It seemed to her to be dreadful not to be able to live in a free and open way. She could think of nothing that she would hate worse than having to hide, or to be forever on the watch. In the old days when she had traveled with the show she often had been made to feel that people did not want them around. They had, in a way, been under suspicion, and houses were always locked up more carefully when the show people came to town. Not that there was any need of it, so far as she knew. They had not been thieves; but they had been careless and dirty and miserable enough. It was very different from the life she was leading now. Pa and Ma McBirney could look anybody in the face. They would go out from their door, smiling, to meet the people driving by, and would always beg them to stop and have some spring water or fresh milk; and Jim and she were proud to be with them. Everyone seemed to like the McBirneys. Everyone thought they were good—and Azalea knew they were and that it was an honor for her to bear their name. At the same time, Azalea realized that she was somehow different from them. For example, ma had spoken of giving up trying to be like those ladies she traveled with. When she found they had so many rules and ways which she couldn’t understand, she made up her mind not to worry about all of these strange matters, but to be contented with her own people and their manner of doing things. Now Azalea felt sure that she, for her part, would not have given up.