“I’d have learned their way of doing things,” she said to herself. “I’d have found out about those things that they knew and I didn’t, ’deed I would. I just hate to have folks get ahead of me! I’m like old Nannie; I want to keep up with everything on the road. And Jim does too, I reckon. I hope pa and ma will let us go to school when it opens, though Jim says it’s a dreadful long walk. But I don’t mind walking. Mercy, if anybody knows how to walk, I’m the person!” It was the very next Sunday that Azalea found out what the moonshiners would do even to a person they were not much afraid of. She had gone to the spring house early, to get the cream and butter, when she saw some one dashing out of the bushes. It was a boy, but it took her several moments to find out that it was some one she knew. When she made out that it was her old friend Hi Kitchell with that white face and those frightened eyes, she was amazed. “Whatever ails you, Hi?” she called, running toward him. “You haven’t been bitten by a rattler have you?” But Hi was too out of breath to answer at once, and he dropped down on the seat by the spring house while Azalea brought him a glass of water. “It was men!” he managed to gasp at last. “It was men, Zalie. They was going to kill me, and I hadn’t done no manner of harm to them. I was walking up the trail—for I thought I might as well be here in time for breakfast, since Mrs. McBirney had asked me to spend the day—and I thought I’d take some short cuts. So plunk I went up the mountain, and the first thing I knowed, I had run plumb into a whole gang of men working like good fellows with a fire and coils of pipe and kettles, and I don’t know what all. Soon as my eyes lighted on to them I guessed it was a moonshiners’ still, and I tried to crawl away without anybody’s seeing me. But, sir, one fellow, he caught sight of me, and he grabbed his gun and started after me, and two others grabbed their guns, and I just hiked up the mountain and they after me. But laws, I couldn’t run with them fellows. Seems as if their legs was about three yards long. They got me in no time and they stood me up against a tree and backed off and pointed their guns at me and told me if I didn’t promise I’d never, never tell on them, they’d put so many holes into me my mother’d think I was a sieve. Well, I give my word I wouldn’t tell where their place was, nor anything about them, and they let me go, but they said if I wasn’t out of sight in two minutes they’d fire anyway. And they run after me a ways just to give me a start.” He grinned up at Azalea, as if half ashamed of the whole affair, and she laughed back at him, reassuringly, though her face was rather white too. “But you’ve told me, Hi,” she said. “And you’ve broken your promise.” Hi frowned.