“That’s her,” said Aunt Lizy, coming back with some haste, before Uncle Ranz could weld his broken narrative. “She said she’d try it, fer Nathe had a fine farm, an’ Bune Waller said the same. Bune wuz an old maid with one leg crippled up ’count of a snake-bite when she wuz little. The old folks thought Bune would suit better’n the widder, not havin’ any young-uns to mix up with Nathe’s, so they went to him an’ told him that Bune wuz the best they could do. I’ve always wished I could ’a’ been there when they told him. Uncle Joe Withers, he wuz senior deacon then, he said Nathe cut his galluses an’ went straight up. When he come down an’ got his breath, he says to ’em, ‘Who’s counted the finest-lookin’ single woman in Silver Valley?’ an’ they ’lowed Callie Brown wuz the takin’est one, sence she’d come back from South C’liny, where she’d been workin’. But she wuzn’t keen to marry, not a mountain man anyway, fer she wouldn’t look at Mince Peters, who wuz runnin’ a payin’ sawmill, an’ the best ketch ’twixt Cherokee an’ Hiwassee. Nathe ast ’em would she be good to the childern, an’ they ’lowed she would, she looked like she’d jump out o’ the way of a worm ruther’n step on it, but he couldn’t git her, they said, not ef he’s as rich as cream in a cracklin’ gourd. She didn’t have no call fer holdin’ off though, Uncle Joe told him, fer she hadn’t saved a brownie workin’ in the mills, put it all on her back, he reckoned, an’ she didn’t have no home, her folks all bein’ dead. ‘But ef you go to see her,’ he says, ‘you’ll ride back jest like you come. She’s livin’ at my house, an’ I know Callie.’ Nathe never paid no more ’tention to what they said, an’ fixed hissef up fer courtin’.”