"Little Buck and Beezy," said Nancy Card, addressing them both, "Yo' unc' Pony's in jail. What you-all goin' to do about it?" The small brown man of six stopped, his feet planted wide on the sward, his freckled face grave and stern as became his sex. "Ef the boys goes down for to git him out, I'm goin' along," Little Buck announced seriously. "Is they goin', granny?" "I'll set my old rooster on the jail man, an' hit'll claw 'im," announced Beezy, reckless of distance and likelihood. "My old rooster can claw dest awful, ef he ain't got but one leg." Nancy chuckled. These grandchildren were the delight of her heart. The rain had ceased for the moment; the old man moved to the porch edge, sighting at the sky. "I don't know whar Blatch is a-keepin' hisself," he observed. "Mebbe I better be a-steppin'." But even as he spoke a tall young mountaineer swung into view down the road, dripping from the recent rain, and with that resentful air the best of us get from aggressions of the weather. Blatchley Turrentine, old Jephthah's nephew, was as brown as an Indian, and his narrow, glinting, steel-grey eyes looked out oddly cold and alien from under level black brows, and a fell of stiff black hair. When the orphaned Judith, living in her Uncle Jephthah's family, was fourteen, the household had removed from the old Turrentine place--which was rented to Blatchley Turrentine--to her better farm, whose tenant had proved unsatisfactory. Well hidden in a gulch on the Turrentine acres there was an illicit still, what the mountain people call a blockade still; and it had been in pretty constant operation in earlier years. When Jephthah abandoned those stony fields for Judith's more productive acres, he definitely turned his own back upon this feature, but Blatch Turrentine revived the illegal activities and enlisted the old man's boys in them. Jeff and Andy had a tobacco patch in one corner where the ground suited, and in another field Jim Cal raised a little corn. Aside from these small ventures, the place was given over entirely to the secret still. The father held scornfully aloof; his attitude was characteristic. "Ef I pay no tax I'll make no whiskey," he declared. "You-all boys will find yourselves behind bars many a time when you'd ruther be out squirrel-huntin'. Ef you make blockade whiskey every fool that gits mad at you has got a stick to hold over you. You are good-Lord-good-devil to everybody, for fear they'll lead to yo' still; or else you mix up with folks about the business and kill somebody an' git a bad name. These here blockaded stills calls every worthless feller in the district; most o' the foolishness in this country goes on around 'em when the boys gits filled up. I let every man choose his callin', but I don't choose to be no moonshiner, and ef you boys is wise you'll say the same." As Blatchley came up now and caught sight of the animals tethered at the fence he began irritably: