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 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
A Wild Thing
It was night in the mountains of Kentucky. Wild
hills rose on all sides. Swift mountain streams flowed
rapidly up and down the mountains.
Jemina Tantrum was down at the stream, brewing
whiskey at the family still.
She was a typical mountain girl.
Her feet were bare. Her hands, large and powerful,
hung down below her knees. Her face showed the
ravages of work. Although but sixteen, she had for
over a dozen years been supporting her aged pappy
and mappy by brewing mountain whiskey.
From time to time she would pause in her task, and,
filling a dipper full of the pure, invigorating liquid, would
drain it off—then pursue her work with renewed vigor.
She would place the rye in the vat, thresh it out with
her feet and, in twenty minutes, the completed product
would be turned out.
A sudden cry made her pause in the act of draining a
dipper and look up.
"Hello," said a voice. It came from a man clad in
hunting boots reaching to his neck, who had emerged
from the wood.
"Hi, thar," she answered sullenly.
"Can you tell me the way to the Tantrums' cabin?"
"Are you uns from the settlements down thar?"
She pointed her hand down to the bottom of the hill,
where Louisville lay. She had never been there; but
once, before she was born, her great-grandfather, old
Gore Tantrum, had gone into the settlements in the company
of two marshals, and had never come back. So
the Tantrums, from generation to generation, had'learned
to dread civilization.
The man was amused. He laughed a light tinkling
laugh, the laugh of a Philadelphian. Something in the
ring of it thrilled her. She drank off another dipper of
whiskey.
"Where is Mr. Tantrum, little girl?" he asked, not
without kindness.
She raised her foot and pointed her big toe toward
the woods.
"Thar in the cabing behind those thar pines. Old
Tantrum air my old man."
The man from the settlements thanked her and strode
off. He was fairly vibrant with youth and personality.
As he walked along he whistled and sang and turned
handsprings and flapjacks, breathing in the fresh, cool
air of the mountains.
The air around the still was like wine.
Jemina Tantrum watched him entranced. No one
like him had ever come into her life before.
She sat down on the grass and counted her toes. She
counted eleven. She had learned arithmetic in the
mountain school.
| Tales of the jazz age | |