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FROM

MOTHERING ON PERILOUS

(KENTUCKY MOUNTAIN SKETCHES)

VIII. NUCKY'S BIG BROTHERS

BY LUCY FURMAN
Author of "Stories of a Sanctified Town"

ROM the beginning of the term in August, Miss Loring and the cottage boys at the Settlement School on Perilous heard large and frequent tales from Nucky Marrs about his two big brothers Blant and Ezry. With pardonable pride he recounted their deeds of valor, which had begun in their early teens, when, by reason of their father's health having been shattered by a gunshot-wound, they had been obliged to take upon themselves the defense of the family honor in the hereditary "war" with the Cheevers. By the time Blant was twenty-one and Ezry nineteen, the two had done much to enhance the reputation of Trigger Branch, Powderhorn Creek, and even of "Bloody Boyne," the county in which they lived. Needless to say, the other eleven cottage boys listened to these accounts with envy and jealousy. Not one of them had an active war" going on in his family; not one lived in a neighborhood where, in favorable seasons, "they bring a dead man down the branch every week"; not one had big brothers as brave, as daring, as quick with the trigger, as Blant and Ezry. Nucky's one regret was that he had come along so many years after the big boys and had been unable to assist them materially in the family quarrel. Of course he had

helped in small ways, such as spying, keeping a lookout, and the like, and had lost no opportunity to "layway" and ambush infant Cheevers, and "tole" them into desperate encounters; but he longed for the day when he might emulate Blant and Ezry and rid the earth of some of the enemies.

Blant and Ezry had not only these social duties to perform for their family, but various others, some of an unusual character. It goes without saying that, since Mr. Marrs's lung had been punctured by a Cheever bullet, they were the breadwinners. They "tended the crop" on the steep mountain-sides in summer, and logged, cleared new-ground, and did other Herculean labors at other seasons; and, since the death of their mother a year before Nucky's arrival at the school, they had also sustained many of the cares of the household. Three or four days after the birth of her last child, Mrs. Marrs had gone out to hoe in the onion-patch one day when the boys were away, and had been overtaken by a sudden, drenching shower, catching cold, and dying within the week. She was intensely devoted to her eight children, and on her death-bed she had requested her husband never to put a "stepmaw" over them, and had instructed Blant

and Ezry to assist their father in raising the younger ones, confiding to Blant's special care the week-old baby, "your paw being too puny to set up with it of nights." After the two big boys there was a gap in the family caused by the death of four children from typhoid; then followed Nucky, who was eleven, and the five younger children. Blant and Ezry accepted their trust with sincere devotion. Their father was able to do a good deal of the cooking and housework, but they assisted him even in this, and, when not at work outside, tirelessly and tenderly minded the children. At night "the babe" always slept at Blant's side,-or, rather, the first three colic months it did not sleep, and Blant patiently walked the floor with it, jolted it on his knees, toasted its little feet before the fire, warmed its bottle, gave it generous doses of corn liquor, and, as Nucky said, "made it sugar-teats and soot-tea as good as a woman."

During the latter part of this colic-time, Mr. Marrs became so desperate by reason of being constantly disturbed in his sleep that he concluded there was nothing for it but to get a woman in the house; and one evening he sadly and secretly started off across Elbow Mountain to propose to a capable widow over in Sassafras Hollow. On the very summit of the mountain, he was confronted by his wife's spirit, which, with denunciation and warning, turned him back, trembling and repentant, to renew his promise to the children that they should never have a stepmaw, and from that day to settle down to the lonely estate of a "widow-man."

From all accounts, Nucky's mother had been a woman of remarkable mind and heart, worthy of the rare affection her children cherished for her. Nucky was proud of telling that, although she had never seen the inside of a school-house, she had yet been a "scholar," and able to read, write, and figure, her great-grandfather, when a very old man of nearly a hundred, and unable to do anything but sit by the fire, having imparted to her a portion of his own learning. She had proved such an apt, eager pupil that, on his death, he had left her his most valued possessions—a few ancient books. One of these was a Bible, another a story-book, with pictures, "about a man by the name of Christian, that fit with devils, and come

near being et up by a jont ten times as big as him." The latter book had been the chief delight of Nucky's infancy. All this was most interesting to Miss Loring, as being another proof that the early settlers were men of an education which isolation and the hard struggle for existence made impossible to their descendants.

Nucky was continually expecting Blant and Ezry over to visit him at the school, and getting word from passers-by that they aimed to come soon; and Miss Loring and the cottage boys were most eager to see the heroes materialize. But it appeared that, although the babe was now more than a year old and done with colic, Blant was still unable to make up his mind to leave it overnight.

The autumn passed, and almost any story Miss Loring read or told Nucky would be able to match with performances of Blant and Ezry and their best friend Richard Tarrant, who always assisted them in their undertakings. Blant, however, was the star actor on every occasion. When, for instance, along in December, they were reading the story of Ulysses, and reached the place where the hero and his friends escape from the cave of Polyphemus, Nucky told of the last time Blant had been arrested for necessarily killing a Cheever (when a Cheever and a Marrs met it was only a question of the quickest trigger), and how, on the way to the county-seat afterward, the officers and prisoner were overtaken by darkness and compelled to stop all night at a wayside house. Blant went to bed in an upper room, handcuffed, between the sheriff and a deputy, each of whom retired with a loaded revolver in his hand. In the morning, when the officers awoke, the prisoner was gone, while the quilt that had covered the three swung from the window, and beneath it, on the ground, lay the two revolvers, placed neatly side by side.

Christmas came and went, and still no Blant and Ezry appeared. The children had returned from their holiday visits home, and the first Saturday evening thereafter, which happened to be the fifth of January, Miss Loring and her boys sat around the fire, again reading Ulysses. There was a violent interruption, however, when Ulysses permits Scylla to snatch six of his friends out of the ship for a meal. "Dad burn him! I 'm

done with him!" "Why n't he grab his ax and chop off them six heads when he seed 'em a-coming?" "Any man can't fight for his friends better be dead!" "Ongrateful 's worse 'n pizen!" "Don't want to hear no more about no such pukestocking as him!" "Better shet up the book!" were some of the sentiments. Miss Loring bowed to the storm and shut the book, and conversation finally simmered down to smoother levels, touching upon the adventures of the boys themselves during the holidays. These seemed to Miss Loring exciting enough; but nearly every boy was bewailing the fact that he had had to return to the school before Old Christ

mas.

"I've heard you boys speak of Old Christmas a number of times," said Miss Loring. "Now, what on earth is it?"

"Old Christmas is sure-enough Christmas," replied Taulbee, gravely. "You brought-on women thinks New Christmas is Christmas, but it ain't. Real Christmas comes to-morrow, on the sixth of January; and to-night is real Christmas eve.”

"What makes you think so?"

"Well, all the old folks says so, for one thing, and I think they knows better than young ones; and, for another, I think the beastes and plants knows better still. Tonight's the night when the elder blossoms out and the cattle kneels down and prays. You can hear 'em a-lowing and a-mowing at midnight if you stay awake and listen."

Miss Loring had some recollection of the English calendar having been set forward eleven days in the middle of the eighteenth century, and of the refusal of many of the people to accept the new dates, and specially the new-style Christmas. This survival in the mountain country seemed to her as wonderful as that of the old English ballads, and the good old Shaksperian words, obsolete elsewhere.

"What do people do on Old Christmas? Do they give presents?" she asked. "No, indeed," said Taulbee. "They "They never heared tell of such a new-fangle thing. The old folks they cook up a week or two beforehand, and lay in a good stock of cider and liquor, for hospitality, so 's they can offer a-plenty to eat and drink, and then when Christmas comes they set around and hold their hands all day (it would be a sin to work then), and

tries to keep the young folks from antikin' around too much, for they claim it's a solemn season. But the girls they mostly gets out and visits and sees what little fun they can (th' ain't no real fun no time, though, for women), and the boys they take their nags and pistols and jugs and rides up and down the road or the creek, hollering and shooting and making what noise they able to. It's what you might call a dangerous time to be out in."

Miss Loring and the boys all agreed to wake up at midnight that night and hear the cattle "lowing and mowing"; but they failed to set the alarm-clock, and unfortunately slept through the miraculous hour.

On the Tuesday following, Miss Loring was passing through the school-yard on her way to dinner at noon when she saw a crowd rapidly gathering at the fence. A man on horseback outside was talking and gesticulating. As she joined the crowd, he was telling how, on Old Christmas morning, Blant and Ezry Marrs, Rich Tarrant, and a lot of the boys, were galloping up and down Powderhorn, drinking, shooting, and celebrating the day, when Rich recklessly and foolishly dashed out on Blant from behind a large rock, and Blant, with his everready instinct for the Cheevers made more keen by liquor, fired on the instant, before he saw who it really was, killing Rich dead. Blant, said the news-bearer, was in a deplorable state of mind, first attempting to end his own life, and, foiled in this, sending word to the sheriff to come and arrest him. Though Blant lived in Boyne, the shooting had occurred on the lower. reaches of Powderhorn, in Kent County, and the sheriff and deputies were now bringing both Blant and Ezry to the jail. in the village near the school, Ezry having opposed Blant's surrender and fired into the posse when it arrived, and being arrested for "contempt."

All the rest of that day, with pale face and straining eyes, Nucky watched the road; and the other boys kept just as near the front fence as possible. A little before dark, the cavalcade came along. Between two armed men rode Blant, his face rigid with misery and horror; Ezry, sullen and defiant of aspect, was behind, between two others. Nucky leaped into Blant's stirrup and rode along with him to the jail, the

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