or his mate from a distant crag. She had grown used to his howls.
He had come close to her cabin once in the day-time. She had tried to
creep on him and show her friendliness. But he had fled in terror at the
first glimpse of her dress through the parting underbrush.

An owl was calling from his dead tree-top down the valley. She smiled at
his familiar, tremulous call. Her own eyes were wide as his tonight.
No sight or sound of Nature among the crags about her cabin had for her
spirit any terror. The night was her mantle.

She added to the meager living which she had wrung from her mountain
farm by trading with the illicit distillers of the backwoods of Yancey
County. Too ignorant to run a distillery of her own, she had stored
their goods with such skill that the hiding-place had never been
discovered. She loved good whiskey herself. She had tried to find in its
fiery depths the dreams of happiness life had so cruelly denied her.

The hiding-place of this whiskey had puzzled the revenue officers of
every administration for years. They had watched her house day and
night. Not one of them had ever struck the trail to her storehouse.

The game had excited her imagination. She loved its daring and
danger. That there was the slightest element of wrong or crime in her
association with the moonshiners of her native heath had never for a
moment entered her mind. It was no crime to make whiskey. This was the
first article of the creed of the true North Carolina mountaineer.
They had from the first declared that the tax levied by the Federal
Government on the product of their industry was an infamous act of
tyranny. They had fought this tyranny for two generations. They would
fight it as long as there was breath in their bodies and a single load
of powder and buckshot for their rifles.

Nance considered herself a heroine in the pride of her soul for the
shrewd and successful defiance she had given the revenue officers for so
many years.

She had been too cunning to even allow one of her own people to know the
secret of her store house. For that reason it had never been discovered.
She always stored the whiskey temporarily in the potato shed or under
the cabin floor until night and then alone carried it to the place she
had discovered.

She laughed softly at the thought of this deep hiding-place tonight.
Its temperature never varied winter or summer. Not a track had ever been
left at its door. She might live a hundred years