orn he raised on his own place and in them
days there wasn't ever the spyin' eyes of the law snoopin' around."
Jorde rolled his walking staff between his rough hands and looked away.
"Sometimes I'd change places with Cynthie whilst she tended the fire. We
made good whiskey," he said neither boastfully nor modestly. "We sold it
for an honest price. That's the way we learnt Ben to do. But, hi
crackies, what takes my hide and taller is when a son o' mine turns out
yaller. I never raised my boy for no chicanery." Old Jorde's voice
raised in indignation. However, when he spoke again there was a note of
tolerance even pity in his tone.

"Ben would never 'a' done it only for that Jezebel he married down to
Cartersville and brought home here to the mountains. Effie, like Delilah
that made mock of her man Samson, was the cause of it all. Ben just
nat'erly couldn't make whiskey fast enough to give that woman all her
cravin's and now you see where it got my poor boy. A man's a right,"
said the old fellow in deadly earnest, "to marry a girl he's growed up
with--stead of tryin' to get above his raisin'. See where it got my poor
boy," he repeated. The troubled eyes sought the neglected grave in the
scrubby orchard far below.

There was no marker, not even a rough stone from the mountain side at
head or foot like on the other Foley graves in the Foley burying ground
on the brow of the hill. Only the sagging fence enclosed Ben's resting
place. "It was hard to do," old Jorde said grimly, "but it had to be
so's no other Foley will follow Ben's course."

With that he slowly arose and led the way to a pile of soot-covered
stones.

"Now close here was where the thumpin' keg stood," he began to indicate
positions, "and yonder the still."

There was nothing but charred remnants of staves and rusty hoops left of
the barrel through which the copper worm had run, while the copper still
itself was reduced to a battered heap. The worm and the thumping keg and
all the essentials for making whiskey leaped into a living scene,
however, when Jorde Foley got to telling of the days when he and Cynthie
and young Ben, peaceable and contented, earned a meager living at the
craft.

"Set your still right about here," Jorde hovered over the remnants of
the stone furnace, "and you break your mash once in so often. A man's
got to know when it is working right. The weather has a heap to do with
it fermenting. Sometimes it takes longer than other times. No