In Happy Valley | Page 8

would not be a busy day with Uncle
Jerry at the mill--there would not be more than one or two ahead of her
and her meal would soon be ground. Several times he quit work to go
to the door and look down the road, and finally he saw her coming.
Again she gave him a shy "how-dye," and his eyes followed her up
Wolf Run until she was out of sight.
The miracle these simple acts would have been to others was none to
him. He was hardly self-conscious, much less analytical, and he went
back to his work again.
A little way up that creek Lum himself lived in a log cabin, and he
lived alone. This in itself was as rare as a miracle in the hills, and the
reason, while clear, was still a mystery: Lum had never been known to
look twice at the same woman. He was big, kind, taciturn, ox-eyed,
calm. He was so good-natured that anybody could banter him, but

nobody ever carried it too far except a bully from an adjoining county
one court day. Lum picked him up bodily and dashed him to the ground
so that blood gushed from his nose and he lay there bewildered, white,
and still. Lum rarely went to church, and he never talked religion,
politics, or neighborhood gossip. He was really thought to be quite
stupid, in spite of the fact that he could make lightning calculations
about crops, hogs, and cattle in his head. However, one man knew
better, but he was a "furriner," a geologist, a "rock-pecker" from the
Bluegrass. To him Lum betrayed an uncanny eye in discovering coal
signs and tracing them to their hidden beds, and wide and valuable
knowledge of the same. Once the foreigner lost his barometer just when
he was trying to locate a coal vein on the side of the mountain opposite.
Two days later Lum pointed to a ravine across the valley.
"You'll find that coal not fer from the bottom o' that big poplar over
thar." The geologist stared, but he went across and found the coal and
came back mystified.
"How'd you do it?"
Lum led him up Wolf Run. Where the vein showed by the creek-side
Lum had built a little dam, and when the water ran even with the
mud-covered stones he had turned the stream aside. The geologist lay
down, sighted across the surface of the water, and his eye caught the
base of the big poplar.
"Hit's the Lord's own level," said Lum, and back he went to his work,
the man looking after him and muttering:
"The Lord's own level."
Hardly knowing it, Lum waited for grinding day. There was the same
exchange of "how-dyes" between him and the girl, going and coming,
and Lum noted that the remaining hind shoe was gone from the old nag
and that one of the front ones was going. This too was gone the next
time she passed, and for the first time Lum spoke:
"Yo' hoss needs shoein'."

"She ain't wuth it," said the girl. Two hours later, when the girl came
back, Lum took up the conversation again.
"Oh, yes, she is," he drawled, and the girl slid from her sack of meal
and watched him, which she could do fearlessly, for Lum never looked
at her. He had never asked her name and he did not ask her now.
"I'm Jeb Mullins's gal," she said. "Pap'll be comin' 'long hyeh some day
an' pay ye."
"My name's Lum--Lum Chapman."
"They calls me Marthy."
He lifted her bag to the horse's bony withers with one hand, but he did
not offer to help her mount. He watched her again as she rode away,
and when she looked back he turned with a queer feeling into his shop.
Two days later Jeb Mullins came by.
"Whad' I owe ye?" he asked.
"Nothin'," said Lum gruffly.
The next day the old man brought down a broken plough on his
shoulder, and to the same question he got the same answer:
"Nothin'." So he went back and teased Martha, who blushed when she
next passed the door of the shop, and this time Lum did not go out to
watch her down the road.
Sunday following, Parson Small, the circuit-rider, preached in the
open-air "meetin'-house," that had the sky for a roof and blossoming
rhododendron for walls, and--wonder of wonders--Lum Chapman was
there. In the rear he sat, and everybody turned to look at Lum. So
simple was he that the reason of his presence was soon plain, for he
could no more keep his eyes from the back of Martha Mullins's yellow
head than a needle could keep its point from the North Pole. The
circuit-rider on his next circuit would preach