This don’t pretend to be “Literature.” This is just a tale for red-blooded folks who want a story and not just a lot of “psychological” stuff or “analysis.” Boy, you’ll love it! Read it here, see it in the movies, play it on the phonograph, run it through the sewing-machine.
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.

Jemima Tantrum was down at the stream, brewing¹ 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 ravages³ of work. Although but sixteen, she had for over a dozen years been supporting her aged⁴ 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 vigor⁵.

She would place the rye in the vat⁶, 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.

“Can you tell me the way to the Tantrums’ cabin?”

“Are you uns from the settlements down thar?”

She pointed⁷ 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 Gore⁸ 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

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