Judith was a lithe, active, slim little creature, monkey-like in the agility with which she could climb trees and shin up poles and vault over fences. Her bare, brown toes took hold like fingers. There was something wild and evasive about her swift, sinuous little body, alive with quick, unexpected movements, like those of a young animal. She was like a naughty little goblin that springs up mockingly in your path and before you can reach for it has run up a tree or vanished into the thicket. These characteristics of her body were somewhat contradicted by her face, vivid and bold in color and outline and habitually serious. Her eyebrows were black and straight and rather too heavy; and beneath them her gray eyes were dark, clear, and steady. She had a way of seeming to look through and through you when she fixed you with even a passing glance. These qualities of elusiveness and boldness seemed bafflingly interwoven in her character and made her a hard pupil to deal with. Lena never knew what to expect from her.
Without doubt the troublesomeness of Judith was partly due to the fact that she was better fed than most of the other children. Bill was one who never stinted his children in their food if he could possibly help it. When there was a shortage he let it affect his own plate. The Pippingers were not so saving as most of their neighbors; they did not take every ounce of butter to the village store to sell at fifteen cents a pound. Eggs, too, were not entire strangers to their table. The fact of comparatively good nourishment did not, however, explain away all of Judith's bad conduct; for the other Pippinger children, fed on the same fare, were model pupils in the school. There was something then in the girl's own inherited nature that made her different from her brothers and sisters and from the docile, mouse-like little girls and boys who sat beside her on the school benches.
In backwoods corners of America, where the people have been poor and benighted for several generations and where for as many generations no new blood has entered, where everybody is cousin, first, second, or third, to everybody else for miles around, the children are mostly dull of mind and scrawny of body. Not infrequently, however, there will be born a child of clear features and strong, straight body, as a reminder of earlier pioneer days when clear features and strong, straight bodies were the rule rather than the exception. Bill Pippinger had two such children, Crawford and Judith. Crawford was, like many of the good-looking children of the neighborhood, merely an empty shell. He had inherited the appearance of some pioneer ancestor without any of the qualities of initiative and energy that had made him a pioneer. Judith, however, was quite different. Sometimes when she was bringing up Roanie and Reddie from the pasture at a fast trot or driving the mules out of the cornfield with much whooping, arm-waving, and bad language, Bill, watching her dynamic, long-legged little figure, would say with a sort of restrained admiration: "Land, that little gal's got life enough for a dozen sech--too much life, too much life for a gal!"