Bawbs O' Blue Ridge

Summary

High in the bruised hollers of the Blue Ridge, where dawn creeps like pale smoke through scrub-pine and laurel, Barbara Colby—called Bawbs by wind-rough kin—receives a deathbed oracle: five thousand war-torn dollars willed by the father already turned to mountain clay, and a caveat sharp as a case-knife—men will covet the coin, not the girl. Into this echoing hollow arrives Ralph Gunther, self-professed ink-slinger hunting hush for his next folio of lies. He drifts, all city-leather boots and fountain-pen swagger, through fog that smells of cider and coal. Bawbs, stung by loneliness and the electric promise of paper romance, mistakes his gaze for wonder rather than wallet. Between fiddle dances on splintered porches and whispered vows by lightning-bug hush, the question mutates: is love still love when the purse-strings tighten like a noose? Aunt Lila’s warning haunts every footstep, a banjo-pluck of dread, until a final test—gunpowder, ink-stained confessions, and the clatter of a typewriter hurled into the river—reveals whether blood or bullion writes the last line of this ballad.

Synopsis

Just before mountain girl Barbara "Bawbs" Colby's aunt dies, she reveals that Bawbs' deceased father had left her $5000, but to watch out for men because they would only be interested in her for her money. Her aunt's warning is tested when Bawbs falls for a new arrival in the mountains named Ralph Gunther, who says he is an author who's there for the peace and quiet he needs to write.