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THE CODE OF THE MOUNTAINS
BY CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK
AUTHOR OF THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS, THE BATTLE CRY, ETC.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY
G. W. GAGE
NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
_Published May_
* * * * *
_OTHER BOOKS BY_
CHARLES NEVILLE BUCK
THE KEY TO YESTERDAY
THE LIGHTED MATCH
THE PORTAL OF DREAMS
THE CALL OF THE CUMBERLANDS
THE BATTLE CRY
[Illustration: "Newty," she said softly, "why don't you shake the dirt
of this place offen your feet?"]
THE CODE OF THE MOUNTAINS
CHAPTER I
This morning the boy from the forks of Troublesome Creek had back his
name once more. It was not a distinguished name, nor one to be flaunted
in pride of race or achievement. On the contrary, it was a synonym for
violent law-breaking and in the homely parlance of the Cumberland
ridges, where certain infractions are condoned, it stood for "pizen
meanness." Generations of Spooners before him had taken up the surname
and carried it like runners in a relay race--often into evil ways. Many
had laid down their lives and name with abruptness and violence.
When the pioneers first set their feet into the Wilderness trail out of
Virginia, some left because the vague hinterland west of the ridges
placed them "beyond the law's pursuing."
Tradition said that of the latter class were the Spooners, but Newt
Spooner had no occasion to probe the remote past for a record of
turpitude. It lay before him inscribed in a round clerical hand on the
ledger which the warden of the Frankfort Penitentiary was just closing.
Though the Governor's clemency had expunged the red charge of murder
set against his name at the tender age of eighteen, there was another
record which the Governor could not erase. A sunken grave bore testimony
in a steep mountainside burial-ground back in "Bloody Breathitt," where
dead weed stalks rattled and tangled ropes of fox-grapes bore their
fruit in due season.
However, even the name of Newt Spooner is a better thing than the Number
813, which for two years had been his designation within those gray and
fortressed walls along whose tops sentry-boxes punctuated the angles.
This morning he wore a suit of black clothes, the gift of the
commonwealth, and his eyes were fixed rather avidly on a five-dollar
note which the warden held tightly between his thumb and forefinger.
Newt knew that the bill, too, was to be his. Yet the warden seemed
needlessly deliberate in making the presentation. That functionary
intended first to have something to say; something meant in all
kindliness, but as Newt waited, shifting his bulk uneasily from foot to
foot, his narrowed eyes traveled with restlessness, and his thin lips
clamped themselves into a line indicative of neither gratitude nor
penitence. The convict's thoughts for two years had been circling with
uncomplicated directness about one focus. Newt Spooner had a fixed idea.
The office of the warden was not a cheery place. Its walls and desk and
key-racks spoke suggestively of the business administered there. The
warden tilted back in his swivel chair, and gazed at the forgiven, but
unforgiving prisoner.
"Spooner," he began in that tone which all homilies have in common;
"Spooner, you have been luckier than you had any reason to expect. It's
up to you to see that I don't get you back here again."
He gazed sternly at the boy, for he was still a boy, despite the chalky
and aged pallor of his face, despite the tight-clenched line of the thin
lips, despite the stooping and emaciated shoulders. The Kentucky
mountaineer withers into quick decay between prison walls, and, unless
appearances were deceitful, this one was already being beckoned to by
the specter of tuberculosis.
"You have been pardoned and restored to all civil rights by the
Governor," went on the official. "Your youth and ill health appealed to
some ladies who went through the prison. You are the youngest homicide
we have here. They interceded because you were only an ignorant kid when
you were drawn into this murder conspiracy."
Newt's eyes blazed evilly at the words, but he only clamped his mouth
tighter. He would not have called it a murder conspiracy. To him it was
merely "killin' a feller that needed killin'." "Since," continued the
warden quietly, "you were full of white liquor, and since you had never
had a chance to know much anyhow, those ladies got busy, and you have
another chance. You ought to feel very grateful to them. It's up to you
to prove that the experiment was worth the risk it involves--the risk
of turning an assassin loose on society."
The boy from Troublesome said nothing. From his thin chest came a deep,
racking cough. He spat on the floor, and wondered how long this man
would hold back the five-dollar bill and prolong the interview.
"Well?" The warden's voice was impatient. "Don't you hear me talking to
you? Haven't you got any sense of decent gratitude?"
A fiercely baleful wrath shot instinctively through Newt's gray
hawk-like eyes and smoldered in their deep sockets, but there still was
need to leash his anger--and conceal his purpose.
"I'm obleeged ter ye," he answered in a dead voice of mock humility,
though his tongue ached to burst into profane denunciation, "but I
hain't axed nobody ter do nothin'. I didn't 'low ter be beholden ter
nobody."
"You are 'beholden' to everybody who has befriended you," retorted the
warden with rising asperity. "Do you mean to go back to the mountains?"
At once there leaped into the released convict's mind a vision of being
spied upon and thwarted in his purpose--a purpose which the law could
not countenance. To cover his anger he fell into a fit of violent
coughing, and, when he answered, it was with the crafty semblance of
indecision.
"I 'lowed I mout go back an' see my kinfolks fer a spell."
"And after that?"
"I 'lowed," lied Spooner cautiously, "thet atter thet I'd go West."
"Now take a tip from me," commanded the warden, and, since he still held
the five-dollar bill, the boy from Troublesome was forced to accord
unwilling attention. "Every mountain man that goes away drifts
eventually back to the mountains. God knows why they do it, but they do.
You have just one chance of salvation. I had that in mind when I spoke
to the Governor and asked him to include in your pardon a restoration of
civil rights. If you get well enough to stand the physical examination,
enlist in the army. Once in, you'll have to stay three years--and in
three years a fellow can do a lot of thinking. It may make a man of you.
If you don't take that tip I'll have you back here again--as sure as God
made you--unless you get hanged instead."
The warden extended his hand containing the provision with which the
commonwealth of Kentucky invited this human brandling to rehabilitate
his life. The mountaineer bent eagerly forward and clutched at the money
with a wolfish haste of greed. Ten minutes later the prison gates swung
outward.
The Frankfort Penitentiary sits on a hill looking down to a ragged town
which straddles the Kentucky River. In the basin below somnolent streets
spread away and lose themselves in glistening turnpikes between
bluegrass farms where velvet lawns and shaded woodlands surround old
mansions that mirror the charm and flavor of rural England. The state
capital is a large village rather than a city, but to this boy who had
known only the wild isolation of the Cumberlands, where sky-high
ramparts have caught and arrested human development, Frankfort seemed a
baffling metropolis. In the lumber-yards and distilleries that cluttered
the steep river banks he saw only bewilderment and in the dome of the
capitol the symbol of a power that had jailed him; that except for his
youth would have hanged him.
One thing only he saw which struck a note of the nostalgic and brought a
catch to his throat. That river had its headwaters in his own country.
One branch flowed through his own county seat, and those knobs that
hugged its banks and framed the straggling town under the singing June
skies, were the little cousins of the mountains where his forefathers
had lived their lives and fought their battles for a hundred years.
If he followed them long enough, they would mount from knobs to
foothills and from foothills to peaks. The metaled turnpikes would
dwindle and end in clay roads. These roads would in time give way to
rougher trails, rock-strewn and licked by the little, whispering waters
that make rivers, and he would travel by creek-bed ways over which
wagons, if they go at all, must strain their axles and where men ride
mules with their luggage in saddle-bags. There forests of age-old oaks
and spruce, pines and poplars and hickory and ash would troop down and
smother in the hillsides, and the rhododendron would be in bloom just
now. The laurel bushes would be all a-glisten and the elder tops would
be tossing sprays of foam-like blossom between towering sentinels of
rock.
But the beauties of the rugged home country had for him another meaning.
At the roots of the laurel a man can crouch unseen with his rifle
cradled against his shoulder to "lay-way" an enemy who has over-lived
his time.
When he had a certain man in rifle-range, the rest would be elementally
simple. He had spent more than two years thinking of that and evolving
every needful plan in detail. There was now no need of haste. After all
this thinking he could afford to consult his leisure and enjoy the
pleasures of anticipation. When once the deed was done, as the warder
had reminded him, there was the probable shadow of the gallows. But it
should be said for the late Number 813 that in his reflections was no
germ of vacillation or indecision. His one definite motive in life was
what he deemed just reprisal. He was willing to pay for that without
haggling over the cost, but he was not willing to defeat his end by
hasty incaution.
He had been in prison over two years and was still very weak. He
recognized with contempt the tremor of his hand. Once that hand had been
so steady that all his squirrels fell from the hickories pierced through
the head. It would be a little time before he could again command that
nicety of rifle-craft. But now he must get home and home lay about a
hundred and fifteen miles "over yon." He could reach Jackson by rail,
but that would cost money, and there was ammunition to be bought and
other matters of importance, and his capital was precisely five dollars.
Besides, railroad trains were luxurious and effete; they were not for
him. He would "jest natcherly take his foot in his hand and light
out"--pausing only for a little "snack" to eat and a flask to cheer his
journey.
He made his way slowly down into the center of the town: a town which
had come to recognize at a glance these prison-given suits of black;
these faces pasty with the pallor of confinement; this shamble fathered
by the slouchy swing of the lock-step. For the June morning when No. 813
became again Newt Spooner was in the year 1897, and the ancient rigors
of prison life still held.
Eyes turned curiously on the shambling derelict, but the only expression
on Newt's face was one of surly defiance to the world. The only
sentiment that stirred in his breast was such as might have brooded in
the narrow and poisoned brain of a rattle-snake, lying close-coiled by
the laurel roots along his native creek-beds.
Prisons are to reform and teach lessons of law. Newt Spooner had been in
prison and was now out. He had already known how to hate, but now he
knew how to hate with a greater tensity. Also, he had learned to cloak
his animosity behind a craftier concealment.
He had grown up as a cub among wolf-like men, running with the pack.
From his mother's shrunken breast he had drawn bitterness toward his
foes and "meanness."
He remembered his boyhood surprise at the shocked face of the circuit
rider when his father had laconically announced: "Stranger, thet thar
boy's done drunk licker sence he was a baby. We weaned him on hit. Hit's
good licker, 'cause we made hit ourselves--an' we hain't paid no damn'
Gov'ment tax on hit, neither." But before him no Spooner had worn felon
stripes, though many had been felons. That he had done so branded him
with disgrace, and until he should remove that stigma by punishing the
witness upon whose sworn word his conviction had been based, he must
face the scorn of the battle-scarred members of the man-pack that still
ranged free. So, as Newt Spooner turned his face homeward between sunny
pasture lands and soft woodlands and golden grain fields and set his
feet into the Lexington turnpike, young Henry Falkins became a man
marked down for death.