Spring was coming: and, meanwhile, that late autumn and short winter,
things went merrily on at the gap in some ways, and in some ways--not.
Within eight miles of the place, for instance, the man fell ill--the man
who was to take up Hale's options--and he had to be taken home. Still
Hale was undaunted: here he was and here he would stay--and he would try
again. Two other young men, Bluegrass Kentuckians, Logan and
Macfarlan, had settled at the gap--both lawyers and both of pioneer,
Indian-fighting blood. The report of the State geologist had been spread
broadcast. A famous magazine writer had come through on horseback and
had gone home and given a fervid account of the riches and the beauty of
the region. Helmeted Englishmen began to prowl prospectively around the
gap sixty miles to the southwest. New surveying parties were directing
lines for the rocky gateway between the iron ore and the coal. Engineers
and coal experts passed in and out. There were rumours of a furnace
and a steel plant when the railroad should reach the place. Capital had
flowed in from the East, and already a Pennsylvanian was starting a main
entry into a ten-foot vein of coal up through the gap and was coking
it. His report was that his own was better than the Connellsville coke,
which was the standard: it was higher in carbon and lower in ash. The
Ludlow brothers, from Eastern Virginia, had started a general store. Two
of the Berkley brothers had come over from Bluegrass Kentucky and their
family was coming in the spring. The bearded Senator up the valley, who
was also a preacher, had got his Methodist brethren interested--and the
community was further enriched by the coming of the Hon. Samuel Budd,
lawyer and budding statesman. As a recreation, the Hon. Sam was an
anthropologist: he knew the mountaineers from Virginia to Alabama and
they were his pet illustrations of his pet theories of the effect of
a mountain environment on human life and character. Hale took a great
fancy to him from the first moment he saw his smooth, ageless, kindly
face, surmounted by a huge pair of spectacles that were hooked behind
two large ears, above which his pale yellow hair, parted in the middle,
was drawn back with plaster-like precision. A mayor and a constable
had been appointed, and the Hon. Sam had just finished his first
case--Squire Morton and the Widow Crane, who ran a boarding-house, each
having laid claim to three pigs that obstructed traffic in the town. The
Hon. Sam was sitting by the stove, deep in thought, when Hale came
into the hotel and he lifted his great glaring lenses and waited for no
introduction:
“Brother,” he said, “do you know twelve reliable witnesses come on
the stand and SWORE them pigs belonged to the squire's sow, and twelve
equally reliable witnesses SWORE them pigs belonged to the Widow Crane's
sow? I shorely was a heap perplexed.”
“That was curious.” The Hon. Sam laughed:
“Well, sir, them intelligent pigs used both them sows as mothers, and
may be they had another mother somewhere else. They would breakfast with
the Widow Crane's sow and take supper with the squire's sow. And so them
witnesses, too, was naturally perplexed.”
Hale waited while the Hon. Sam puffed his pipe into a glow:
“Believin', as I do, that the most important principle in law is
mutually forgivin' and a square division o' spoils, I suggested a
compromise. The widow said the squire was an old rascal an' thief and
he'd never sink a tooth into one of them shoats, but that her lawyer
was a gentleman--meanin' me--and the squire said the widow had been
blackguardin' him all over town and he'd see her in heaven before she
got one, but that HIS lawyer was a prince of the realm: so the other
lawyer took one and I got the other.”
“What became of the third?”
The Hon. Sam was an ardent disciple of Sir Walter Scott:
“Well, just now the mayor is a-playin' Gurth to that little runt for
costs.”
Outside, the wheels of the stage rattled, and as half a dozen strangers
trooped in, the Hon. Sam waved his hand: “Things is comin'.”
Things were coming. The following week “the booming editor” brought in
a printing-press and started a paper. An enterprising Hoosier soon
established a brick-plant. A geologist--Hale's predecessor in Lonesome
Cove--made the Gap his headquarters, and one by one the vanguard of
engineers, surveyors, speculators and coalmen drifted in. The wings of
progress began to sprout, but the new town-constable soon tendered his
resignation with informality and violence. He had arrested a Falin,
whose companions straightway took him from custody and set him free.
Straightway the constable threw his pistol and badge of office to the
ground.
“I've fit an' I've hollered fer help,” he shouted, almost crying with
rage, “an' I've fit agin. Now this town can go to hell”: and he picked
up his pistol but left his symbol of law and order in the dust. Next
morning there was a new constable, and only that afternoon when Hale
stepped into the Ludlow Brothers' store he found the constable already
busy. A line of men with revolver or knife in sight was drawn up inside
with their backs to Hale, and beyond them he could see the new constable
with a man under arrest. Hale had not forgotten his promise to himself
and he began now:
“Come on,” he called quietly, and when the men turned at the sound of
his voice, the constable, who was of sterner stuff than his predecessor,
pushed through them, dragging his man after him.
“Look here, boys,” said Hale calmly. “Let's not have any row. Let him go
to the mayor's office. If he isn't guilty, the mayor will let him go. If
he is, the mayor will give him bond. I'll go on it myself. But let's not
have a row.”
Now, to the mountain eye, Hale appeared no more than the ordinary man,
and even a close observer would have seen no more than that his face was
clean-cut and thoughtful, that his eye was blue and singularly clear
and fearless, and that he was calm with a calmness that might come from
anything else than stolidity of temperament--and that, by the way, is
the self-control which counts most against the unruly passions of other
men--but anybody near Hale, at a time when excitement was high and a
crisis was imminent, would have felt the resultant of forces emanating
from him that were beyond analysis. And so it was now--the curious power
he instinctively had over rough men had its way.
“Go on,” he continued quietly, and the constable went on with his
prisoner, his friends following, still swearing and with their weapons
in their hands. When constable and prisoner passed into the mayor's
office, Hale stepped quickly after them and turned on the threshold with
his arm across the door.
“Hold on, boys,” he said, still good-naturedly. “The mayor can attend to
this. If you boys want to fight anybody, fight me. I'm unarmed and you
can whip me easily enough,” he added with a laugh, “but you mustn't come
in here,” he concluded, as though the matter was settled beyond further
discussion. For one instant--the crucial one, of course--the men
hesitated, for the reason that so often makes superior numbers of no
avail among the lawless--the lack of a leader of nerve--and without
another word Hale held the door. But the frightened mayor inside let the
prisoner out at once on bond and Hale, combining law and diplomacy, went
on the bond.
Only a day or two later the mountaineers, who worked at the brick-plant
with pistols buckled around them, went on a strike and, that night, shot
out the lights and punctured the chromos in their boarding-house. Then,
armed with sticks, knives, clubs and pistols, they took a triumphant
march through town. That night two knives and two pistols were whipped
out by two of them in the same store. One of the Ludlows promptly blew
out the light and astutely got under the counter. When the combatants
scrambled outside, he locked the door and crawled out the back window.
Next morning the brick-yard malcontents marched triumphantly again and
Hale called for volunteers to arrest them. To his disgust only Logan,
Macfarlan, the Hon. Sam Budd, and two or three others seemed willing to
go, but when the few who would go started, Hale, leading them, looked
back and the whole town seemed to be strung out after him. Below the
hill, he saw the mountaineers drawn up in two bodies for battle and, as
he led his followers towards them, the Hoosier owner of the plant rode
out at a gallop, waving his hands and apparently beside himself with
anxiety and terror.
“Don't,” he shouted; “somebody'll get killed. Wait--they'll give up.” So
Hale halted and the Hoosier rode back. After a short parley he came back
to Hale to say that the strikers would give up, but when Logan started
again, they broke and ran, and only three or four were captured. The
Hoosier was delirious over his troubles and straightway closed his
plant.
“See,” said Hale in disgust. “We've got to do something now.”
“We have,” said the lawyers, and that night on Hale's porch, the three,
with the Hon. Sam Budd, pondered the problem. They could not build a
town without law and order--they could not have law and order without
taking part themselves, and even then they plainly would have their
hands full. And so, that night, on the tiny porch of the little cottage
that was Hale's sleeping-room and office, with the creaking of the one
wheel of their one industry--the old grist-mill--making patient music
through the rhododendron-darkness that hid the steep bank of the
stream, the three pioneers forged their plan. There had been
gentlemen-regulators a plenty, vigilance committees of gentlemen, and
the Ku-Klux clan had been originally composed of gentlemen, as they all
knew, but they meant to hew to the strict line of town-ordinance and
common law and do the rough everyday work of the common policeman.
So volunteer policemen they would be and, in order to extend their
authority as much as possible, as county policemen they would be
enrolled. Each man would purchase his own Winchester, pistol, billy,
badge and a whistle--to call for help--and they would begin drilling and
target-shooting at once. The Hon. Sam shook his head dubiously:
“The natives won't understand.”
“We can't help that,” said Hale.
“I know--I'm with you.”
Hale was made captain, Logan first lieutenant, Macfarlan second, and the
Hon. Sam third. Two rules, Logan, who, too, knew the mountaineer well,
suggested as inflexible. One was never to draw a pistol at all unless
necessary, never to pretend to draw as a threat or to intimidate, and
never to draw unless one meant to shoot, if need be.
“And the other,” added Logan, “always go in force to make an
arrest--never alone unless necessary.” The Hon. Sam moved his head up
and down in hearty approval.
“Why is that?” asked Hale.
“To save bloodshed,” he said. “These fellows we will have to deal with
have a pride that is morbid. A mountaineer doesn't like to go home and
have to say that one man put him in the calaboose--but he doesn't mind
telling that it took several to arrest him. Moreover, he will give in
to two or three men, when he would look on the coming of one man as a
personal issue and to be met as such.”
Hale nodded.
“Oh, there'll be plenty of chances,” Logan added with a smile, “for
everyone to go it alone.” Again the Hon. Sam nodded grimly. It was
plain to him that they would have all they could do, but no one of them
dreamed of the far-reaching effect that night's work would bring.
They were the vanguard of civilization--“crusaders of the nineteenth
century against the benighted of the Middle Ages,” said the Hon. Sam,
and when Logan and Macfarlan left, he lingered and lit his pipe.
“The trouble will be,” he said slowly, “that they won't understand our
purpose or our methods. They will look on us as a lot of meddlesome
'furriners' who have come in to run their country as we please, when
they have been running it as they please for more than a hundred years.
You see, you mustn't judge them by the standards of to-day--you must
go back to the standards of the Revolution. Practically, they are the
pioneers of that day and hardly a bit have they advanced. They are
our contemporary ancestors.” And then the Hon. Sam, having dropped his
vernacular, lounged ponderously into what he was pleased to call his
anthropological drool.
“You see, mountains isolate people and the effect of isolation on
human life is to crystallize it. Those people over the line have had
no navigable rivers, no lakes, no wagon roads, except often the beds of
streams. They have been cut off from all communication with the outside
world. They are a perfect example of an arrested civilization and they
are the closest link we have with the Old World. They were Unionists
because of the Revolution, as they were Americans in the beginning
because of the spirit of the Covenanter. They live like the pioneers;
the axe and the rifle are still their weapons and they still have the
same fight with nature. This feud business is a matter of clan-loyalty
that goes back to Scotland. They argue this way: You are my friend or
my kinsman, your quarrel is my quarrel, and whoever hits you hits me.
If you are in trouble, I must not testify against you. If you are an
officer, you must not arrest me; you must send me a kindly request to
come into court. If I'm innocent and it's perfectly convenient--why,
maybe I'll come. Yes, we're the vanguard of civilization, all right, all
right--but I opine we're goin' to have a hell of a merry time.”
Hale laughed, but he was to remember those words of the Hon. Samuel
Budd. Other members of that vanguard began to drift in now by twos and
threes from the bluegrass region of Kentucky and from the tide-water
country of Virginia and from New England--strong, bold young men with
the spirit of the pioneer and the birth, breeding and education of
gentlemen, and the war between civilization and a lawlessness that was
the result of isolation, and consequent ignorance and idleness started
in earnest.
“A remarkable array,” murmured the Hon. Sam, when he took an inventory
one night with Hale, “I'm proud to be among 'em.”
Many times Hale went over to Lonesome Cove and with every visit his
interest grew steadily in the little girl and in the curious people
over there, until he actually began to believe in the Hon. Sam Budd's
anthropological theories. In the cabin on Lonesome Cove was a crane
swinging in the big stone fireplace, and he saw the old step-mother and
June putting the spinning wheel and the loom to actual use. Sometimes
he found a cabin of unhewn logs with a puncheon floor, clapboards for
shingles and wooden pin and auger holes for nails; a batten wooden
shutter, the logs filled with mud and stones and holes in the roof for
the wind and the rain. Over a pair of buck antlers sometimes lay the
long heavy home-made rifle of the backwoodsman--sometimes even with a
flintlock and called by some pet feminine name. Once he saw the hominy
block that the mountaineers had borrowed from the Indians, and once a
handmill like the one from which the one woman was taken and the
other left in biblical days. He struck communities where the medium of
exchange was still barter, and he found mountaineers drinking metheglin
still as well as moonshine. Moreover, there were still log-rollings,
house-warmings, corn-shuckings, and quilting parties, and sports were
the same as in pioneer days--wrestling, racing, jumping, and lifting
barrels. Often he saw a cradle of beegum, and old Judd had in his house
a fox-horn made of hickory bark which even June could blow. He ran
across old-world superstitions, too, and met one seventh son of a
seventh son who cured children of rash by blowing into their mouths. And
he got June to singing transatlantic songs, after old Judd said one day
that she knowed the “miserablest song he'd ever heerd”--meaning the most
sorrowful. And, thereupon, with quaint simplicity, June put her heels on
the rung of her chair, and with her elbows on her knees, and her chin
on both bent thumbs, sang him the oldest version of “Barbara Allen” in a
voice that startled Hale by its power and sweetness. She knew lots more
“song-ballets,” she said shyly, and the old man had her sing some songs
that were rather rude, but were as innocent as hymns from her lips.
Everywhere he found unlimited hospitality.
“Take out, stranger,” said one old fellow, when there was nothing on
the table but some bread and a few potatoes, “have a tater. Take two of
'em--take damn nigh ALL of 'em.”
Moreover, their pride was morbid, and they were very religious. Indeed,
they used religion to cloak their deviltry, as honestly as it was ever
used in history. He had heard old Judd say once, when he was speaking of
the feud:
“Well, I've al'ays laid out my enemies. The Lord's been on my side an' I
gits a better Christian every year.”
Always Hale took some children's book for June when he went to Lonesome
Cove, and she rarely failed to know it almost by heart when he went
again. She was so intelligent that he began to wonder if, in her case,
at least, another of the Hon. Sam's theories might not be true--that
the mountaineers were of the same class as the other westward-sweeping
emigrants of more than a century before, that they had simply lain
dormant in the hills and--a century counting for nothing in the matter
of inheritance--that their possibilities were little changed, and
that the children of that day would, if given the chance, wipe out the
handicap of a century in one generation and take their place abreast
with children of the outside world. The Tollivers were of good blood;
they had come from Eastern Virginia, and the original Tolliver had
been a slave-owner. The very name was, undoubtedly, a corruption of
Tagliaferro. So, when the Widow Crane began to build a brick house for
her boarders that winter, and the foundations of a school-house were
laid at the Gap, Hale began to plead with old Judd to allow June to go
over to the Gap and go to school, but the old man was firm in refusal:
“He couldn't git along without her,” he said; “he was afeerd he'd
lose her, an' he reckoned June was a-larnin' enough without goin' to
school--she was a-studyin' them leetle books o' hers so hard.” But as
his confidence in Hale grew and as Hale stated his intention to take an
option on the old man's coal lands, he could see that Devil Judd, though
his answer never varied, was considering the question seriously.
Through the winter, then, Hale made occasional trips to Lonesome Cove
and bided his time. Often he met young Dave Tolliver there, but the
boy usually left when Hale came, and if Hale was already there, he kept
outside the house, until the engineer was gone.
Knowing nothing of the ethics of courtship in the mountains--how, when
two men meet at the same girl's house, “they makes the gal say which one
she likes best and t'other one gits”--Hale little dreamed that the first
time Dave stalked out of the room, he threw his hat in the grass
behind the big chimney and executed a war-dance on it, cursing the
blankety-blank “furriner” within from Dan to Beersheba.
Indeed, he never suspected the fierce depths of the boy's jealousy at
all, and he would have laughed incredulously, if he had been told how,
time after time as he climbed the mountain homeward, the boy's black
eyes burned from the bushes on him, while his hand twitched at his
pistol-butt and his lips worked with noiseless threats. For Dave had
to keep his heart-burnings to himself or he would have been laughed
at through all the mountains, and not only by his own family, but by
June's; so he, too, bided his time.
In late February, old Buck Falin and old Dave Tolliver shot each other
down in the road and the Red Fox, who hated both and whom each thought
was his friend, dressed the wounds of both with equal care. The
temporary lull of peace that Bad Rufe's absence in the West had brought
about, gave way to a threatening storm then, and then it was that old
Judd gave his consent: when the roads got better, June could go to the
Gap to school. A month later the old man sent word that he did not want
June in the mountains while the trouble was going on, and that Hale
could come over for her when he pleased: and Hale sent word back that
within three days he would meet the father and the little girl at the
big Pine. That last day at home June passed in a dream. She went through
her daily tasks in a dream and she hardly noticed young Dave when he
came in at mid-day, and Dave, when he heard the news, left in sullen
silence. In the afternoon she went down to the mill to tell Uncle Billy
and ole Hon good-by and the three sat in the porch a long time and with
few words. Ole Hon had been to the Gap once, but there was “so much
bustle over thar it made her head ache.” Uncle Billy shook his head
doubtfully over June's going, and the two old people stood at the gate
looking long after the little girl when she went homeward up the road.
Before supper June slipped up to her little hiding-place at the pool and
sat on the old log saying good-by to the comforting spirit that always
brooded for her there, and, when she stood on the porch at sunset, a
new spirit was coming on the wings of the South wind. Hale felt it as
he stepped into the soft night air; he heard it in the piping of
frogs--“Marsh-birds,” as he always called them; he could almost see it
in the flying clouds and the moonlight and even the bare trees seemed
tremulously expectant. An indefinable happiness seemed to pervade the
whole earth and Hale stretched his arms lazily. Over in Lonesome Cove
little June felt it more keenly than ever in her life before. She did
not want to go to bed that night, and when the others were asleep she
slipped out to the porch and sat on the steps, her eyes luminous and her
face wistful--looking towards the big Pine which pointed the way towards
the far silence into which she was going at last.