The boom started after its shadow through the hills now, and Hale
watched it sweep toward him with grim satisfaction at the fulfilment of
his own prophecy and with disgust that, by the irony of fate, it
should come from the very quarters where years before he had played
the maddening part of lunatic at large. The avalanche was sweeping
southward; Pennsylvania was creeping down the Alleghanies, emissaries of
New York capital were pouring into the hills, the tide-water of Virginia
and the Bluegrass region of Kentucky were sending in their best blood
and youth, and friends of the helmeted Englishmen were hurrying over the
seas. Eastern companies were taking up principalities, and at Cumberland
Gap, those helmeted Englishmen had acquired a kingdom. They were
building a town there, too, with huge steel plants, broad avenues and
business blocks that would have graced Broadway; and they were pouring
out a million for every thousand that it would have cost Hale to acquire
the land on which the work was going on. Moreover they were doing it
there, as Hale heard, because they were too late to get control of
his gap through the Cumberland. At his gap, too, the same movement was
starting. In stage and wagon, on mule and horse, “riding and tying”
sometimes, and even afoot came the rush of madmen. Horses and mules were
drowned in the mud holes along the road, such was the traffic and such
were the floods. The incomers slept eight in a room, burned oil at one
dollar a gallon, and ate potatoes at ten cents apiece. The Grand Central
Hotel was a humming Real-Estate Exchange, and, night and day, the
occupants of any room could hear, through the thin partitions, lots
booming to right, left, behind and in front of them. The labour
and capital question was instantly solved, for everybody became a
capitalist-carpenter, brick-layer, blacksmith, singing teacher and
preacher. There is no difference between the shrewdest business man and
a fool in a boom, for the boom levels all grades of intelligence and
produces as distinct a form of insanity as you can find within the walls
of an asylum. Lots took wings sky-ward. Hale bought one for June for
thirty dollars and sold it for a thousand. Before the autumn was gone,
he found himself on the way to ridiculous opulence and, when spring
came, he had the world in a sling and, if he wished, he could toss it
playfully at the sun and have it drop back into his hand again. And the
boom spread down the valley and into the hills. The police guard had
little to do and, over in the mountains, the feud miraculously came to a
sudden close.
So pervasive, indeed, was the spirit of the times that the Hon. Sam
Budd actually got old Buck Falin and old Dave Tolliver to sign a truce,
agreeing to a complete cessation of hostilities until he carried through
a land deal in which both were interested. And after that was
concluded, nobody had time, even the Red Fox, for deviltry and private
vengeance--so busy was everybody picking up the manna which was dropping
straight from the clouds. Hale bought all of old Judd's land, formed a
stock company and in the trade gave June a bonus of the stock. Money was
plentiful as grains of sand, and the cashier of the bank in the back of
the furniture store at the Gap chuckled to his beardless directors as he
locked the wooden door on the day before the great land sale:
“Capital stock paid in--thirteen thousand dollars;
“Deposits--three hundred thousand;
“Loans--two hundred and sixty thousand--interest from eight to twelve
per cent.” And, beardless though those directors were, that statement
made them reel.
A club was formed and the like of it was not below Mason and Dixon's
line in the way of furniture, periodicals, liquors and cigars. Poker
ceased--it was too tame in competition with this new game of town-lots.
On the top of High Knob a kingdom was bought. The young bloods of the
town would build a lake up there, run a road up and build a Swiss chalet
on the very top for a country club. The “booming” editor was discharged.
A new paper was started, and the ex-editor of a New York Daily was got
to run it. If anybody wanted anything, he got it from no matter where,
nor at what cost. Nor were the arts wholly neglected. One man, who was
proud of his voice, thought he would like to take singing lessons. An
emissary was sent to Boston to bring back the best teacher he could
find. The teacher came with a method of placing the voice by trying to
say “Come!” at the base of the nose and between the eyes. This was with
the lips closed. He charged two dollars per half hour for this effort,
he had each pupil try it twice for half an hour each day, and for six
weeks the town was humming like a beehive. At the end of that period,
the teacher fell ill and went his way with a fat pocket-book and not
a warbling soul had got the chance to open his mouth. The experience
dampened nobody. Generosity was limitless. It was equally easy to raise
money for a roulette wheel, a cathedral or an expedition to Africa.
And even yet the railroad was miles away and even yet in February, the
Improvement Company had a great land sale. The day before it, competing
purchasers had deposited cheques aggregating three times the sum
asked for by the company for the land. So the buyers spent the night
organizing a pool to keep down competition and drawing lots for the
privilege of bidding. For fairness, the sale was an auction, and one old
farmer who had sold some of the land originally for a hundred dollars an
acre, bought back some of that land at a thousand dollars a lot.
That sale was the climax and, that early, Hale got a warning word from
England, but he paid no heed even though, after the sale, the boom
slackened, poised and stayed still; for optimism was unquenchable and
another tide would come with another sale in May, and so the spring
passed in the same joyous recklessness and the same perfect hope.
In April, the first railroad reached the Gap at last, and families came
in rapidly. Money was still plentiful and right royally was it spent,
for was not just as much more coming when the second road arrived in
May? Life was easier, too--supplies came from New York, eight o'clock
dinners were in vogue and everybody was happy. Every man had two or
three good horses and nothing to do. The place was full of visiting
girls. They rode in parties to High Knob, and the ring of hoof and the
laughter of youth and maid made every dusk resonant with joy. On Poplar
Hill houses sprang up like magic and weddings came. The passing stranger
was stunned to find out in the wilderness such a spot; gayety, prodigal
hospitality, a police force of gentlemen--nearly all of whom were
college graduates--and a club, where poker flourished in the smoke of
Havana cigars, and a barrel of whiskey stood in one corner with a faucet
waiting for the turn of any hand. And still the foundation of the new
hotel was not started and the coming of the new railroad in May did not
make a marked change. For some reason the May sale was postponed by the
Improvement Company, but what did it matter? Perhaps it was better to
wait for the fall, and so the summer went on unchanged. Every man still
had a bank account and in the autumn, the boom would come again. At such
a time June came home for her vacation, and Bob Berkley came back from
college for his. All through the school year Hale had got the best
reports of June. His sister's letters were steadily encouraging. June
had been very homesick for the mountains and for Hale at first, but the
homesickness had quickly worn off--apparently for both. She had studied
hard, had become a favourite among the girls, and had held her own
among them in a surprising way. But it was on June's musical talent that
Hale's sister always laid most stress, and on her voice which, she said,
was really unusual. June wrote, too, at longer and longer intervals and
in her letters, Hale could see the progress she was making--the change
in her handwriting, the increasing formality of expression, and the
increasing shrewdness of her comments on her fellow-pupils, her teachers
and the life about her. She did not write home for a reason Hale knew,
though June never mentioned it--because there was no one at home who
could read her letters--but she always sent messages to her father and
Bub and to the old miller and old Hon, and Hale faithfully delivered
them when he could.
From her people, as Hale learned from his sister, only one messenger had
come during the year to June, and he came but once. One morning, a tall,
black-haired, uncouth young man, in a slouch hat and a Prince Albert
coat, had strode up to the school with a big paper box under his arm and
asked for June. As he handed the box to the maid at the door, it broke
and red apples burst from it and rolled down the steps. There was a
shriek of laughter from the girls, and the young man, flushing red as
the apples, turned, without giving his name, and strode back with no
little majesty, looking neither to right nor left. Hale knew and June
knew that the visitor was her cousin Dave, but she never mentioned the
incident to him, though as the end of the session drew nigh, her letters
became more frequent and more full of messages to the people in Lonesome
Cove, and she seemed eager to get back home. Over there about this time,
old Judd concluded suddenly to go West, taking Bud with him, and when
Hale wrote the fact, an answer came from June that showed the blot of
tears. However, she seemed none the less in a hurry to get back, and
when Hale met her at the station, he was startled; for she came back in
dresses that were below her shoe-tops, with her wonderful hair massed
in a golden glory on the top of her head and the little fairy-cross
dangling at a woman's throat. Her figure had rounded, her voice had
softened. She held herself as straight as a young poplar and she walked
the earth as though she had come straight from Olympus. And still, in
spite of her new feathers and airs and graces, there was in her eye and
in her laugh and in her moods all the subtle wild charm of the child in
Lonesome Cove. It was fairy-time for June that summer, though her father
and Bud had gone West, for her step-mother was living with a sister, the
cabin in Lonesome Cove was closed and June stayed at the Gap, not at the
Widow Crane's boarding-house, but with one of Hale's married friends
on Poplar Hill. And always was she, young as she was, one of the merry
parties of that happy summer--even at the dances, for the dance, too,
June had learned. Moreover she had picked up the guitar, and many times
when Hale had been out in the hills, he would hear her silver-clear
voice floating out into the moonlight as he made his way toward Poplar
Hill, and he would stop under the beeches and listen with ears of
growing love to the wonder of it all. For it was he who was the ardent
one of the two now.
June was no longer the frank, impulsive child who stood at the foot of
the beech, doggedly reckless if all the world knew her love for him. She
had taken flight to some inner recess where it was difficult for Hale to
follow, and right puzzled he was to discover that he must now win again
what, unasked, she had once so freely given.
Bob Berkley, too, had developed amazingly. He no longer said “Sir” to
Hale--that was bad form at Harvard--he called him by his first name and
looked him in the eye as man to man: just as June--Hale observed--no
longer seemed in any awe of Miss Anne Saunders and to have lost all
jealousy of her, or of anybody else--so swiftly had her instinct taught
her she now had nothing to fear. And Bob and June seemed mightily
pleased with each other, and sometimes Hale, watching them as they
galloped past him on horseback laughing and bantering, felt foolish
to think of their perfect fitness--the one for the other--and the
incongruity of himself in a relationship that would so naturally be
theirs. At one thing he wondered: she had made an extraordinary
record at school and it seemed to him that it was partly through the
consciousness that her brain would take care of itself that she could
pay such heed to what hitherto she had had no chance to learn--dress,
manners, deportment and speech. Indeed, it was curious that she seemed
to lay most stress on the very things to which he, because of his long
rough life in the mountains, was growing more and more indifferent.
It was quite plain that Bob, with his extreme gallantry of manner,
his smart clothes, his high ways and his unconquerable gayety, had
supplanted him on the pedestal where he had been the year before, just
as somebody, somewhere--his sister, perhaps--had supplanted Miss Anne.
Several times indeed June had corrected Hale's slips of tongue with
mischievous triumph, and once when he came back late from a long trip in
the mountains and walked in to dinner without changing his clothes,
Hale saw her look from himself to the immaculate Bob with an unconscious
comparison that half amused, half worried him. The truth was he was
building a lovely Frankenstein and from wondering what he was going to
do with it, he was beginning to wonder now what it might some day
do with him. And though he sometimes joked with Miss Anne, who had
withdrawn now to the level plane of friendship with him, about the
transformation that was going on, he worried in a way that did neither
his heart nor his brain good. Still he fought both to little purpose
all that summer, and it was not till the time was nigh when June must
go away again, that he spoke both. For Hale's sister was going to marry,
and it was her advice that he should take June to New York if only for
the sake of her music and her voice. That very day June had for the
first time seen her cousin Dave. He was on horseback, he had been
drinking and he pulled in and, without an answer to her greeting, stared
her over from head to foot. Colouring angrily, she started on and then
he spoke thickly and with a sneer:
“'Bout fryin' size, now, ain't ye? I reckon maybe, if you keep on,
you'll be good enough fer him in a year or two more.”
“I'm much obliged for those apples, Dave,” said June quietly--and Dave
flushed a darker red and sat still, forgetting to renew the old threat
that was on his tongue.
But his taunt rankled in the girl--rankled more now than when Dave first
made it, for she better saw the truth of it and the hurt was the greater
to her unconquerable pride that kept her from betraying the hurt to Dave
long ago, and now, when he was making an old wound bleed afresh. But
the pain was with her at dinner that night and through the evening. She
avoided Hale's eyes though she knew that he was watching her all the
time, and her instinct told her that something was going to happen that
night and what that something was. Hale was the last to go and when he
called to her from the porch, she went out trembling and stood at the
head of the steps in the moonlight.
“I love you, little girl,” he said simply, “and I want you to marry me
some day--will you, June?” She was unsurprised but she flushed under his
hungry eyes, and the little cross throbbed at her throat.
“SOME day--not NOW,” she thought, and then with equal simplicity: “Yes,
Jack.”
“And if you should love somebody else more, you'll tell me right
away--won't you, June?” She shrank a little and her eyes fell, but
straight-way she raised them steadily:
“Yes, Jack.”
“Thank you, little girl--good-night.”
“Good-night, Jack.”
Hale saw the little shrinking movement she made, and, as he went down
the hill, he thought she seemed to be in a hurry to be alone, and that
she had caught her breath sharply as she turned away. And brooding he
walked the woods long that night.
Only a few days later, they started for New York and, with all her
dreaming, June had never dreamed that the world could be so large.
Mountains and vast stretches of rolling hills and level land melted
away from her wondering eyes; towns and cities sank behind them, swift
streams swollen by freshets were outstripped and left behind, darkness
came on and, through it, they still sped on. Once during the night she
woke from a troubled dream in her berth and for a moment she thought she
was at home again. They were running through mountains again and there
they lay in the moonlight, the great calm dark faces that she knew and
loved, and she seemed to catch the odour of the earth and feel the cool
air on her face, but there was no pang of homesickness now--she was too
eager for the world into which she was going. Next morning the air was
cooler, the skies lower and grayer--the big city was close at hand. Then
came the water, shaking and sparkling in the early light like a great
cauldron of quicksilver, and the wonderful Brooklyn Bridge--a ribbon of
twinkling lights tossed out through the mist from the mighty city that
rose from that mist as from a fantastic dream; then the picking of a
way through screeching little boats and noiseless big ones and white
bird-like floating things and then they disappeared like two tiny grains
in a shifting human tide of sand. But Hale was happy now, for on that
trip June had come back to herself, and to him, once more--and now, awed
but unafraid, eager, bubbling, uplooking, full of quaint questions
about everything she saw, she was once more sitting with affectionate
reverence at his feet. When he left her in a great low house that
fronted on the majestic Hudson, June clung to him with tears and of her
own accord kissed him for the first time since she had torn her little
playhouse to pieces at the foot of the beech down in the mountains far
away. And Hale went back with peace in his heart, but to trouble in the
hills.
* * * * * * *
Not suddenly did the boom drop down there, not like a falling star,
but on the wings of hope--wings that ever fluttering upward, yet sank
inexorably and slowly closed. The first crash came over the waters when
certain big men over there went to pieces--men on whose shoulders rested
the colossal figure of progress that the English were carving from the
hills at Cumberland Gap. Still nobody saw why a hurt to the Lion should
make the Eagle sore and so the American spirit at the other gaps and
all up the Virginia valleys that skirt the Cumberland held faithful
and dauntless--for a while. But in time as the huge steel plants grew
noiseless, and the flaming throats of the furnaces were throttled, a
sympathetic fire of dissolution spread slowly North and South and it was
plain only to the wise outsider as merely a matter of time until, all up
and down the Cumberland, the fox and the coon and the quail could come
back to their old homes on corner lots, marked each by a pathetic little
whitewashed post--a tombstone over the graves of a myriad of buried
human hopes. But it was the gap where Hale was that died last and
hardest--and of the brave spirits there, his was the last and hardest to
die.
In the autumn, while June was in New York, the signs were sure but every
soul refused to see them. Slowly, however, the vexed question of labour
and capital was born again, for slowly each local capitalist went slowly
back to his own trade: the blacksmith to his forge, but the carpenter
not to his plane nor the mason to his brick--there was no more building
going on. The engineer took up his transit, the preacher-politician was
oftener in his pulpit, and the singing teacher started on his round of
raucous do-mi-sol-dos through the mountains again. It was curious to see
how each man slowly, reluctantly and perforce sank back again to his old
occupation--and the town, with the luxuries of electricity, water-works,
bath-tubs and a street railway, was having a hard fight for the plain
necessities of life. The following spring, notes for the second payment
on the lots that had been bought at the great land sale fell due,
and but very few were paid. As no suits were brought by the company,
however, hope did not quite die. June did not come home for the
summer, and Hale did not encourage her to come--she visited some of her
school-mates in the North and took a trip West to see her father who had
gone out there again and bought a farm. In the early autumn, Devil Judd
came back to the mountains and announced his intention to leave them for
good. But that autumn, the effects of the dead boom became perceptible
in the hills. There were no more coal lands bought, logging ceased, the
factions were idle once more, moonshine stills flourished, quarrelling
started, and at the county seat, one Court day, Devil Judd whipped three
Falins with his bare fists. In the early spring a Tolliver was shot
from ambush and old Judd was so furious at the outrage that he openly
announced that he would stay at home until he had settled the old scores
for good. So that, as the summer came on, matters between the Falins and
the Tollivers were worse than they had been for years and everybody knew
that, with old Judd at the head of his clan again, the fight would be
fought to the finish. At the Gap, one institution only had suffered in
spirit not at all and that was the Volunteer Police Guard. Indeed, as
the excitement of the boom had died down, the members of that force,
as a vent for their energies, went with more enthusiasm than ever into
their work. Local lawlessness had been subdued by this time, the Guard
had been extending its work into the hills, and it was only a question
of time until it must take a part in the Falin-Tolliver troubles.
Indeed, that time, Hale believed, was not far away, for Election Day was
at hand, and always on that day the feudists came to the Gap in a search
for trouble. Meanwhile, not long afterward, there was a pitched battle
between the factions at the county seat, and several of each would fight
no more. Next day a Falin whistled a bullet through Devil Judd's beard
from ambush, and it was at such a crisis of all the warring elements in
her mountain life that June's school-days were coming to a close. Hale
had had a frank talk with old Judd and the old man agreed that the
two had best be married at once and live at the Gap until things
were quieter in the mountains, though the old man still clung to his
resolution to go West for good when he was done with the Falins. At such
a time, then, June was coming home.