CHAPTER I_The Red Debt: Echoes from Kentucky

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THE RED DEBT

Echoes from Kentucky

EVERETT MACDONALD

Illustrations from Original Drawings of William Oberhardt

G. W. Dillingham Co.

New York

_The Red Debt_

By G. W. Dillingham Company

Published April, 1916

Printed in the United States of America

Linotype Composition, Electrotypes, Presswork and Binding

By the J. J. Little & Ives Company

425-435 East 24th Street

New York City

N. Y.

WITH UNUTTERABLE LOVE I DEDICATE

THIS VOLUME TO

My Mother

_THE AUTHOR_

[Illustration: "... use me as best you can for a grandfather?"]

CONTENTS

I A Mighty Man

II Belle-Ann Benson

III The Traitor

IV An Ultimatum

V Orlick's money Spurned

VI Upon the Altar

VII Dedicated with his Blood

VIII "Lessen he kills the Revenuer"

IX Orlick works Evil

X In Prison

XI A Friend in Need

XII The Stigma

XIII Rubric Drops

XIV "The onlyest Lutts"

XV Buddy forces an Issue

XVI The Murder Partners

XVII Circuit Court

XVIII The Graveyard Massacre

XIX Hatfield overtakes the Traitor

XX In the Hands of the Enemy

XXI "Draw--now--Coward!"

XXII The Mission School

XXIII Belle-Ann visits Lexington

XXIV The Guest of a Grandee

XXV Know Ye the Truth

XXVI Belle-Ann has a Vision

XXVII A Grandfather

XXVIII A Confession

XXIX The Red Debt

XXX The Shooting of Peter Burton

XXXI In which Slab prophesies

XXXII The Near Assassin

XXXIII Belle-Ann comes back

XXXIV The Reunion

XXXV The Downfall of Sap McGill

XXXVI Belle-Ann's Recanted Creed

XXXVII The Ghost-Man

XXXVIII The Haunted Church

XXXIX The Flight

XL His Rock of Ages

XLI In which Providence takes a Hand

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"... use me as best you can for a grandfather?"

"Yo' know where _they_ be"

"He kilt my maw--he ded--an' he kilt my pap"

"Who air th' head o' th' people--who air Cap'in heah in Moon?"

"Hit air God's buryin' now"

THE RED DEBT

CHAPTER I

A MIGHTY MAN

No imagery can adequately picture the profound grandeur and wide wild

beauty of these Kentucky highlands. At the age when its purity was

whitest, a great moon hung midway between Southpaw peak and Moon

mountain. Its divine splendor, unalloyed with any tithe of partisanship,

laved with a mystic luster these two primeval ranges that had scowled

impenitently at each other, behind their mask of flowers and tinseled

verdure, across the lethal gulch separating them, for fifty

blood-touched, feudal years.

This wondrous effulgence purged every exposed crevice, naked rock and

open cove with its chastity. On the ground underneath the patch-quilt of

virgin petals and emerald leafage, it peopled a theatre of animated

pictures. And the coppice pooled the shadows, creating a hippodrome of

transitory caricatures, fanciful, grotesque and fearful. Each sullen

moss-hooded boulder flung its distorted, exaggerated image down and

fixed a creeping mummy hard by.

Still another white beacon leaned over the hills where, like a stellar

flambeau, the lead-star trembled and sputtered, kindled just on the apex

of Henhawk's knob. The chasm that furrowed between and, topographically,

held these two warring communities apart, sunk its rock-lined bed sheer

two hundred feet below. Through this sinuous adamantine artery the head

waters of Hellsfork dashed in rampant flight, beating themselves into a

madness against a troup of gigantic, orange-tinctured boulders polished

glassy by the torrents Nature had unloosed at the beginning of time.

The onrushing wavelets leaped like furious creatures at these menacing

things which evermore preyed upon their foaming, impotent wrath; shaping

crystal goblets that bubbled over and burst, and flung showers of

magical frothy flowers aloft. From across the silvery expanse of

spectral mist that overhung the mountains, near and afar, a hundred

voices of the wilderness night were calling.

That this barnacle of blood-lust should leech itself upon the fair face

of a modern civilization; that in this nineteen hundred and twelve epoch

of obeisant civism, hedged about with emollient Christian culture--such

a vast stratum of malignant strife should coil here, hidden amidst a

congress of Nature's sublime artistry, is an irony at once awesome and

hopelessly insoluble. Nevertheless, immured upon natural ramifications

on the shoulder of Moon mountain, old Cap Lutts, a strategist and

mountain despot of kingly renown, dominated as the head of an implacable

dynasty that boded ill to inimical invaders; be it agents of the

government or spies of the shaggy Southpaw clan where Sap McGill, who

had stepped into his father's war shoes at the end of their last fatal

encounter with Cap Lutts, now marshalled his horde of bush-whackers,

bent upon the speedy annihilation of the Lutts folk, kith and kin.

Supported on a platform-like plot projecting from the hip of Moon

mountain, the domicile of old Lutts stood out in the moonlight, traced

in silver brocade against a somber ribbon of scrub timber that girded

the waist of the mountain.

From the Lutts abode the eye traveled for miles along the gorge to the

right. To the left the chasm cut deeper into the hills, until it ended

in the valley where Boon Creek and Hellsfork intersected; where the

paw-paws and the ferns, the weeping willows and the familiar, unnamed

flowers were luxuriant.

Straight ahead, traversing the dry bed of a blind gulch, a train of

pigmy peaks, left dun and naked by a river dead a thousand years, rose

up and bared their serried spurs like hound's teeth.

On the opposite side of Hellsfork, lifted the stupendous Southpaw

range--the stronghold of the enemy--rearing its savage peaks higher and

higher, piling upward and onward until they pierced the myriad stars;

then tumbled downward into the russet realms of lilac mist.

Beyond the Lutts cabin and towering above it, a single monster boulder

jutted outward from the perpendicular wall of granite and hung

perilously over sheer space. This freakish rock, known as Eagle Crown,

looked like a ragged punctuation pause in a folk-lore story; a relic

tossed on high by some legendary, boastful giant.

The wonder was how Cap Lutts gained its forbidding lofty platform, for

surely there was no visible means of ascent. Howbeit, Eagle Crown had

been the old man's retreat for sixty-odd years. This imperishable shelf

of granite offered him sanctuary when travail and sorrow, that weighted

his life, pressed hard upon him. There he had spent his moody hours

since boyhood. There his father and his great-grandfather had gone to be

alone. And there to-night, high up and alone, his majestic form was

silhouetted plainly against the sky.

A mighty man, this Lutts. At seventy-six he stood six feet seven

inches--straight as an arrow; a seasoned ball-bearing pyramid of big

bones, mounted with iron-fibered muscles; and a drop of chilled steel

for a fighting heart. In the premises of peace, this same heart swelled

up to proportions of compassion and generosity that named him father of

all the community north of Hellsfork--a man who never failed his people;

one to whom they hurried with their woes when they needed material help,

succor, sympathy and protection.

From this height, the old man fondly turned his eyes downward toward the

clearing that now held his sacred treasure--a log church. There, high up

toward heaven, in the profundity of his loneness, only God knew this

somber, silent man's thoughts--this feud-hunted, law-hounded man whose

soul brimmed with his own religion; whose being was wrapped about with

that which he took for the right; whose heart spurned all that he

thought wrong.

His so-called bandit-spirit was insulated with the convictions of his

own peculiar faith. His every utterance and deed were tempered with the

tenets of a unique creed handed down by his mountain fore-fathers. In

his heart there murmured a runic cadence, the language of which was only

interpreted by the omnipotent, all-merciful Over-soul.

Why the menacing hand of an outer world was lifted against him was a

problem he had long since despaired of solving. Fondly now he gazed down

toward the spot where the new cedar clapboards of the meeting-house

shimmered like a disk of true gold beneath the moon's whiteness;

beckoning to him with an insistence that stirred his stoic heart to its

depths.

A tender look softened the old man's opaque mask-like features, as

fumbling in his shirt-pocket and bringing forth a worn tintype picture

of a woman, swathed in buckskin, he held it to the moon's rays and for a

full minute peered tenderly at the kindly pictured eyes and smiling

lips. Then, clasping the tintype reverently between his two mighty

hands, he leaned against the natural buttress at his back, and his great

head, crowned with its hoary white mane, was bowed down.

"To-morry--to-morry," he whispered, and he knew that the picture smiled

forgivingly and happily back to him.

With the proceeds of moonshine whiskey, backed by the brawn of heredity

and a righteous purpose, old Cap Lutts had at last realized the dream of

two lives--his own and that of his dead wife, Maw Lutts. Although

grievously late, he had now moulded this double dream into a tangible

reality; for now before him, in the center of the clearing at the

frowsy, feudal base of Moon mountain, and just where the rabid waters of

Hellsfork leaped like live, wild things in their down-grade race across

forty-odd rugged miles of Kentucky, this grizzled hillman viewed in

sober, pious exultation, the product of his log church, all but

finished.

A church is an acquisition strangely alien to this mountain-piled

country, where the strategy of family wars and illicit distilling is

religiously pursued. Nevertheless, he and Maw Lutts had dreamed in

unison for years and had longed for the culmination of this extravagant,

divine purpose.

Formerly, it had appeared to him that the propitious hour in their

furtive existence had not arrived, although daily he had clearly

foreseen it in the rising sun of the morrow. Always with the firm

intention to do, he had added postponement to delay, and another broken

promise on the creased brow of Maw Lutts and another prayer in her

sorrowing heart.

However, the belated church was finally upon the perilous premises. Then

with the poignant achings that many desirable citizens had felt before

him, the old man had gone to the orchard like a penitent truce-breaker,

where on his knees in supplicant whispers he had unfolded his tardy

atonement and laid it like a tarnished sceptre at the woman's mute,

unseeing grave-side.

Since the majority of native adults were babies, the magic name of Cap

Lutts was mouthed in every cabin on the border range. He held the novel

status where popularity was abreast with notoriety. Long since the

populace had heard of his intention to build a church. Looking across

the epitome of delay, they told themselves that this was the first

pledge the old man had ever made, which he had not kept, so now the

redeeming news of Cap Lutts' finished meeting-house and the day of

dedication had penetrated the remotest habitants of the mountains. This

intelligence had gone hither to friend and enemy, pious and wicked

alike, with the same mysterious agency and puzzling rapidity that

characterizes winged warnings of the on-coming revenuer.

Every man and woman in the district, big enough to pull a trigger, knew

that he held a certain latent stock in this meeting-house. It came like

an unknown heritage suddenly delivered. While some would,

surreptitiously, have exchanged their interest for a mustard plaster,

they knew that it was not negotiable. They lied aloud, but in their

hearts they knew that sooner or later they would follow that magnetic

spark Luttsward. They knew that they would either cross the hypnotic

threshold of that sanctuary into the halo of sacred enlightenment, or

halt without in the darkness of superstition and feudal malice and spend

their ammunition to help crush it.

There was no intermediate platform. There was no neutral grand-stand

wherein the indifferent could take refuge. The populace stood either for

or against. Even the lethargic, voteless clay-eaters sat up and took

notice like a nest of snakes in the sunshine. The relatives and friendly

factions representing the prospective congregation, did homage to Cap

Lutts and clamored to make the church a success. The enemy over in

Southpaw had already advanced the prophecy that they would take the

meeting-house. But the flapping of feudal wings did not perturb this

veteran hawk of the hills. His one apprehension was of the common enemy,

the "revenuer."

There was now but one day between the new church and its dedication. In

secret service circles, down in Frankfort, it had long been mooted that

the pet aim of Peter H. Burton was to capture old Cap Lutts.

Burton had, during his service, previously captured many members of the

Lutts faction. The commissioners were ready enough to bind them over,

but trials never carried a conviction. Burton had even juggled cases,

alternately, on venue writs, between the six Federal Courts in the

Eastern District, but the Lutts blood invariably cropped up, stealthful

and rich in sympathy, in the precincts of the petit jury room. Acquittal

followed acquittal.

But now Burton, feeling himself close upon the heels of the King of

Moonshiners, altered his procedure and, armed with a premature change of

venue to Frankfort, he hunted Lutts with a renewed zeal, keen and

pleasurable.

Indeed, the younger attaches of the office regarded Cap Lutts as an

historic myth. In jest, knowing Burton's affinity for wildcat skins,

they hinted that the Lutts in question was merely a wraith-pilot

pointing toward new skins--a favorite platitude upon which to stage

another hunting vacation. But to Chief Burton, the subject of this jest

was far removed from joking premises; mainly for the adequate reason

that he himself, like many of his predecessors, had eyed old Cap Lutts

more than once. His corporeal being had felt Lutts' lead.

Although the astute Burton had toiled a part of each season for eleven

consecutive years on the border trail of this subtle law-breaker, Lutts

had as yet never seen the county calaboose, or the barriers of a

blue-grass jail. Burton had surprised him time and again, but inventory

of these encounters always told the same trite story--the moonshiner had

simply melted into absence.

After the smoke of some of these sorties, Burton had either limped or

loped away with hopes mounting over a trail of blood. But these red

splotches never led to the man. This feud leader and distilling

chieftain of the range still reigned and the stereotyped report to

headquarters was simply dated and signed with open blanks, a form to

apprise headquarters that the officer was still alive.

Under pressure the county authorities periodically sought old Lutts. The

times when they did find him, they merely flirted mutually with the

faction and subsided harmlessly.

With the completion of the meeting-house, Cap Lutts had attained his

goal; nor had he suffered the neighboring denizens of the foothills to

raise an axe, or donate a single clapboard toward the erection of this

infantile sanctuary. It was an enshrined monument to Maw Lutts. It was a

mural hanging against Moon mountain, the place of her birth and the

scene of her death. It was her own cherished endowment to the

rifle-toting, tobacco-swallowing, snuff-chewing community. It was Maw

Lutts's and his individual, holy triumph. All Cap Lutts expected of the

people was, he told them:

"T' cum when th' ridin' pahson rid up t' ded'cate th' gawspel-house; an'

tote thar sins t' th' altar, an' donate 'em at th' cross t' be wyshed

'way with th' blood uv Calv'ry--an' keep on a comin' thet they mought be

clean an' onspotted an'--Gawd an' my gun'll damn ary hillbilly what

darst lift a han' to hender."

The church represented months of hard toil, interrupted only when Cap

Lutts fled up to the rock-ribbed pockets of the mountain or down into

some untrodden ravine to escape Burton, the revenuer. Even in such

intervals, the old man had sallied out into the night like the

crag-panther, when the moon had turned white; and climbed high, with

rifle ready and the hollow-flanked hound at his heels, to visit the

clearing and gloat in solitude beneath the trembling stars over the

progress of his sacred enterprise.

The church itself stood on "squatted" soil. Crowned with rhododendrons

and laurel blossoms, it reared its exotic head in defiant challenge to

Satan, like a single star upon the horizon of feudal gloom.

The level space had cost Lutts nothing but labor. The logs had cost him

nothing but work. With his own hands and crude appliances of the back

forests he had split, shaped and trimmed eleven thousand cedar

clapboards; but when it came to interior finish he was extravagant and

fastidious.

The white-pine tongue-and-grooved boards that he used to make the

platform and the altar, the window and door plates; and the wide, smooth

planks turned into benches, all represented cash--and cash was a rarity

in the sterile Moon mountain district. And, too, the new gold-hued bell,

which now nestled in its cotlike belfry, about to utter its virgin

exhortation across those Godless hills, cost money.

Cap Lutts had paid this money ungrudgingly, for it was his own. Had he

not, together with his son Lem, and Slab, the negro, and the two red

steers, plowed the slanting plot that hung on the hip of the mountain

and sown the grain, and tilled it, and reaped it, and carried it to the

hidden still, where he had brewed it into money?

It was Lutts's own scant, hard-earned dollars that had bought the

boards, the nails, and the bell.

True, it was not a regular church bell; but it was the largest farm bell

he could procure and it had taken the steers five hot days to go to Flat

Gap Junction and haul back the bell, and the nails, and the polished

boards and glass.