"THE ONLYEST LUTTS"
Up on Eagle Crown, dim crest of his benighted world, Buddy Lutts' small
shape made a vague shadow, fusing with the dawn-mists that dipped and
lifted and swathed the peaks like a nun's veil. The boy crawled far out
on this majestic point that divided night from day. On one side the sun
had poised its jewelled lance against the east. On the other, the
vanquished morning moon was hiding his pallid face amidst the naked
peaks.
Buddy crawled farther along the dew-chilled brink of the ledge like a
young, lean catamount whelp. Here he sprawled at full length upon his
stomach with his thin face propped up between his hands. Here, alone on
the sanctum-rock of Eagle Crown, he lay, his moody eyes gazing beneath
and across the limitless expanse of purple fog.
There was a great ache in his heart, and he was lonelier than any boy
could well be and live. By and by he discerned the top of the church
belfry floating on the sea of fog like a buoy, and the mere sight of
this replenished the fires of vengeance that had reduced his puerile
being to a hard cinder of hate.
No human foot had ventured across the door block of that death place
since that serene Sabbath morning, more than a year since, when they had
lifted the dead body of his father off the virgin altar and laid him on
the pyramid of flowers built up in the clearing by the hundreds who had
come to witness the dedication of the church. Although this deed stood
foremost and fresh and even more vivid now in his memory, still, the
calendar day of its enactment, seemingly, held a grim unforgettable spot
on the apex of a grievous avalanche of immeasurable vengeance.
The boy wearily withdrew his truculent gaze and his eyes softened with
an unutterable sadness as he fixed them on the tops of the apple trees,
behind the log barn, grouped about the two sodden graves of his father
and mother--both dead at the hands of the despised law. His heart was
dead to all else save one hope--to avenge the death of his parents and
his brother Lem, whom he now believed to have been murdered by Sap
McGill. He would not count his young life amiss with all its hardships
and heart-aches, if only he could see the dawn of this triumphant day
for which he lived. He was hoping and waiting and watching--waiting
evermore.
It seemed that the torturous days, weeks and months that he wandered
through the hills furtively and alone, waiting and watching since his
father's killing and since Lem and Belle-Ann had slipped away and out of
his life, was time enough to make a decrepit, aged man. An insufferable
loneliness had wrapped its tentacles around his being, and had, like a
cruel tourniquet, crushed all the joy out of his soul. At times in
retrospective indulgence he felt that his soul could not endure. Tears
might have alleviated the misery within him, but Buddy's grievous
repining and loneliness was of a tearless brand.
Buddy Lutts was a boy in size and in years only, for it was with an
adult stoicism that he valiantly fought this creeping madness. In his
weaker moments this brooding would seize him and drag him back to the
brink of utter hopelessness and despair; but always his purpose would
fly to his rescue and beckon a renewed promise, and he would awake out
of these lethargies armed with a buoyant sense of patience and inspired
with a mighty will to wait and watch.
In these periodical relapses it was his wont to humor his fevered fancy
with lurid and extravagant sequences to his protracted term of
espionage. Among these vagaries was a pet dream representing the
revenuer and Sap McGill creeping upon him in single file; whereupon, he
fired and his single ball tore both their hearts out and made him dance
and clap his hands with sheer joy, and he was merrier than any orphan
had ever been before him. His conscience acquitted him blithely, and his
spirits soared skyward.
Deprived of these monopolistic creations of reprisal to alleviate the
tension of his hate, the bonds of his perverse reason would have burst
asunder and left him bereft.
But now again, there arose a cheering prophecy in the advent of spring.
Since Lem Lutts had dropped out of the mountain so mysteriously, the
bitter nights and days had rolled into weary months. And the brooding
months had waxed into riotous winter tempests and had dragged in
endless, eternal deluges of ice and snow, adding cold agony to Buddy's
already misanthropic heart. But finally the crows rode up on the soft
winds out of the South, and a benign sun broke the grip of these
frost-bound hills, and gradually emptied their pockets of snow. The
ridges and coves, and the emerald hulks of the mountains smiled
gratefully back. And through this expanse of tangled scenic splendor,
the rhododendrons and laurels wove a banner of multicolored tones. The
sassafras and poplar and dogwood bloomed and the cascade sang a new ode.
The calling of the lark came up from the lowland, mingled with the
blatant scream of jay-birds in the orchard. And the warble of the
blue-birds filled the odoriferous somnolent air.
Buddy lay motionless out on the crag with his thoughts, and watched the
sun unveil the spurs below him. Then he divided his gaze between the
distant splash of water that marked Boon's Ford, shining back like the
glint of a sun-perch, and the yellow length of trail across Hellsfork
that marked the path to Sap McGill's stronghold. Then he twisted his
head around unconsciously, and his eyes caressed the rifle that rested
behind him--his father's rifle. And an inarticulate muttering answered
the reiterated avowal in his heart, inspired each time he looked at
this, his father's rifle--a sacred relic bequeathed to him and vested
with a stupendous responsibility. He reasoned that now as he was the
last of the Luttses, he was rightfully the Captain of the faction. In
view of this heritage he argued that he should at least have a voice in
the counsel of the clan.
But Johnse Hatfield had a smooth, persuasive mien with him, and while he
and all the men facetiously recognized young Buddy as their "Captain,"
they had, through Johnse, kept Buddy artfully in the background. The
disgruntled boy did not relish this lack of due recognition and these
periods of inaction. He did not favor postponements. Time and again he
had appealed to Johnse Hatfield to issue a call and muster every man and
boy in the Moon mountains range, and cross Hellsfork and storm the
McGills, win or lose. Ultimately, Johnse always twisted this sanguine
project away from him, through flattery and cajolery; making amendments
bit by bit, until Buddy's pet scheme had petered down to another
postponement to which he readily acquiesced at the time. But always his
truant acumen told him later that Johnse Hatfield did not consider him
"fitten."
This morning Buddy crawfished backward away from the brink of the
overhanging rock. He threw the rifle-strap over his shoulder, and as he
made the dangerous descent, there was etched on his grim little face the
outlines of some new, inexorable resolution.
The type of man who now stood as dictator and leader by proxy, of the
Lutts' faction in the Moon mountain range, was an individual possessing
a peculiarly complex and many-sided nature. In stature Johnse Hatfield
was of medium height. He was deep-chested and thick of neck, but his
legs were straight and incongruously slender in comparison with his
shoulders. His face was a mask of black, close-cropped hair, save the
complete exposure of the mouth.
The hair growth halted below the lower lip and, from constant biting or
use of the shears, the hair on his upper lip held aloof; hence, the
mouth, thick-lipped and wide and tilted upward at the corners, bore the
aspect of one perpetual smile. But, oddly enough, the eyes were a total
and surprising antonym of this smiling mouth. They were markedly small,
close set, and of a singular amber hue, glinting like needle points and
carrying the fire of direct and instant demand. Thus, these closely
coupled, unwinking eyes contradicted and specifically denied the
smiling, placatory, diplomatic mouth so prominent across his black
visage.
It was said of Johnse Hatfield that at the moment marking his advent
into the world he had interrupted his mother who was working a pump-gun
from behind a grind-stone, in her will to help the men-folks repulse an
attack upon their home cabin. She claimed that she "sho' wud a fetched
thet 'onery Tod McCoy," whose head she was angling for behind a turnip
mound, "ef little Johnsie hed a waited an' hadn't bin so all-fired
anxious t' git hisse'f into th' rumpus."
As a lad Johnse had carried arms with his notorious father and brothers
against the McCoys. Then he had drifted up Hazard way and had, through
blood relationship, become entangled in the French-Eversole war. Eight
years since he had come up to Moon mountain to visit "Maw" Lutts, who
was a blood cousin, and he never went back.
While his life had been practically one prolonged fight, there was,
nevertheless, a commiserating, gentle side to his nature. This
incorruptible fealty and trustworthiness was an element that had
attracted old Cap Lutts, and in time Johnse Hatfield had become the old
man's first lieutenant. He had since served gallantly through many
fierce sorties with the McGills and the revenuers.
Johnse's friends pretended that he was a source of deep anxiety to them
when near the water, because if he unfortunately fell in, there was
enough lead in him to take him to the very bottom and keep him there.
Hatfield had a smattering of education, and was reputed as upstanding as
a mountain fighter could well be. Certainly, Johnse did not stand up and
invite hot pellets of lead. He did not scorn a rock or a tree any more
than did his opposing belligerents. But throughout his life the value of
his given word was equal to a fulfillment. Those who bargained for this
man's word felt that on the spot where Johnse defaulted they would find
his dead body.
When Lem Lutts had disappeared so inexplicably from the mountains,
Hatfield had, after a hasty search, hied himself out and visited every
calaboose and county jail in the surrounding country. He knew the
cunning of Burton, the revenuer, well enough, but little did he
anticipate such a flagrant irregularity as the transfer of a
"moonshiner" to the capital of the State, with a dozen counties
separating the place of offense. Such a procedure was depriving a
defendant of all constitutional rights, and an effrontery to county
jurisprudence, the enormity of which Hatfield could not ascribe to the
power of even the wily, murderous revenuer.