While Spicer South and his cousins had been sustaining themselves or
building up competences by tilling their soil, the leaders of the other
faction were basing larger fortunes on the profits of merchandise and
trade. So, although Spicer South could neither read nor write, his
chief enemy, Micah Hollman, was to outward seeming an urbane and fairly
equipped man of affairs. Judged by their heads, the clansmen were
rougher and more illiterate on Misery, and in closer touch with
civilization on Crippleshin. A deeper scrutiny showed this seeming to
be one of the strange anomalies of the mountains.
Micah Hollman had established himself at Hixon, that shack town which
had passed of late years from feudal county seat to the section's one
point of contact with the outside world; a town where the ancient and
modern orders brushed shoulders; where the new was tolerated, but dared
not become aggressive. Directly across the street from the court-house
stood an ample frame building, on whose side wall was emblazoned the
legend: "Hollman's Mammoth Department Store." That was the secret
stronghold of Hollman power. He had always spoken deploringly of that
spirit of lawlessness which had given the mountains a bad name. He
himself, he declared, believed that the best assets of any community
were tenets of peace and brotherhood. Any mountain man or foreigner who
came to town was sure of a welcome from Judge Micah Hollman, who added
to his title of storekeeper that of magistrate.
As the years went on, the proprietor of the "Mammoth Department Store"
found that he had money to lend and, as a natural sequence, mortgages
stored away in his strong box. To the cry of distress, he turned a
sympathetic ear. His infectious smile and suave manner won him fame as
"the best-hearted man in the mountains." Steadily and unostentatiously,
his fortune fattened.
When the railroad came to Hixon, it found in Judge Hollman a "public-
spirited citizen." Incidentally, the timber that it hauled and the coal
that its flat cars carried down to the Bluegrass went largely to his
consignees. He had so astutely anticipated coming events that, when the
first scouts of capital sought options, they found themselves
constantly referred to Judge Hollman. No wheel, it seemed, could turn
without his nod. It was natural that the genial storekeeper should
become the big man of the community and inevitable that the one big man
should become the dictator. His inherited place as leader of the
Hollmans in the feud he had seemingly passed on as an obsolete
prerogative.
Yet, in business matters, he was found to drive a hard bargain, and
men came to regard it the part of good policy to meet rather than
combat his requirements. It was essential to his purposes that the
officers of the law in his county should be in sympathy with him.
Sympathy soon became abject subservience. When a South had opposed
Jesse Purvy in the primary as candidate for High Sheriff, he was found
one day lying on his face with a bullet-riddled body. It may have been
a coincidence which pointed to Jim Asberry, the judge's nephew, as the
assassin. At all events, the judge's nephew was a poor boy, and a
charitable Grand Jury declined to indict him.
In the course of five years, several South adherents, who had crossed
Hollman's path, became victims of the laurel ambuscade. The theory of
coincidence was strained. Slowly, the rumor grew and persistently
spread, though no man would admit having fathered it, that before each
of these executions star-chamber conferences had been held in the rooms
above Micah Hollman's "Mammoth Department Store." It was said that
these exclusive sessions were attended by Judge Hollman, Sheriff Purvy
and certain other gentlemen selected by reason of their marksmanship.
When one of these victims fell, John South had just returned from a law
school "down below," wearing "fotched-on" clothing and thinking
"fotched-on" thoughts. He had amazed the community by demanding the
right to assist in probing and prosecuting the affair. He had then
shocked the community into complete paralysis by requesting the Grand
Jury to indict not alone the alleged assassin, but also his employers,
whom he named as Judge Hollman and Sheriff Purvy. Then, he, too, fell
under a bolt from the laurel.
That was the first public accusation against the bland capitalist, and
it carried its own prompt warning against repetition. The Judge's High
Sheriff and chief ally retired from office, and went abroad only with a
bodyguard. Jesse Purvy had built his store at a cross roads twenty-five
miles from the railroad. Like Hollman, he had won a reputation for open
-handed charity, and was liked--and hated. His friends were legion. His
enemies were so numerous that he apprehended violence not only from the
Souths, but also from others who nursed grudges in no way related to
the line of feud cleavage. The Hollman-Purvy combination had retained
enough of its old power to escape the law's retribution and to hold its
dictatorship, but the efforts of John South had not been altogether
bootless. He had ripped away two masks, and their erstwhile wearers
could no longer hold their old semblance of law-abiding
philanthropists. Jesse Purvy's home was the show place of the country
side. To the traveler's eye, which had grown accustomed to hovel life
and squalor, it offered a reminder of the richer Bluegrass. Its walls
were weather-boarded and painted, and its roof two stories high.
Commodious verandahs looked out over pleasant orchards, and in the same
enclosure stood the two frame buildings of his store--for he, too,
combined merchandise with baronial powers. But back of the place rose
the mountainside, on which Purvy never looked without dread. Twice, its
impenetrable thickets had spat at him. Twice, he had recovered from
wounds that would have taken a less-charmed life. And in grisly
reminder of the terror which clouded the peace of his days stood the
eight-foot log stockade at the rear of the place which the proprietor
had built to shield his daily journeys between house and store. But
Jesse Purvy was not deluded by his escapes. He knew that he was "marked
down." For years, he had seen men die by his own plotting, and he
himself must in the end follow by a similar road. Rumor had it that he
wore a shirt of mail, certain it is that he walked in the expectancy of
death.
"Why don't you leave the mountains?" strangers had asked; and to each
of them Purvy had replied with a shrug of his shoulders and a short
laugh: "This is where I belong."
But the years of strain were telling on Jesse Purvy. The robust, full-
blooded face was showing deep lines; his flesh was growing flaccid; his
glance tinged with quick apprehension. He told his intimates that he
realized "they'd get him," yet he sought to prolong his term of escape.
The creek purled peacefully by the stile; the apple and peach trees
blossomed and bore fruit at their appointed time, but the householder,
when he walked between his back door and the back door of the store,
hugged his stockade, and hurried his steps.
Yesterday morning, Jesse Purvy had risen early as usual, and, after a
satisfying breakfast, had gone to his store to arrange for the day's
business. One or two of his henchmen, seeming loafers, but in reality a
bodyguard, were lounging within call. A married daughter was chatting
with her father while her young baby played among the barrels and
cracker boxes.
The daughter went to a rear window, and gazed up at the mountain. The
cloudless skies were still in hiding behind a curtain of mist. The
woman was idly watching the vanishing fog wraiths, and her father came
over to her side. Then, the baby cried, and she stepped back. Purvy
himself remained at the window. It was a thing he did not often do. It
left him exposed, but the most cautiously guarded life has its moments
of relaxed vigilance. He stood there possibly thirty seconds, then a
sharp fusillade of clear reports barked out and was shattered by the
hills into a long reverberation. With a hand clasped to his chest,
Purvy turned, walked to the middle of the floor, and fell.
The henchmen rushed to the open sash. They leaped out, and plunged up
the mountain, tempting the assassin's fire, but the assassin was
satisfied. The mountain was again as quiet as it had been at dawn. Its
impenetrable mask of green was blank and unresponsive. Somewhere in the
cool of the dewy treetops a squirrel barked. Here and there, the birds
saluted the sparkle and freshness of June. Inside, at the middle of the
store, Jesse Purvy shifted his head against his daughter's knee, and
said, as one stating an expected event:
"Well, they've got me."
An ordinary mountaineer would have been carried home to die in the
darkness of a dirty and windowless shack. The long-suffering star of
Jesse Purvy ordained otherwise. He might go under or he might once more
beat his way back and out of the quicksands of death. At all events, he
would fight for life to the last gasp.
Twenty miles away in the core of the wilderness, removed from a
railroad by a score of semi-perpendicular miles, a fanatic had once
decided to found a school. The fact that the establishment in this
place of such a school as his mind pictured was sheer madness and
impossibility did not in the least deter him. It was a thing that could
not be done, and it was a thing that he had done none the less.
Now a faculty of ten men, like himself holding degrees of Masters of
Dreams, taught such as cared to come such things as they cared to
learn. Substantial two-and three-storied buildings of square-hewn logs
lay grouped in a sort of Arts and Crafts village around a clean-clipped
campus. The Stagbone College property stretched twenty acres square at
the foot of a hill. The drone of its own saw-mill came across the
valley. In a book-lined library, wainscoted in natural woods of three
colors, the original fanatic often sat reflecting pleasurably on his
folly. Higher up the hillside stood a small, but model, hospital, with
a modern operating table and a case of surgical instruments, which, it
was said, the State could not surpass. These things had been the gifts
of friends who liked such a type of God-inspired madness. A "fotched-on"
trained nurse was in attendance. From time to time, eminent Bluegrass
surgeons came to Hixon by rail, rode twenty miles on mules, and held
clinics on the mountainside.
To this haven, Jesse Purvy, the murder lord, was borne in a litter
carried on the shoulders of his dependents. Here, as his steadfast
guardian star decreed, he found two prominent medical visitors, who
hurried him to the operating table. Later, he was removed to a white
bed, with the June sparkle in his eyes, pleasantly modulated through
drawn blinds, and the June rustle and bird chorus in his ears--and his
own thoughts in his brain.
Conscious, but in great pain, Purvy beckoned Jim Asberry and Aaron
Hollis, his chiefs of bodyguard, to his bedside, and waved the nurse
back out of hearing.
"If I don't get well," he said, feebly, "there's a job for you two
boys. I reckon you know what it is?"
They nodded, and Asberry whispered a name:
"Samson South?"
"Yes," Purvy spoke in a weak whisper; but the old vindictiveness was
not smothered. "You got the old man, I reckon you can manage the cub.
If you don't, he'll get you both one day."
The two henchmen scowled.
"I'll git him to-morrer," growled Asberry. "Thar hain't no sort of use
in a-waitin'."
"No!" For an instant Purvy's voice rose out of its weakness to its old
staccato tone of command, a tone which brought obedience. "If I get
well, I have other plans. Never mind what they are. That's my business.
If I don't die, leave him alone, until I give other orders." He lay
back and fought for breath. The nurse came over with gentle insistence,
ordering quiet, but the man, whose violent life might be closing, had
business yet to discuss with his confidential vassals. Again, he waved
her back.
"If I get well," he went on, "and Samson South is killed meanwhile, I
won't live long either. It would be my life for his. Keep close to him.
The minute you hear of my death--get him." He paused again, then
supplemented, "You two will find something mighty interestin' in my
will."
It was afternoon when Purvy reached the hospital, and, at nightfall of
the same day, there arrived at his store's entrance, on stumbling, hard
-ridden mules, several men, followed by two tawny hounds whose long ears
flapped over their lean jaws, and whose eyes were listless and tired,
but whose black muzzles wrinkled and sniffed with that sensitive
instinct which follows the man-scent. The ex-sheriff's family were
instituting proceedings independent of the Chief's orders. The next
morning, this party plunged into the mountain tangle, and beat the
cover with the bloodhounds in leash.
The two gentle-faced dogs picked their way between the flowering
rhododendrons, the glistening laurels, the feathery pine sprouts and
the moss-covered rocks. They went gingerly and alertly on ungainly,
cushioned feet. Just as their masters were despairing, they came to a
place directly over the store, where a branch had been bent back and
hitched to clear the outlook, and where a boot heel had crushed the
moss. There one of them raised his nose high into the air, opened his
mouth, and let out a long, deep-chested bay of discovery.