The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

by John Fox

  XI

  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 manwho was to take up Hale's options--and he had to be taken home. StillHale was undaunted: here he was and here he would stay--and he would tryagain. Two other young men, Bluegrass Kentuckians, Logan andMacfarlan, had settled at the gap--both lawyers and both of pioneer,Indian-fighting blood. The report of the State geologist had been spreadbroadcast. A famous magazine writer had come through on horseback andhad gone home and given a fervid account of the riches and the beauty ofthe region. Helmeted Englishmen began to prowl prospectively around thegap sixty miles to the southwest. New surveying parties were directinglines for the rocky gateway between the iron ore and the coal. Engineersand coal experts passed in and out. There were rumours of a furnaceand a steel plant when the railroad should reach the place. Capital hadflowed in from the East, and already a Pennsylvanian was starting a mainentry into a ten-foot vein of coal up through the gap and was cokingit. 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. TheLudlow brothers, from Eastern Virginia, had started a general store. Twoof the Berkley brothers had come over from Bluegrass Kentucky and theirfamily was coming in the spring. The bearded Senator up the valley, whowas also a preacher, had got his Methodist brethren interested--and thecommunity was further enriched by the coming of the Hon. Samuel Budd,lawyer and budding statesman. As a recreation, the Hon. Sam was ananthropologist: he knew the mountaineers from Virginia to Alabama andthey were his pet illustrations of his pet theories of the effect ofa mountain environment on human life and character. Hale took a greatfancy to him from the first moment he saw his smooth, ageless, kindlyface, surmounted by a huge pair of spectacles that were hooked behindtwo large ears, above which his pale yellow hair, parted in the middle,was drawn back with plaster-like precision. A mayor and a constablehad been appointed, and the Hon. Sam had just finished his firstcase--Squire Morton and the Widow Crane, who ran a boarding-house, eachhaving laid claim to three pigs that obstructed traffic in the town. TheHon. Sam was sitting by the stove, deep in thought, when Hale cameinto the hotel and he lifted his great glaring lenses and waited for nointroduction:

  "Brother," he said, "do you know twelve reliable witnesses come onthe stand and SWORE them pigs belonged to the squire's sow, and twelveequally reliable witnesses SWORE them pigs belonged to the Widow Crane'ssow? I shorely was a heap perplexed."

  "That was curious." The Hon. Sam laughed:

  "Well, sir, them intelligent pigs used both them sows as mothers, andmay be they had another mother somewhere else. They would breakfast withthe Widow Crane's sow and take supper with the squire's sow. And so themwitnesses, 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 ismutually forgivin' and a square division o' spoils, I suggested acompromise. The widow said the squire was an old rascal an' thief andhe'd never sink a tooth into one of them shoats, but that her lawyerwas a gentleman--meanin' me--and the squire said the widow had beenblackguardin' him all over town and he'd see her in heaven before shegot one, but that HIS lawyer was a prince of the realm: so the otherlawyer 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 forcosts."

  Outside, the wheels of the stage rattled, and as half a dozen strangerstrooped in, the Hon. Sam waved his hand: "Things is comin'."

  Things were coming. The following week "the booming editor" brought ina printing-press and started a paper. An enterprising Hoosier soonestablished a brick-plant. A geologist--Hale's predecessor in LonesomeCove--made the Gap his headquarters, and one by one the vanguard ofengineers, surveyors, speculators and coalmen drifted in. The wings ofprogress began to sprout, but the new town-constable soon tendered hisresignation 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 theground.

  "I've fit an' I've hollered fer help," he shouted, almost crying withrage, "an' I've fit agin. Now this town can go to hell": and he pickedup his pistol but left his symbol of law and order in the dust. Nextmorning there was a new constable, and only that afternoon when Halestepped into the Ludlow Brothers' store he found the constable alreadybusy. A line of men with revolver or knife in sight was drawn up insidewith their backs to Hale, and beyond them he could see the new constablewith a man under arrest. Hale had not forgotten his promise to himselfand he began now:

  "Come on," he called quietly, and when the men turned at the sound ofhis 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 goto the mayor's office. If he isn't guilty, the mayor will let him go. Ifhe is, the mayor will give him bond. I'll go on it myself. But let's nothave 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 wasclean-cut and thoughtful, that his eye was blue and singularly clearand fearless, and that he was calm with a calmness that might come fromanything else than stolidity of temperament--and that, by the way, isthe self-control which counts most against the unruly passions of othermen--but anybody near Hale, at a time when excitement was high and acrisis was imminent, would have felt the resultant of forces emanatingfrom him that were beyond analysis. And so it was now--the curious powerhe instinctively had over rough men had its way.

  "Go on," he continued quietly, and the constable went on with hisprisoner, his friends following, still swearing and with their weaponsin their hands. When constable and prisoner passed into the mayor'soffice, Hale stepped quickly after them and turned on the threshold withhis arm across the door.

  "Hold on, boys," he said, still good-naturedly. "The mayor can attend tothis. If you boys want to fight anybody, fight me. I'm unarmed and youcan whip me easily enough," he added with a laugh, "but you mustn't comein here," he concluded, as though the matter was settled beyond furtherdiscussion. For one instant--the crucial one, of course--the menhesitated, for the reason that so often makes superior numbers of noavail among the lawless--the lack of a leader of nerve--and withoutanother word Hale held the door. But the frightened mayor inside let theprisoner out at once on bond and Hale, combining law and diplomacy, wenton the bond.

  Only a day or two later the mountaineers, who worked at the brick-plantwith pistols buckled around them, went on a strike and, that night, shotout the lights and punctured the chromos in their boarding-house. Then,armed with sticks, knives, clubs and pistols, they took a triumphantmarch through town. That night two knives and two pistols were whippedout by two of them in the same store. One of the Ludlows promptly blewout the light and astutely got under the counter. When the combatantsscrambled outside, he locked the door and crawled out the back window.Next morning the brick-yard malcontents marched triumphantly again andHale called for volunteers to arrest them. To his disgust only Logan,Macfarlan, the Hon. Sam Budd, and two or three others seemed willing togo, but when the few who would go started, Hale, leading them, lookedback and the whole town seemed to be strung out after him. Below thehill, he saw the mountaineers drawn up in two bodies for battle and, ashe led his followers towards them, the Hoosier owner of the plant rodeout at a gallop, waving his hands and apparently beside himself withanxiety and terror.

  "Don't," he shouted; "somebody'll get killed. Wait--they'll give up." SoHale halted and the Hoosier rode back. After a short parley he came backto Hale to say that the strikers would give up, but when Logan startedagain, they broke
and ran, and only three or four were captured. TheHoosier was delirious over his troubles and straightway closed hisplant.

  "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 atown without law and order--they could not have law and order withouttaking part themselves, and even then they plainly would have theirhands full. And so, that night, on the tiny porch of the little cottagethat was Hale's sleeping-room and office, with the creaking of the onewheel of their one industry--the old grist-mill--making patient musicthrough the rhododendron-darkness that hid the steep bank of thestream, the three pioneers forged their plan. There had beengentlemen-regulators a plenty, vigilance committees of gentlemen, andthe Ku-Klux clan had been originally composed of gentlemen, as they allknew, but they meant to hew to the strict line of town-ordinance andcommon law and do the rough everyday work of the common policeman.So volunteer policemen they would be and, in order to extend theirauthority as much as possible, as county policemen they would beenrolled. Each man would purchase his own Winchester, pistol, billy,badge and a whistle--to call for help--and they would begin drilling andtarget-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 theHon. Sam third. Two rules, Logan, who, too, knew the mountaineer well,suggested as inflexible. One was never to draw a pistol at all unlessnecessary, never to pretend to draw as a threat or to intimidate, andnever to draw unless one meant to shoot, if need be.

  "And the other," added Logan, "always go in force to make anarrest--never alone unless necessary." The Hon. Sam moved his head upand down in hearty approval.

  "Why is that?" asked Hale.

  "To save bloodshed," he said. "These fellows we will have to deal withhave a pride that is morbid. A mountaineer doesn't like to go home andhave to say that one man put him in the calaboose--but he doesn't mindtelling that it took several to arrest him. Moreover, he will give into two or three men, when he would look on the coming of one man as apersonal issue and to be met as such."

  Hale nodded.

  "Oh, there'll be plenty of chances," Logan added with a smile, "foreveryone to go it alone." Again the Hon. Sam nodded grimly. It wasplain to him that they would have all they could do, but no one of themdreamed of the far-reaching effect that night's work would bring.

  They were the vanguard of civilization--"crusaders of the nineteenthcentury 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 ourpurpose 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, whenthey 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 mustgo back to the standards of the Revolution. Practically, they are thepioneers of that day and hardly a bit have they advanced. They areour contemporary ancestors." And then the Hon. Sam, having dropped hisvernacular, lounged ponderously into what he was pleased to call hisanthropological drool.

  "You see, mountains isolate people and the effect of isolation onhuman life is to crystallize it. Those people over the line have hadno navigable rivers, no lakes, no wagon roads, except often the beds ofstreams. They have been cut off from all communication with the outsideworld. They are a perfect example of an arrested civilization and theyare the closest link we have with the Old World. They were Unionistsbecause of the Revolution, as they were Americans in the beginningbecause of the spirit of the Covenanter. They live like the pioneers;the axe and the rifle are still their weapons and they still have thesame fight with nature. This feud business is a matter of clan-loyaltythat goes back to Scotland. They argue this way: You are my friend ormy 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 anofficer, you must not arrest me; you must send me a kindly request tocome 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, allright--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. SamuelBudd. Other members of that vanguard began to drift in now by twos andthrees from the bluegrass region of Kentucky and from the tide-watercountry of Virginia and from New England--strong, bold young men withthe spirit of the pioneer and the birth, breeding and education ofgentlemen, and the war between civilization and a lawlessness that wasthe result of isolation, and consequent ignorance and idleness startedin earnest.

  "A remarkable array," murmured the Hon. Sam, when he took an inventoryone night with Hale, "I'm proud to be among 'em."

  Many times Hale went over to Lonesome Cove and with every visit hisinterest grew steadily in the little girl and in the curious peopleover there, until he actually began to believe in the Hon. Sam Budd'santhropological theories. In the cabin on Lonesome Cove was a craneswinging in the big stone fireplace, and he saw the old step-mother andJune putting the spinning wheel and the loom to actual use. Sometimeshe found a cabin of unhewn logs with a puncheon floor, clapboards forshingles and wooden pin and auger holes for nails; a batten woodenshutter, the logs filled with mud and stones and holes in the roof forthe wind and the rain. Over a pair of buck antlers sometimes lay thelong heavy home-made rifle of the backwoodsman--sometimes even with aflintlock and called by some pet feminine name. Once he saw the hominyblock that the mountaineers had borrowed from the Indians, and once ahandmill like the one from which the one woman was taken and theother left in biblical days. He struck communities where the medium ofexchange was still barter, and he found mountaineers drinking metheglinstill as well as moonshine. Moreover, there were still log-rollings,house-warmings, corn-shuckings, and quilting parties, and sports werethe same as in pioneer days--wrestling, racing, jumping, and liftingbarrels. Often he saw a cradle of beegum, and old Judd had in his housea fox-horn made of hickory bark which even June could blow. He ranacross old-world superstitions, too, and met one seventh son of aseventh son who cured children of rash by blowing into their mouths. Andhe got June to singing transatlantic songs, after old Judd said one daythat she knowed the "miserablest song he'd ever heerd"--meaning the mostsorrowful. And, thereupon, with quaint simplicity, June put her heels onthe rung of her chair, and with her elbows on her knees, and her chinon both bent thumbs, sang him the oldest version of "Barbara Allen" in avoice 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 songsthat 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 onthe 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 everused in history. He had heard old Judd say once, when he was speaking ofthe feud:

  "Well, I've al'ays laid out my enemies. The Lord's been on my side an' Igits a better Christian every year."

  Always Hale took some children's book for June when he went to LonesomeCove, and she rarely failed to know it almost by heart when he wentagain. 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--thatthe mountaineers were of the same class as the other westward-sweepingemigrants of more than a century before, that they had simply laindormant in the hills and--a century counting for nothing in the matterof inheritance--that their possibilities were little changed, andthat the children of that day would, if given t
he chance, wipe out thehandicap of a century in one generation and take their place abreastwith children of the outside world. The Tollivers were of good blood;they had come from Eastern Virginia, and the original Tolliver hadbeen a slave-owner. The very name was, undoubtedly, a corruption ofTagliaferro. So, when the Widow Crane began to build a brick house forher boarders that winter, and the foundations of a school-house werelaid at the Gap, Hale began to plead with old Judd to allow June to goover 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'dlose her, an' he reckoned June was a-larnin' enough without goin' toschool--she was a-studyin' them leetle books o' hers so hard." But ashis confidence in Hale grew and as Hale stated his intention to take anoption on the old man's coal lands, he could see that Devil Judd, thoughhis answer never varied, was considering the question seriously.

  Through the winter, then, Hale made occasional trips to Lonesome Coveand bided his time. Often he met young Dave Tolliver there, but theboy usually left when Hale came, and if Hale was already there, he keptoutside the house, until the engineer was gone.

  Knowing nothing of the ethics of courtship in the mountains--how, whentwo men meet at the same girl's house, "they makes the gal say which oneshe likes best and t'other one gits"--Hale little dreamed that the firsttime Dave stalked out of the room, he threw his hat in the grassbehind the big chimney and executed a war-dance on it, cursing theblankety-blank "furriner" within from Dan to Beersheba.

  Indeed, he never suspected the fierce depths of the boy's jealousy atall, and he would have laughed incredulously, if he had been told how,time after time as he climbed the mountain homeward, the boy's blackeyes burned from the bushes on him, while his hand twitched at hispistol-butt and his lips worked with noiseless threats. For Dave hadto keep his heart-burnings to himself or he would have been laughedat through all the mountains, and not only by his own family, but byJune's; so he, too, bided his time.

  In late February, old Buck Falin and old Dave Tolliver shot each otherdown in the road and the Red Fox, who hated both and whom each thoughtwas his friend, dressed the wounds of both with equal care. Thetemporary lull of peace that Bad Rufe's absence in the West had broughtabout, gave way to a threatening storm then, and then it was that oldJudd gave his consent: when the roads got better, June could go to theGap to school. A month later the old man sent word that he did not wantJune in the mountains while the trouble was going on, and that Halecould come over for her when he pleased: and Hale sent word back thatwithin three days he would meet the father and the little girl at thebig Pine. That last day at home June passed in a dream. She went throughher daily tasks in a dream and she hardly noticed young Dave when hecame in at mid-day, and Dave, when he heard the news, left in sullensilence. In the afternoon she went down to the mill to tell Uncle Billyand ole Hon good-by and the three sat in the porch a long time and withfew words. Ole Hon had been to the Gap once, but there was "so muchbustle over thar it made her head ache." Uncle Billy shook his headdoubtfully over June's going, and the two old people stood at the gatelooking 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 andsat on the old log saying good-by to the comforting spirit that alwaysbrooded for her there, and, when she stood on the porch at sunset, anew spirit was coming on the wings of the South wind. Hale felt it ashe stepped into the soft night air; he heard it in the piping offrogs--"Marsh-birds," as he always called them; he could almost see itin the flying clouds and the moonlight and even the bare trees seemedtremulously expectant. An indefinable happiness seemed to pervade thewhole earth and Hale stretched his arms lazily. Over in Lonesome Covelittle June felt it more keenly than ever in her life before. She didnot want to go to bed that night, and when the others were asleep sheslipped out to the porch and sat on the steps, her eyes luminous and herface wistful--looking towards the big Pine which pointed the way towardsthe far silence into which she was going at last.