Sir Winston S. Churchill - "The Story of the Malakand Field Force"

John Lothrop Motley - "History of the United Netherlands, 1588"

Sir Walter Scott - "The Monastery"

E. Nesbit - "The Enchanted Castle"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Heart Of The Hills

J >> John Fox, Jr. >> The Heart Of The Hills




"Grandpap," he called tremulously.

The old man started and turned his great shaggy head. He said
nothing, but it seemed to the boy that from under his bushy brows
a flash of lightning was searching him from head to foot.

"Well," he rumbled scathingly, "you've been a-playin' hell, hain't
ye? I mought 'a' knowed whut would happen with Honeycutts a-
leadin' that gang. I tol' 'em to go up thar an' fight open--man to
man. They don't know nothin' but way-layin'. A thousand of 'em
shootin' one pore man in the back! Whut've I been tryin' to l'arn
ye since you was a baby? God knows I WANTED him killed. Why,"
thundered the old man savagely, "didn't YOU kill him face to
face?"

The boy's chin had gone up proudly while the old man talked and
now there was a lightning-flash in his own eyes.

"I tried to git him face to face fer three days. I knowed he had a
gun. I was aimin' to give him a chance fer his life. But seemed
like thar wasn't no other--"

"Stop!" thundered the old man again, "don't you say a word."

There was a loud "Hello" at the gate.

"Thar they air now," said the old man with a break in his voice,
and as he rose from his chair he said sternly: "An' stay right
where you air."

Through the window the boy saw the two horsemen who had passed him
in the road that morning. His eyes grew wild and he began to
tremble violently, but he stood still. The old man went to the
door.

"Hyeh he is, men," he shouted; "come in hyeh an' git him."

Then he turned to the boy.

"You air goin' back thar an' stand yore trial like a man."

The boy leaped wildly for the door, but the old man caught him and
with one hand held him as though he were a child, and thus the two
astonished detectives from the Blue-grass found them, and they
gaped at the mystery, for they knew the kinship of the two. One
pulled from his pocket a pair of handcuffs, and old Jason glared
at him with contempt.

"Don't you put them things on this boy--he's my grandson. An',
anyhow, ef you two full-grown men can't handle a boy without 'em
I'll go 'long with you myself."

Shamed, the man put the irons back in his pocket, and the other
one started to speak but stopped. The old man turned hospitably
toward his unwelcome guests.

"I reckon all o' ye want a bite to eat afore ye start. Mammy!"

The door to the kitchen opened and the aged grandmother halted
there, peering through brass-rimmed spectacles at her husband and
the two men, and catching sight last of little Jason standing in
the corner--trapped, white-faced, silent. Instantly she caught the
meaning of the scene, and with a little cry she tottered over to
the boy and putting both her hands on his breast began to pat him
gently. Then, still helplessly patting him with one hand, she
turned to her husband.

"You hain't goin' to give the boy up, Jason?" she asked
plaintively, and the old man swerved his face aside and nodded.

"Git up somethin' to eat, mammy," he said with rough gentleness,
and without another look or word she turned with her apron at her
eyes to the kitchen door. The old man glared out the window, the
boy sank on a chair at the corner of the fireplace, and in the
face of one of the men there was sympathy. The other, shifty of
eyes and crafty of face, spoke harshly.

"How much o' this reward do you want?"

Old Jason wheeled and the other man cried sternly:

"Shut up, you fool!"

"You lop-yeared rattlesnake!" began old Jason, and with a
contemptuous gesture dismissed him. "How much is that reward?"

The other man hesitated, and then with the thought that the fact
would soon be world-known answered promptly:

"For the capture and conviction of the murderer--one hundred
thousand dollars."

The old man gasped at the amazing sum; his face worked suddenly
with convulsive rage and calmed in a sudden way that made the
watching boy know that something was going to happen. Quietly old
Jason walked over to the fire and stood with his back to it. He
pulled out his pipe, filled it, and turned again to the mantel-
piece as though to reach for a match, but instead whipped two big
revolvers from it and wheeled.

"Hands up, men!" he said quietly. For a moment the two were
paralyzed, but the thick-set man, whose instincts were quicker,
obeyed slowly. The other one started to laugh.

"Up!" called the old man sternly, levelling one pistol, and the
laugh stopped, the man's face paled, and his hands flew high.

"Git their guns fer a minute, Jasie, an' put em' up hyeh on the
mantel. A hundred thousand dollars is a LEETLE too much."

The kitchen door opened and again the old woman peered through her
spectacles within.

"I knowed you wouldn't do it, pap," she said. "Dinner's ready--
come on in now, men, an' git a bite to eat."

The thin man's shifty eyes roved to his companion, who had almost
begun to smile and who muttered to himself as he rose:

"Well, by God!"

In utter silence the meal went through, except that the old man,
with his pistols crossed in his lap, kept urging his guests to the
full of their appetites. Jason ate like a wolf.

"Git a poke, mammy," said old Jason when the boy dropped knife and
fork, "an' fill it full o' victuals."

And still with a smile the thick-set man watched her gather food
from the table, put it in a paper sack, and hand it to the boy.

"Now git, Jasie--these men air goin' to stay hyeh with me fer'
bout an hour, an' then they can go atter ye ef they think they can
ketch ye."

With no word at all even of good-by, little Jason noiselessly
disappeared. A few minutes later, sitting in front of the fire
with his pistols still in his lap, old Jason Hawn explained:

"Fer a mule, a Winchester, and a hundred dollars I can git most
any man in this country killed. Fer a thousand I reckon I could
git hit proved that I had stole a side o' bacon or a hoss. Fer a
hundred thousand I could git hit proved that the President of
these United States killed that feller--an' human natur' is about
the same, I reckon, ever'whar. You don't git no grandson o' mine
when thar's a bunch o' greenbacks like that tied to the rope
that's a-pinin' to hang him."

An hour later he told his guests that they could be on their way,
though he'd be mighty glad to have 'em stay all night--and they
went, both chagrined, the thin one raging within but obedient and
respectful without, while the other, chuckling at his companion's
discomfiture and no little at his own, watched with a smile the
old fellow's method of speeding his parting guests.

"Git on yo' hosses, men," he suggested, and when the two stepped
from the porch he replaced his own guns on the mantel and followed
them with both of their guns in one hand and a Winchester in the
other. While they were mounting he walked to the corner of the
yard, laid both their pistols on the fence, walked back to the
porch, and stood there with his Winchester in the hollow of his
arm.

"Ride by thar, men, and git yo' guns; an' I reckon," he suggested
casually but convincingly, "when you pick 'em up you better not
EVEN LOOK BACK--NARY ONE O' YE."

"Can you beat it?" murmured the quiet man, while the other snarled
helplessly.

"An' when you git down to town you can tell the sheriff. He's a
Honeycutt, an' he won't come atter me, but I'll go down thar to
him an' pay my leetle fine."

Again the man said:

"Well, BY God!"

And as the two rode on, the old fellow's voice followed them:

"Come ag'in, men--I wish ye both well."

Two nights later St. Hilda, reading by her fire, heard a tap on
her window-pane, and, looking up, saw Jason's pale face outside.
She ran to the door, and the boy stumbled wearily toward the
threshold and stopped with a look of fear and piteous appeal. She
stretched out her arms to him, and, broken at last, the boy sank
at her feet, and, with his head in her lap, sobbed out of his
heart the truth.




XXIX

St. Hilda herself took Jason back to the Blue-grass, took him to
the gray frowning prison at the capital, and with streaming eyes
watched the iron gates close between them. Then she went home,
sent for John Burnham, and within an hour both started working for
the boy's freedom, for Jason must keep on with his studies, and,
with Steve Hawn in jail, must help his mother. Through Gray's
influence Colonel Pendleton, and through Marjorie's, Mrs.
Pendleton as well, offered to go sponsors for the boy's appearance
at his trial. The man from the Pennyroyal who sat in the
governor's chair, and even the successor to the autocrat who was
trying to pre-empt that seat, gave letters to help, and before any
prison pallor could touch the boy's sun-tanned face he was out in
the open air once more on bail. And when old Jason Hawn in the
mountains heard what had happened, he laughed.

"Well, I reckon if he's indicted only fer HELPIN' Steve, he ain't
in much danger, fer they can't git him onless they git Steve, an'
if thar IS one man no money can ketch--that man is slick Steve
Hawn. An' lemme tell ye: if the right feller was from the
mountains an' only mountain folks knows it, they hain't NUVER
goin' to find him out. Mebbe I was a leetle hasty--mebbe I was."

After one talk with John Burnham, the old president suggested that
Jason drop down into the "kitchen" and go on with his books, but
against this plan Jason shook his head. He was going to raise
Steve Hawn's tobacco crop on shares with Colonel Pendleton, he
would study at home, and John Burnham saw, moreover, that the boy
shrank from the ordeal of college associations and any further
hurt to his pride.

The pores of the earth were beginning to open now to the warm
breath of spring. Already Martha Hawn and Mavis had burnt brush on
the soil to kill the grass, and Jason ploughed the soil and
harrowed it with minute care, and sowed the seed broadcast by
hand. Within two weeks lettuce-like leaves were peeping through
the ground, and Jason and Mavis stretched canvas over the beds to
hold in the heat of day and hold off the frost of night. Three
weeks later came the first ploughing; then there was ploughing and
ploughing and ploughing again, and weeding and weeding and weeding
again. Just before ripening, the blooms came--blooms that were for
all the word like the blooms of purple rhododendron back in the
hills, and then the task of suckering began. Sometimes Mavis would
help and the mother started in to work like a man, but the boy had
absorbed from his environment its higher ideal of woman and, all
he could, he kept both of them out of the tobacco field. This made
it all the harder for him and there was no let-up to his toil.
Just the same, Jason put in every spare moment on his books, and
in Mavis's little room, which had been turned over to him, his
lamp burned far into every night. When he struck a knotty point or
problem, he would walk over to John Burnham's for help, or the
school-master, as he went to and fro from his college duties,
would find the boy on a fence by the roadside waiting with his
question for him. All the summer Jason toiled. When there was no
hard labor, always he had to fight the tobacco worms with spray,
and hand, and boot-heel, until the rich dark-green of the leaves
took on a furry, velvety sheen--until at ripening they turned to a
bright gold and were ready for the chisel-bladed, double-edged
knife with which the plants are cut close to the ground. Then they
must be hung on upright tobacco sticks, stalks upward, to wilt
under the August sun, and then on to be housed in Colonel
Pendleton's great barns to dry within their slitted walls. Several
times during the summer Arch Hawn came by and looked at the boy's
work with keen, approving eye and in turn won a falling-off in
Jason's old prejudice against him; for Arch had built a church in
the county-seat in the mountains, had helped the county schools,
was making ready to help the mountain people fight unjust claims
to their lands, and, himself charged with helping to bring the
mountain army down to the capital, stood boldly ready to surrender
to the call of the law--he even meant to help Steve Hawn in his
trouble, for Steve, after an examining trial, had been remanded
back to prison without bail: and he was going to help Jason in his
trial, which would closely follow Steve's.

All summer, too, Gray and Marjorie were riding or driving past the
tobacco field, and Jason and Mavis, when they saw either or both
coming, would move to the end of the field that was farthest from
the turnpike and, turning their backs, would pretend not to see.
Sometimes the two mountaineers would be caught where avoidance was
impossible, and then Marjorie and Gray would call out cheerily and
with a smile--to get in return from the children of the soil a
grave, silent nod of the head and a grave, answering glance of the
eye--for neither knew the part the Blue-grass boy and girl had
played in the getting of Jason's freedom, until one late afternoon
of the closing summer days, for John Burnham had been asked to
keep the matter a secret. But Steve Hawn had learned from his
lawyer and had told his wife Martha when she came to visit him in
prison; and that late afternoon she was in the tobacco field when
Mavis and Jason moved to the other end and turned their backs as
Marjorie rode by on her way home and Gray an hour later galloped
past the other way.

"I reckon," she said quietly to Jason, "ef you knowed whut that
boy an' gal has been a-doin' fer ye, you wouldn't be a-actin'
that-a-way."

And then she explained and started for home. Both stood still--
silent and dumfounded--and only Mavis spoke at last.

"BOTH of us beholden to BOTH of 'em."

Jason made no answer, but bent to his work. When Mavis, too,
started for home he stayed behind without explanation, and when
she was out of sight he climbed the fence at the edge of the
woods, and sat there looking toward the sunset fading behind
Marjorie's home.




XXX

The tobacco was dry now, for the autumn was at hand. It must come
to case yet, then it must be stripped, the grades picked out, and
left then in bulk for sale. With all this Jason had nothing to do.
He had done good work on his books during the spring and autumn,
such good work that, with the old president's gladly given
permission, he was allowed a special examination which admitted
him with but one or two "conditions" into his own sophomore class.
Then was there the extraordinary spectacle of a college boy--
quiet, serious, toiling--making the slow way toward the humanities
under charge of murder and awaiting trial for his life. And that
course Jason Hawn followed with a dignity, reticence, and self-
effacement that won the steadily increasing respect of every
student and teacher within the college walls. A belief in his
innocence became wide-spread, and that coming trial began to be
regarded in time as a trial of the good name of the college
itself. A change of venue had been obtained and the trial was to
be held in the college town. It came in mid-December. Jason,
neatly dressed, sat beside his lawyer, and his mother, in black,
and Mavis sat quite near him. In the first row among the
spectators were Gray and Marjorie and Colonel Pendleton. Behind
them was John Burnham, and about him and behind him were several
other professors, while the room was crowded with students. The
boy was pale when he went to the witness-chair, and the court-room
was as still as a wooded ravine in the hills when he began to tell
his story, which apparently no other soul than his own lawyer had
ever heard; indeed it was soon apparent that even he had never
heard it all.

"I went down there to kill him," the boy said calmly, though his
eyes were two deep points of fire--so calmly, indeed, that as one
man the audience gasped audibly--"an' I reckon all of ye know why.
My grandpap al'ays told me the meanest thing a man could do was to
shoot another man in the back. I tried for three days to git face
to face with him. I knowed he had a gun all the time, an' I meant
to give him a fair chance fer his life. That mornin' I heard
through the walls of the boardin'-house I was in--an' I didn't
know who was doin' the talkin'--that the man was goin' to be
waylaid right then an' I run over to that ex-ec-u-tive building to
reach Steve Hawn an' keep HIM anyways from doin' the shootin'. I
heard the shots soon as I got inside the door, and purty soon I
met Steve runnin' down the stairs. 'I didn't do it!' Steve says,
'but any feller from the mountains better git away from HERE.' We
run out through the yard an' got into Steve's buggy an' travelled
the road till we was ketched--an' that's all I know."

And that was all. No other fact, no other admission, no other
statement could the rigid, bitter cross-examination bring from the
lad's lips than just those words; and those words alone the jury
carried to their room. Nor were they long gone. Back they came,
and again the court-room was as the holding in of one painful
breath, and then tears started in the eyes of the woman in black,
the mountain girl by her side, and in Marjorie's, and the court-
room broke into stifled cheer, for the words all heard were:

"Not guilty."

At the gate of the college a crowd of students, led by Gray
Pendleton, awaited Jason. The boy was borne aloft on their
shoulders through the yard amid the cheers of boys and girls--was
borne on into the gymnasium, and before the lad could quite
realize what was going on he heard himself cheered as captain of
the foot-ball team for the next year, and was once more borne out,
around and aloft again--while John Burnham with a full heart, and
Mavis and Marjorie with wet eyes, looked smilingly on. A week
later Arch Hawn persuaded the boy to allow him to lend him money
to complete his course and a week later still it was Christmas
again. Christmas night there was a glad gathering at Colonel
Pendleton's. Even St. Hilda was there, and she and John Burnham,
and Colonel Pendleton and Mrs. Pendleton, Gray and Mavis, and
Marjorie and Jason, danced the Virginia reel together, and all the
stars were stars of Bethlehem to Mavis and Jason Hawn as they
crunched across the frozen fields at dawn for home.




XXXI

The pale, dark young secretary of state had fled from the capital
in a soldier's uniform and had been captured with a pardon in his
pocket from the Pennyroyal governor, which the authorities refused
to honor. The mountain ex-secretary of state had fled across the
Ohio, to live there an exile. The governor from the Pennyroyal had
carried his case to the supreme court of the land, had lost, and
he, too, amid the condemnation of friends and foes, had crossed
the same yellow river to the protection of the same Northern
State. With his flight the troubles at the capital had passed the
acute crisis and settled down into a long, wearisome struggle to
convict the assassins of the autocrat. During the year the young
secretary of state had been once condemned to death, once to life
imprisonment, and was now risking the noose again on a third
trial. Jason Hawn's testimony at his own trial, it was thought,
would help Steve Hawn. Indeed, another mountaineer, Hiram
Honeycutt, an uncle to little Aaron, was, it seemed, in greater
danger than Steve, but the suspect in most peril was an auditor's
clerk from the Blue-grass; so it looked as though old Jason's
prophecy--that the real murderer, if a mountaineer, would never be
convicted--might yet come true. The autocrat was living on in the
hearts of his followers as a martyr to the cause of the people,
and a granite shaft was to rise in the little cemetery on the
river bluff to commemorate his deeds and his name. His death had
gratified the blood-lust of his foes, his young Democratic
successor would amend that "infamous election law" and was plainly
striving for a just administration, and so bitterness began
swiftly to abate, tolerance grew rapidly, and the State went
earnestly on trying to cure its political ills. And yet even while
John Burnham and his like were congratulating themselves that cool
heads and strong hands had averted civil war, checked further
violence, and left all questions to the law and the courts, the
economic poison that tobacco had been spreading through the land
began to shake the commonwealth with a new fever: for not liberty
but daily bread was the farmer's question now.

The Big Trust had cut out competitive buyers, cut down prices to
the cost of production, and put up the price of the tobacco bag
and the plug. So that the farmer must smoke and chew his own
tobacco, or sell it at a loss and buy it back again at whatever
price the trust chose to charge him. Already along the southern
border of the State the farmers had organized for mutual
protection and the members had agreed to plant only half the usual
acreage. When the non-members planted more than ever, masked men
descended upon them at night and put the raiser to the whip and
his barn to the torch. It seemed as though the passions of men,
aroused by the political troubles and getting no vent in action,
welcomed this new outlet, and already the night-riding of ku-klux
and toll gate days was having a new and easy birth. And these
sinister forces were sweeping slowly toward the Blue-grass. Thus
the injection of this new problem brought a swift subsidence of
politics in the popular mind. It caused a swift withdrawal of the
political background from the lives of the Pendletons and dwarfed
its importance for the time in the lives of the Hawns, for again
the following spring Colonel Pendleton, in the teeth of the coming
storm, raised tobacco, and so, for his mother, did Jason Hawn.

In the mountains, meanwhile, the trend, contrariwise, was upward--
all upward. Railroads were building, mines were opening, great
trees were falling for timber. Even the Hawns and Honeycutts were
too busy for an actual renewal of the feud, though the casual
traveller was amazed to discover slowly how bitter the enmity
still was. But the feud in no way checked the growth going on in
all ways, nor was that growth all material. More schools than St.
Hilda's had come into the hills from the outside and were doing
hardly less effective work. County schools, too, were increasing
in number and in strength. More and more mountain boys and girls
were each year going away to college, bringing back the fruits of
their work and planting the seeds of them at home. The log cabin
was rapidly disappearing, the frame cottages were being built with
more neatness and taste, and garish colors were becoming things of
the past. Indeed, a quick uplift through all the mountains was
perceptible to any observant eye that had known and knew now the
hills. To the law-makers at the capital and to the men of law and
business in the Blue-grass, that change was plain when they came
into conflict with the lawyers and bankers and merchants of the
highlands, for they found this new hillsman shrewd, resourceful,
quick-witted, tenacious, and strong, and John Burnham began to
wonder if the vigorous type of Kentuckian that seemed passing in
the Blue-grass might not be coming to a new birth in the hills. He
smiled grimly that following spring when he heard that a company
of mountain militia from a county that was notorious for a
desperate feud had been sent down to keep order in the tobacco
lowlands; he kept on smiling every time he heard that a
mountaineer had sold his coal lands and moved down to buy some
blue-grass farm, and wondering how far this peaceful
dispossessment might go in time; and whether a fusion of these
social extremes of civilization might not be in the end for the
best good of the State. And he knew that the basis of his every
speculation about the fortunes of the State rested on the
intertwining hand of fate in the lives of Marjorie and Gray
Pendleton and Mavis and Jason Hawn.




XXXII

In June, Gray Pendleton closed his college career as he had gone
through it--like a meteor--and Jason went for the summer to the
mountains, while Mavis stayed with his mother, for again Steve
Hawn had been tried and convicted and returned to jail to await a
new trial. In the mountains Jason got employment at some mines
below the county-seat, and there he watched the incoming of the
real "furriners," Italians, "Hunks," and Slavs, and the uprising
of a mining town. He worked, too, in every capacity that was open
to him, and he kept his keen eyes and keen mind busy that he might
know as much as possible of the great machine that old Morton
Sanders would build and set to work on his mother's land. And more
than ever that summer he warmed to his uncle Arch Hawn for the
fight that Arch was making to protect native titles to mountain
lands--a fight that would help the achievement of the purpose
that, though faltering at last, was still deep in the boy's heart.

In the autumn, when he went back to college, Gray had set off to
some Northern college for a post-graduate course in engineering
and Marjorie had gone to some fashionable school in the great city
of the nation for the finishing touches of hats and gowns,
painting and music, and for a wider knowledge of her own social
world. That autumn the tobacco trouble was already pointing to a
crisis for Colonel Pendleton. The whip and lash and the
destruction of seed-beds had been ineffective, and as the trust
had got control of the trade, the raisers must now get control of
the raw leaf in the field and in the barn. That autumn Jason
himself drifted into a mass-meeting of growers in the court-house
one day on his way home from college. An orator from the Far West
with a shock of black hair and gloomy black brows and eyes urged a
general and permanent alliance of the tillers of the soil. An old
white-bearded man with cane and spectacles and a heavy goatee
working under a chew of tobacco tremulously pleaded for a pooling
of the crops. The answer was that all would not pool, and the
question was how to get all in. A great-shouldered, red-faced man
and a bull-necked fellow with gray, fearless eyes, both from the
southern part of the State, openly urged the incendiary methods
that they were practising at home--the tearing up of tobacco-beds,
burning of barns, and the whipping of growers who refused to go
into the pool. And then Colonel Pendleton rose, his face as white
as his snowy shirt, and bowed courteously to the chairman.