Books: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

J >> John Fox, Jr. >> The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

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"Howdye!" said Hale.

"Howdye!" was the low, unpropitiating answer.

The owner of the eyes was nothing but a boy, in spite of his
length: so much of a boy that a slight crack in his voice showed
that it was just past the throes of "changing," but those black
eyes burned on without swerving--except once when they flashed at
the little girl who, with her chin in her hand and one foot on the
top rung of her chair, was gazing at the stranger with equal
steadiness. She saw the boy's glance, she shifted her knees
impatiently and her little face grew sullen. Hale smiled inwardly,
for he thought he could already see the lay of the land, and he
wondered that, at such an age, such fierceness could be: so every
now and then he looked at the boy, and every time he looked, the
black eyes were on him. The mountain youth must have been almost
six feet tall, young as he was, and while he was lanky in limb he
was well knit. His jean trousers were stuffed in the top of his
boots and were tight over his knees which were well-moulded, and
that is rare with a mountaineer. A loop of black hair curved over
his forehead, down almost to his left eye. His nose was straight
and almost delicate and his mouth was small, but extraordinarily
resolute. Somewhere he had seen that face before, and he turned
suddenly, but he did not startle the lad with his abruptness, nor
make him turn his gaze.

"Why, haven't I--?" he said. And then he suddenly remembered. He
had seen that boy not long since on the other side of the
mountains, riding his horse at a gallop down the county road with
his reins in his teeth, and shooting a pistol alternately at the
sun and the earth with either hand. Perhaps it was as well not to
recall the incident. He turned to the old mountaineer.

"Do you mean to tell me that a man can't go through these
mountains without telling everybody who asks him what his name
is?"

The effect of his question was singular. The old man spat into the
fire and put his hand to his beard. The boy crossed his legs
suddenly and shoved his muscular fingers deep into his pockets.
The figure shifted position on the bed and the infant at the foot
of it seemed to clench his toy-dagger a little more tightly. Only
the little girl was motionless--she still looked at him,
unwinking. What sort of wild animals had he fallen among?

"No, he can't--an' keep healthy." The giant spoke shortly.

"Why not?"

"Well, if a man hain't up to some devilment, what reason's he got
fer not tellin' his name?"

"That's his business."

"Tain't over hyeh. Hit's mine. Ef a man don't want to tell his
name over hyeh, he's a spy or a raider or a officer looking fer
somebody or," he added carelessly, but with a quick covert look at
his visitor--"he's got some kind o' business that he don't want
nobody to know about."

"Well, I came over here--just to--well, I hardly know why I did
come."

"Jess so," said the old man dryly. "An' if ye ain't looking fer
trouble, you'd better tell your name in these mountains, whenever
you're axed. Ef enough people air backin' a custom anywhar hit
goes, don't hit?"

His logic was good--and Hale said nothing. Presently the old man
rose with a smile on his face that looked cynical, picked up a
black lump and threw it into the fire. It caught fire, crackled,
blazed, almost oozed with oil, and Hale leaned forward and leaned
back.

"Pretty good coal!"

"Hain't it, though?" The old man picked up a sliver that had flown
to the hearth and held a match to it. The piece blazed and burned
in his hand.

"I never seed no coal in these mountains like that--did you?"

"Not often--find it around here?"

"Right hyeh on this farm--about five feet thick!"

"What?"

"An' no partin'."

"No partin'"--it was not often that he found a mountaineer who
knew what a parting in a coal bed was.

"A friend o' mine on t'other side,"--a light dawned for the
engineer.

"Oh," he said quickly. "That's how you knew my name."

"Right you air, stranger. He tol' me you was a--expert."

The old man laughed loudly. "An' that's why you come over hyeh."

"No, it isn't."

"Co'se not,"--the old fellow laughed again. Hale shifted the talk.

"Well, now that you know my name, suppose you tell me what yours
is?"

"Tolliver--Judd Tolliver." Hale started.

"Not Devil Judd!"

"That's what some evil folks calls me." Again he spoke shortly.
The mountaineers do not like to talk about their feuds. Hale knew
this--and the subject was dropped. But he watched the huge
mountaineer with interest. There was no more famous character in
all those hills than the giant before him--yet his face was kind
and was good-humoured, but the nose and eyes were the beak and
eyes of some bird of prey. The little girl had disappeared for a
moment. She came back with a blue-backed spelling-book, a second
reader and a worn copy of "Mother Goose," and she opened first one
and then the other until the attention of the visitor was caught--
the black-haired youth watching her meanwhile with lowering brows.

"Where did you learn to read?" Hale asked. The old man answered:

"A preacher come by our house over on the Nawth Fork 'bout three
year ago, and afore I knowed it he made me promise to send her
sister Sally to some school up thar on the edge of the
settlements. And after she come home, Sal larned that little gal
to read and spell. Sal died 'bout a year ago."

Hale reached over and got the spelling-book, and the old man
grinned at the quick, unerring responses of the little girl, and
the engineer looked surprised. She read, too, with unusual
facility, and her pronunciation was very precise and not at all
like her speech.

"You ought to send her to the same place," he said, but the old
fellow shook his head.

"I couldn't git along without her."

The little girl's eyes began to dance suddenly, and, without
opening "Mother Goose," she began:

"Jack and Jill went up a hill," and then she broke into a laugh
and Hale laughed with her.

Abruptly, the boy opposite rose to his great length.

"I reckon I better be goin'." That was all he said as he caught up
a Winchester, which stood unseen by his side, and out he stalked.
There was not a word of good-by, not a glance at anybody. A few
minutes later Hale heard the creak of a barn door on wooden
hinges, a cursing command to a horse, and four feet going in a
gallop down the path, and he knew there went an enemy.

"That's a good-looking boy--who is he?"

The old man spat into the fire. It seemed that he was not going to
answer and the little girl broke in:

"Hit's my cousin Dave--he lives over on the Nawth Fork."

That was the seat of the Tolliver-Falin feud. Of that feud, too,
Hale had heard, and so no more along that line of inquiry. He,
too, soon rose to go.

"Why, ain't ye goin' to have something to eat?"

"Oh, no, I've got something in my saddlebags and I must be getting
back to the Gap."

"Well, I reckon you ain't. You're jes' goin' to take a snack right
here." Hale hesitated, but the little girl was looking at him with
such unconscious eagerness in her dark eyes that he sat down
again.

"All right, I will, thank you." At once she ran to the kitchen and
the old man rose and pulled a bottle of white liquid from under
the quilts.

"I reckon I can trust ye," he said. The liquor burned Hale like
fire, and the old man, with a laugh at the face the stranger made,
tossed off a tumblerful.

"Gracious!" said Hale, "can you do that often?"

"Afore breakfast, dinner and supper," said the old man--"but I
don't." Hale felt a plucking at his sleeve. It was the boy with
the dagger at his elbow.

"Less see you laugh that-a-way agin," said Bub with such deadly
seriousness that Hale unconsciously broke into the same peal.

"Now," said Bub, unwinking, "I ain't afeard o' you no more."

V

Awaiting dinner, the mountaineer and the "furriner" sat on the
porch while Bub carved away at another pine dagger on the stoop.
As Hale passed out the door, a querulous voice said "Howdye" from
the bed in the corner and he knew it was the step-mother from whom
the little girl expected some nether-world punishment for an
offence of which he was ignorant. He had heard of the feud that
had been going on between the red Falins and the black Tollivers
for a quarter of a century, and this was Devil Judd, who had
earned his nickname when he was the leader of his clan by his
terrible strength, his marksmanship, his cunning and his courage.
Some years since the old man had retired from the leadership,
because he was tired of fighting or because he had quarrelled with
his brother Dave and his foster-brother, Bad Rufe--known as the
terror of the Tollivers--or from some unknown reason, and in
consequence there had been peace for a long time--the Falins
fearing that Devil Judd would be led into the feud again, the
Tollivers wary of starting hostilities without his aid. After the
last trouble, Bad Rufe Tolliver had gone West and old Judd had
moved his family as far away as possible. Hale looked around him:
this, then, was the home of Devil Judd Tolliver; the little
creature inside was his daughter and her name was June. All around
the cabin the wooded mountains towered except where, straight
before his eyes, Lonesome Creek slipped through them to the river,
and the old man had certainly picked out the very heart of silence
for his home. There was no neighbour within two leagues, Judd
said, except old Squire Billy Beams, who ran a mill a mile down
the river. No wonder the spot was called Lonesome Cove.

"You must ha' seed Uncle Billy and ole Hon passin'," he said.

"I did." Devil Judd laughed and Hale made out that "Hon" was short
for Honey.

"Uncle Billy used to drink right smart. Ole Hon broke him. She
followed him down to the grocery one day and walked in. 'Come on,
boys--let's have a drink'; and she set 'em up an' set 'em up until
Uncle Billy most went crazy. He had hard work gittin' her home,
an' Uncle Billy hain't teched a drap since." And the old
mountaineer chuckled again.

All the time Hale could hear noises from the kitchen inside. The
old step-mother was abed, he had seen no other woman about the
house and he wondered if the child could be cooking dinner. Her
flushed face answered when she opened the kitchen door and called
them in. She had not only cooked but now she served as well, and
when he thanked her, as he did every time she passed something to
him, she would colour faintly. Once or twice her hand seemed to
tremble, and he never looked at her but her questioning dark eyes
were full upon him, and always she kept one hand busy pushing her
thick hair back from her forehead. He had not asked her if it was
her footprints he had seen coming down the mountain for fear that
he might betray her, but apparently she had told on herself, for
Bub, after a while, burst out suddenly:

"June, thar, thought you was a raider." The little girl flushed
and the old man laughed.

"So'd you, pap," she said quietly.

"That's right," he said. "So'd anybody. I reckon you're the first
man that ever come over hyeh jus' to go a-fishin'," and he laughed
again. The stress on the last words showed that he believed no man
had yet come just for that purpose, and Hale merely laughed with
him. The old fellow gulped his food, pushed his chair back, and
when Hale was through, he wasted no more time.

"Want to see that coal?"

"Yes, I do," said Hale.

"All right, I'll be ready in a minute."

The little girl followed Hale out on the porch and stood with her
back against the railing.

"Did you catch it?" he asked. She nodded, unsmiling.

"I'm sorry. What were you doing up there?" She showed no surprise
that he knew that she had been up there, and while she answered
his question, he could see that she was thinking of something
else.

"I'd heerd so much about what you furriners was a-doin' over
thar."

"You must have heard about a place farther over--but it's coming
over there, too, some day." And still she looked an unspoken
question.

The fish that Hale had caught was lying where he had left it on
the edge of the porch.

"That's for you, June," he said, pointing to it, and the name as
he spoke it was sweet to his ears.

"I'm much obleeged," she said, shyly. "I'd 'a' cooked hit fer ye
if I'd 'a' knowed you wasn't goin' to take hit home."

"That's the reason I didn't give it to you at first--I was afraid
you'd do that. I wanted you to have it."

"Much obleeged," she said again, still unsmiling, and then she
suddenly looked up at him--the deeps of her dark eyes troubled.

"Air ye ever comin' back agin, Jack?" Hale was not accustomed to
the familiar form of address common in the mountains, independent
of sex or age--and he would have been staggered had not her face
been so serious. And then few women had ever called him by his
first name, and this time his own name was good to his ears.

"Yes, June," he said soberly. "Not for some time, maybe--but I'm
coming back again, sure." She smiled then with both lips and eyes-
-radiantly.

"I'll be lookin' fer ye," she said simply.

VI

The old man went with him up the creek and, passing the milk
house, turned up a brush-bordered little branch in which the
engineer saw signs of coal. Up the creek the mountaineer led him
some thirty yards above the water level and stopped. An entry had
been driven through the rich earth and ten feet within was a
shining bed of coal. There was no parting except two inches of
mother-of-coal--midway, which would make it but easier to mine.
Who had taught that old man to open coal in such a way--to make
such a facing? It looked as though the old fellow were in some
scheme with another to get him interested. As he drew closer, he
saw radiations of some twelve inches, all over the face of the
coal, star-shaped, and he almost gasped. It was not only cannel
coal--it was "bird's-eye" cannel. Heavens, what a find! Instantly
he was the cautious man of business, alert, cold, uncommunicative.

"That looks like a pretty good--" he drawled the last two words--
"vein of coal. I'd like to take a sample over to the Gap and
analyze it." His hammer, which he always carried--was in his
saddle pockets, but he did not have to go down to his horse. There
were pieces on the ground that would suit his purpose, left there,
no doubt, by his predecessor.

"Now I reckon you know that I know why you came over hyeh."

Hale started to answer, but he saw it was no use.

"Yes--and I'm coming again--for the same reason."

"Shore--come agin and come often."

The little girl was standing on the porch as he rode past the milk
house. He waved his hand to her, but she did not move nor answer.
What a life for a child--for that keen-eyed, sweet-faced child!
But that coal, cannel, rich as oil, above water, five feet in
thickness, easy to mine, with a solid roof and perhaps self-
drainage, if he could judge from the dip of the vein: and a market
everywhere--England, Spain, Italy, Brazil. The coal, to be sure,
might not be persistent--thirty yards within it might change in
quality to ordinary bituminous coal, but he could settle that only
with a steam drill. A steam drill! He would as well ask for the
wagon that he had long ago hitched to a star; and then there might
be a fault in the formation. But why bother now? The coal would
stay there, and now he had other plans that made even that find
insignificant. And yet if he bought that coal now--what a bargain!
It was not that the ideals of his college days were tarnished, but
he was a man of business now, and if he would take the old man's
land for a song--it was because others of his kind would do the
same! But why bother, he asked himself again, when his brain was
in a ferment with a colossal scheme that would make dizzy the
magnates who would some day drive their roadways of steel into
those wild hills. So he shook himself free of the question, which
passed from his mind only with a transient wonder as to who it was
that had told of him to the old mountaineer, and had so paved his
way for an investigation--and then he wheeled suddenly in his
saddle. The bushes had rustled gently behind him and out from them
stepped an extraordinary human shape--wearing a coon-skin cap,
belted with two rows of big cartridges, carrying a big Winchester
over one shoulder and a circular tube of brass in his left hand.
With his right leg straight, his left thigh drawn into the hollow
of his saddle and his left hand on the rump of his horse, Hale
simply stared, his eyes dropping by and by from the pale-blue eyes
and stubbly red beard of the stranger, down past the cartridge-
belts to the man's feet, on which were moccasins--with the heels
forward! Into what sort of a world had he dropped!

"So nary a soul can tell which way I'm going," said the red-haired
stranger, with a grin that loosed a hollow chuckle far behind it.

"Would you mind telling me what difference it can make to me which
way you are going?" Every moment he was expecting the stranger to
ask his name, but again that chuckle came.

"It makes a mighty sight o' difference to some folks."

"But none to me."

"I hain't wearin' 'em fer you. I know YOU."

"Oh, you do." The stranger suddenly lowered his Winchester and
turned his face, with his ear cocked like an animal. There was
some noise on the spur above.

"Nothin' but a hickory nut," said the chuckle again. But Hale had
been studying that strange face. One side of it was calm, kindly,
philosophic, benevolent; but, when the other was turned, a curious
twitch of the muscles at the left side of the mouth showed the
teeth and made a snarl there that was wolfish.

"Yes, and I know you," he said slowly. Self-satisfaction,
straightway, was ardent in the face.

"I knowed you would git to know me in time, if you didn't now."

This was the Red Fox of the mountains, of whom he had heard so
much--"yarb" doctor and Swedenborgian preacher; revenue officer
and, some said, cold-blooded murderer. He would walk twenty miles
to preach, or would start at any hour of the day or night to
minister to the sick, and would charge for neither service. At
other hours he would be searching for moonshine stills, or
watching his enemies in the valley from some mountain top, with
that huge spy-glass--Hale could see now that the brass tube was a
telescope--that he might slip down and unawares take a pot-shot at
them. The Red Fox communicated with spirits, had visions and
superhuman powers of locomotion--stepping mysteriously from the
bushes, people said, to walk at the traveller's side and as
mysteriously disappearing into them again, to be heard of in a few
hours an incredible distance away.

"I've been watchin' ye from up thar," he said with a wave of his
hand. "I seed ye go up the creek, and then the bushes hid ye. I
know what you was after--but did you see any signs up thar of
anything you wasn't looking fer?"

Hale laughed.

"Well, I've been in these mountains long enough not to tell you,
if I had."

The Red Fox chuckled.

"I wasn't sure you had--" Hale coughed and spat to the other side
of his horse. When he looked around, the Red Fox was gone, and he
had heard no sound of his going.

"Well, I be--" Hale clucked to his horse and as he climbed the
last steep and drew near the Big Pine he again heard a noise out
in the woods and he knew this time it was the fall of a human foot
and not of a hickory nut. He was right, and, as he rode by the
Pine, saw again at its base the print of the little girl's foot--
wondering afresh at the reason that led her up there--and dropped
down through the afternoon shadows towards the smoke and steam and
bustle and greed of the Twentieth Century. A long, lean, black-
eyed boy, with a wave of black hair over his forehead, was pushing
his horse the other way along the Big Black and dropping down
through the dusk into the Middle Ages--both all but touching on
either side the outstretched hands of the wild little creature
left in the shadows of Lonesome Cove.

VII

Past the Big Pine, swerving with a smile his horse aside that he
might not obliterate the foot-print in the black earth, and down
the mountain, his brain busy with his big purpose, went John Hale,
by instinct, inheritance, blood and tradition--pioneer.

One of his forefathers had been with Washington on the Father's
first historic expedition into the wilds of Virginia. His great-
grandfather had accompanied Boone when that hunter first
penetrated the "Dark and Bloody Ground," had gone back to Virginia
and come again with a surveyor's chain and compass to help wrest
it from the red men, among whom there had been an immemorial
conflict for possession and a never-recognized claim of ownership.
That compass and that chain his grandfather had fallen heir to and
with that compass and chain his father had earned his livelihood
amid the wrecks of the Civil War. Hale went to the old
Transylvania University at Lexington, the first seat of learning
planted beyond the Alleghanies. He was fond of history, of the
sciences and literature, was unusually adept in Latin and Greek,
and had a passion for mathematics. He was graduated with honours,
he taught two years and got his degree of Master of Arts, but the
pioneer spirit in his blood would still out, and his polite
learning he then threw to the winds.

Other young Kentuckians had gone West in shoals, but he kept his
eye on his own State, and one autumn he added a pick to the old
compass and the ancestral chain, struck the Old Wilderness Trail
that his grandfather had travelled, to look for his own fortune in
a land which that old gentleman had passed over as worthless. At
the Cumberland River he took a canoe and drifted down the river
into the wild coal-swollen hills. Through the winter he froze,
starved and prospected, and a year later he was opening up a
region that became famous after his trust and inexperience had let
others worm out of him an interest that would have made him easy
for life.

With the vision of a seer, he was as innocent as Boone. Stripped
clean, he got out his map, such geological reports as he could
find and went into a studious trance for a month, emerging
mentally with the freshness of a snake that has shed its skin.
What had happened in Pennsylvania must happen all along the great
Alleghany chain in the mountains of Virginia, West Virginia,
Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee. Some day the avalanche must sweep
south, it must--it must. That he might be a quarter of a century
too soon in his calculations never crossed his mind. Some day it
must come.

Now there was not an ounce of coal immediately south-east of the
Cumberland Mountains--not an ounce of iron ore immediately north-
east; all the coal lay to the north-east; all of the iron ore to
the south-east. So said Geology. For three hundred miles there
were only four gaps through that mighty mountain chain--three at
water level, and one at historic Cumberland Gap which was not at
water level and would have to be tunnelled. So said Geography.

All railroads, to east and to west, would have to pass through
those gaps; through them the coal must be brought to the iron ore,
or the ore to the coal. Through three gaps water flowed between
ore and coal and the very hills between were limestone. Was there
any such juxtaposition of the four raw materials for the making of
iron in the known world? When he got that far in his logic, the
sweat broke from his brows; he felt dizzy and he got up and walked
into the open air. As the vastness and certainty of the scheme--
what fool could not see it?--rushed through him full force, he
could scarcely get his breath. There must be a town in one of
those gaps--but in which? No matter--he would buy all of them--all
of them, he repeated over and over again; for some day there must
be a town in one, and some day a town in all, and from all he
would reap his harvest. He optioned those four gaps at a low
purchase price that was absurd. He went back to the Bluegrass; he
went to New York; in some way he managed to get to England. It had
never crossed his mind that other eyes could not see what he so
clearly saw and yet everywhere he was pronounced crazy. He failed
and his options ran out, but he was undaunted. He picked his
choice of the four gaps and gave up the other three. This
favourite gap he had just finished optioning again, and now again
he meant to keep at his old quest. That gap he was entering now
from the north side and the North Fork of the river was hurrying
to enter too. On his left was a great gray rock, projecting
edgewise, covered with laurel and rhododendron, and under it was
the first big pool from which the stream poured faster still.
There had been a terrible convulsion in that gap when the earth
was young; the strata had been tossed upright and planted almost
vertical for all time, and, a little farther, one mighty ledge,
moss-grown, bush-covered, sentinelled with grim pines, their bases
unseen, seemed to be making a heavy flight toward the clouds.

Big bowlders began to pop up in the river-bed and against them the
water dashed and whirled and eddied backward in deep pools, while
above him the song of a cataract dropped down a tree-choked
ravine. Just there the drop came, and for a long space he could
see the river lashing rock and cliff with increasing fury as
though it were seeking shelter from some relentless pursuer in the
dark thicket where it disappeared. Straight in front of him
another ledge lifted itself. Beyond that loomed a mountain which
stopped in mid-air and dropped sheer to the eye. Its crown was
bare and Hale knew that up there was a mountain farm, the refuge
of a man who had been involved in that terrible feud beyond Black
Mountain behind him. Five minutes later he was at the yawning
mouth of the gap and there lay before him a beautiful valley shut
in tightly, for all the eye could see, with mighty hills. It was
the heaven-born site for the unborn city of his dreams, and his
eyes swept every curve of the valley lovingly. The two forks of
the river ran around it--he could follow their course by the trees
that lined the banks of each--curving within a stone's throw of
each other across the valley and then looping away as from the
neck of an ancient lute and, like its framework, coming together
again down the valley, where they surged together, slipped through
the hills and sped on with the song of a sweeping river. Up that
river could come the track of commerce, out the South Fork, too,
it could go, though it had to turn eastward: back through that gap
it could be traced north and west; and so none could come as
heralds into those hills but their footprints could be traced
through that wild, rocky, water-worn chasm. Hale drew breath and
raised in his stirrups.

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