Books: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

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

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"It's a cinch," he said aloud. "It's a shame to take the money."

Yet nothing was in sight now but a valley farmhouse above the ford
where he must cross the river and one log cabin on the hill
beyond. Still on the other river was the only woollen mill in
miles around; farther up was the only grist mill, and near by was
the only store, the only blacksmith shop and the only hotel. That
much of a start the gap had had for three-quarters of a century--
only from the south now a railroad was already coming; from the
east another was travelling like a wounded snake and from the
north still another creeped to meet them. Every road must run
through the gap and several had already run through it lines of
survey. The coal was at one end of the gap, and the iron ore at
the other, the cliffs between were limestone, and the other
elements to make it the iron centre of the world flowed through it
like a torrent.

"Selah! It's a shame to take the money."

He splashed into the creek and his big black horse thrust his nose
into the clear running water. Minnows were playing about him. A
hog-fish flew for shelter under a rock, and below the ripples a
two-pound bass shot like an arrow into deep water.

Above and below him the stream was arched with beech, poplar and
water maple, and the banks were thick with laurel and
rhododendron. His eye had never rested on a lovelier stream, and
on the other side of the town site, which nature had kindly lifted
twenty feet above the water level, the other fork was of equal
clearness, swiftness and beauty.

"Such a drainage," murmured his engineering instinct. "Such a
drainage!" It was Saturday. Even if he had forgotten he would have
known that it must be Saturday when he climbed the bank on the
other side. Many horses were hitched under the trees, and here and
there was a farm-wagon with fragments of paper, bits of food and
an empty bottle or two lying around. It was the hour when the
alcoholic spirits of the day were usually most high. Evidently
they were running quite high that day and something distinctly was
going on "up town." A few yells--the high, clear, penetrating yell
of a fox-hunter--rent the air, a chorus of pistol shots rang out,
and the thunder of horses' hoofs started beyond the little slope
he was climbing. When he reached the top, a merry youth, with a
red, hatless head was splitting the dirt road toward him, his
reins in his teeth, and a pistol in each hand, which he was
letting off alternately into the inoffensive earth and toward the
unrebuking heavens--that seemed a favourite way in those mountains
of defying God and the devil--and behind him galloped a dozen
horsemen to the music of throat, pistol and iron hoof.

The fiery-headed youth's horse swerved and shot by. Hale hardly
knew that the rider even saw him, but the coming ones saw him afar
and they seemed to be charging him in close array. Hale stopped
his horse a little to the right of the centre of the road, and
being equally helpless against an inherited passion for
maintaining his own rights and a similar disinclination to get out
of anybody's way--he sat motionless. Two of the coming horsemen,
side by side, were a little in advance.

"Git out o' the road!" they yelled. Had he made the motion of an
arm, they might have ridden or shot him down, but the simple
quietness of him as he sat with hands crossed on the pommel of his
saddle, face calm and set, eyes unwavering and fearless, had the
effect that nothing else he could have done would have brought
about--and they swerved on either side of him, while the rest
swerved, too, like sheep, one stirrup brushing his, as they swept
by. Hale rode slowly on. He could hear the mountaineers yelling on
top of the hill, but he did not look back. Several bullets sang
over his head. Most likely they were simply "bantering" him, but
no matter--he rode on.

The blacksmith, the storekeeper and one passing drummer were
coming in from the woods when he reached the hotel.

"A gang o' those Falins," said the storekeeper, "they come over
lookin' for young Dave Tolliver. They didn't find him, so they
thought they'd have some fun"; and he pointed to the hotel sign
which was punctuated with pistol-bullet periods. Hale's eyes
flashed once but he said nothing. He turned his horse over to a
stable boy and went across to the little frame cottage that served
as office and home for him. While he sat on the veranda that
almost hung over the mill-pond of the other stream three of the
Falins came riding back. One of them had left something at the
hotel, and while he was gone in for it, another put a bullet
through the sign, and seeing Hale rode over to him. Hale's blue
eye looked anything than friendly.

"Don't ye like it?" asked the horseman.

"I do not," said Hale calmly. The horseman seemed amused.

"Well, whut you goin' to do about it?"

"Nothing--at least not now."

"All right--whenever you git ready. You ain't ready now?"

"No," said Hale, "not now." The fellow laughed.

"Hit's a damned good thing for you that you ain't."

Hale looked long after the three as they galloped down the road.
"When I start to build this town," he thought gravely and without
humour, "I'll put a stop to all that."

VIII

On a spur of Black Mountain, beyond the Kentucky line, a lean
horse was tied to a sassafras bush, and in a clump of rhododendron
ten yards away, a lean black-haired boy sat with a Winchester
between his stomach and thighs--waiting for the dusk to drop. His
chin was in both hands, the brim of his slouch hat was curved
crescent-wise over his forehead, and his eyes were on the sweeping
bend of the river below him. That was the "Bad Bend" down there,
peopled with ancestral enemies and the head-quarters of their
leader for the last ten years. Though they had been at peace for
some time now, it had been Saturday in the county town ten miles
down the river as well, and nobody ever knew what a Saturday might
bring forth between his people and them. So he would not risk
riding through that bend by the light of day.

All the long way up spur after spur and along ridge after ridge,
all along the still, tree-crested top of the Big Black, he had
been thinking of the man--the "furriner" whom he had seen at his
uncle's cabin in Lonesome Cove. He was thinking of him still, as
he sat there waiting for darkness to come, and the two vertical
little lines in his forehead, that had hardly relaxed once during
his climb, got deeper and deeper, as his brain puzzled into the
problem that was worrying it: who the stranger was, what his
business was over in the Cove and his business with the Red Fox
with whom the boy had seen him talking.

He had heard of the coming of the "furriners" on the Virginia
side. He had seen some of them, he was suspicious of all of them,
he disliked them all--but this man he hated straightway. He hated
his boots and his clothes; the way he sat and talked, as though he
owned the earth, and the lad snorted contemptuously under his
breath:

"He called pants 'trousers.'" It was a fearful indictment, and he
snorted again: "Trousers!"

The "furriner" might be a spy or a revenue officer, but deep down
in the boy's heart the suspicion had been working that he had gone
over there to see his little cousin--the girl whom, boy that he
was, he had marked, when she was even more of a child than she was
now, for his own. His people understood it as did her father, and,
child though she was, she, too, understood it. The difference
between her and the "furriner"--difference in age, condition, way
of life, education--meant nothing to him, and as his suspicion
deepened, his hands dropped and gripped his Winchester, and
through his gritting teeth came vaguely:

"By God, if he does--if he just does!"

Away down at the lower end of the river's curving sweep, the dirt
road was visible for a hundred yards or more, and even while he
was cursing to himself, a group of horsemen rode into sight. All
seemed to be carrying something across their saddle bows, and as
the boy's eyes caught them, he sank sidewise out of sight and
stood upright, peering through a bush of rhododendron. Something
had happened in town that day--for the horsemen carried
Winchesters, and every foreign thought in his brain passed like
breath from a window pane, while his dark, thin face whitened a
little with anxiety and wonder. Swiftly he stepped backward,
keeping the bushes between him and his far-away enemies. Another
knot he gave the reins around the sassafras bush and then,
Winchester in hand, he dropped noiseless as an Indian, from rock
to rock, tree to tree, down the sheer spur on the other side.
Twenty minutes later, he lay behind a bush that was sheltered by
the top boulder of the rocky point under which the road ran. His
enemies were in their own country; they would probably be talking
over the happenings in town that day, and from them he would learn
what was going on.

So long he lay that he got tired and out of patience, and he was
about to creep around the boulder, when the clink of a horseshoe
against a stone told him they were coming, and he flattened to the
earth and closed his eyes that his ears might be more keen. The
Falins were riding silently, but as the first two passed under
him, one said:

"I'd like to know who the hell warned 'em!"

"Whar's the Red Fox?" was the significant answer.

The boy's heart leaped. There had been deviltry abroad, but his
kinsmen had escaped. No one uttered a word as they rode two by
two, under him, but one voice came back to him as they turned the
point.

"I wonder if the other boys ketched young Dave?" He could not
catch the answer to that--only the oath that was in it, and when
the sound of the horses' hoofs died away, he turned over on his
back and stared up at the sky. Some trouble had come and through
his own caution, and the mercy of Providence that had kept him
away from the Gap, he had had his escape from death that day. He
would tempt that Providence no more, even by climbing back to his
horse in the waning light, and it was not until dusk had fallen
that he was leading the beast down the spur and into a ravine that
sank to the road. There he waited an hour, and when another
horseman passed he still waited a while. Cautiously then, with
ears alert, eyes straining through the darkness and Winchester
ready, he went down the road at a slow walk. There was a light in
the first house, but the front door was closed and the road was
deep with sand, as he knew; so he passed noiselessly. At the
second house, light streamed through the open door; he could hear
talking on the porch and he halted. He could neither cross the
river nor get around the house by the rear--the ridge was too
steep--so he drew off into the bushes, where he had to wait
another hour before the talking ceased. There was only one more
house now between him and the mouth of the creek, where he would
be safe, and he made up his mind to dash by it. That house, too,
was lighted and the sound of fiddling struck his ears. He would
give them a surprise; so he gathered his reins and Winchester in
his left hand, drew his revolver with his right, and within thirty
yards started his horse into a run, yelling like an Indian and
firing his pistol in the air. As he swept by, two or three figures
dashed pell-mell indoors, and he shouted derisively:

"Run, damn ye, run!" They were running for their guns, he knew,
but the taunt would hurt and he was pleased. As he swept by the
edge of a cornfield, there was a flash of light from the base of a
cliff straight across, and a bullet sang over him, then another
and another, but he sped on, cursing and yelling and shooting his
own Winchester up in the air--all harmless, useless, but just to
hurl defiance and taunt them with his safety. His father's house
was not far away, there was no sound of pursuit, and when he
reached the river he drew down to a walk and stopped short in a
shadow. Something had clicked in the bushes above him and he bent
over his saddle and lay close to his horse's neck. The moon was
rising behind him and its light was creeping toward him through
the bushes. In a moment he would be full in its yellow light, and
he was slipping from his horse to dart aside into the bushes, when
a voice ahead of him called sharply:

"That you, Dave?"

It was his father, and the boy's answer was a loud laugh. Several
men stepped from the bushes--they had heard firing and, fearing
that young Dave was the cause of it, they had run to his help.

"What the hell you mean, boy, kickin' up such a racket?"

"Oh, I knowed somethin'd happened an' I wanted to skeer 'em a
leetle."

"Yes, an' you never thought o' the trouble you might be causin'
us."

"Don't you bother about me. I can take keer o' myself."

Old Dave Tolliver grunted--though at heart he was deeply pleased.

"Well, you come on home!"

All went silently--the boy getting meagre monosyllabic answers to
his eager questions but, by the time they reached home, he had
gathered the story of what had happened in town that day. There
were more men in the porch of the house and all were armed. The
women of the house moved about noiselessly and with drawn faces.
There were no lights lit, and nobody stood long even in the light
of the fire where he could be seen through a window; and doors
were opened and passed through quickly. The Falins had opened the
feud that day, for the boy's foster-uncle, Bad Rufe Tolliver,
contrary to the terms of the last truce, had come home from the
West, and one of his kinsmen had been wounded. The boy told what
he had heard while he lay over the road along which some of his
enemies had passed and his father nodded. The Falins had learned
in some way that the lad was going to the Gap that day and had
sent men after him. Who was the spy?

"You TOLD me you was a-goin' to the Gap," said old Dave. "Whar was
ye?"

"I didn't git that far," said the boy.

The old man and Loretta, young Dave's sister, laughed, and quiet
smiles passed between the others.

"Well, you'd better be keerful 'bout gittin' even as far as you
did git--wharever that was--from now on."

"I ain't afeered," the boy said sullenly, and he turned into the
kitchen. Still sullen, he ate his supper in silence and his mother
asked him no questions. He was worried that Bad Rufe had come back
to the mountains, for Rufe was always teasing June and there was
something in his bold, black eyes that made the lad furious, even
when the foster-uncle was looking at Loretta or the little girl in
Lonesome Cove. And yet that was nothing to his new trouble, for
his mind hung persistently to the stranger and to the way June had
behaved in the cabin in Lonesome Cove. Before he went to bed, he
slipped out to the old well behind the house and sat on the water-
trough in gloomy unrest, looking now and then at the stars that
hung over the Cove and over the Gap beyond, where the stranger was
bound. It would have pleased him a good deal could he have known
that the stranger was pushing his big black horse on his way,
under those stars, toward the outer world.

IX

It was court day at the county seat across the Kentucky line. Hale
had risen early, as everyone must if he would get his breakfast in
the mountains, even in the hotels in the county seats, and he sat
with his feet on the railing of the hotel porch which fronted the
main street of the town. He had had his heart-breaking failures
since the autumn before, but he was in good cheer now, for his
feverish enthusiasm had at last clutched a man who would take up
not only his options on the great Gap beyond Black Mountain but on
the cannel-coal lands of Devil Judd Tolliver as well. He was
riding across from the Bluegrass to meet this man at the railroad
in Virginia, nearly two hundred miles away; he had stopped to
examine some titles at the county seat and he meant to go on that
day by way of Lonesome Cove. Opposite was the brick Court House--
every window lacking at least one pane, the steps yellow with dirt
and tobacco juice, the doorway and the bricks about the upper
windows bullet-dented and eloquent with memories of the feud which
had long embroiled the whole county. Not that everybody took part
in it but, on the matter, everybody, as an old woman told him,
"had feelin's." It had begun, so he learned, just after the war.
Two boys were playing marbles in the road along the Cumberland
River, and one had a patch on the seat of his trousers. The other
boy made fun of it and the boy with the patch went home and told
his father. As a result there had already been thirty years of
local war. In the last race for legislature, political issues were
submerged and the feud was the sole issue. And a Tolliver had
carried that boy's trouser-patch like a flag to victory and was
sitting in the lower House at that time helping to make laws for
the rest of the State. Now Bad Rufe Tolliver was in the hills
again and the end was not yet. Already people were pouring in,
men, women and children--the men slouch-hatted and stalking
through the mud in the rain, or filing in on horseback--riding
double sometimes--two men or two women, or a man with his wife or
daughter behind him, or a woman with a baby in her lap and two
more children behind--all dressed in homespun or store-clothes,
and the paint from artificial flowers on her hat streaking the
face of every girl who had unwisely scanned the heavens that
morning. Soon the square was filled with hitched horses, and an
auctioneer was bidding off cattle, sheep, hogs and horses to the
crowd of mountaineers about him, while the women sold eggs and
butter and bought things for use at home. Now and then, an open
feudsman with a Winchester passed and many a man was belted with
cartridges for the big pistol dangling at his hip. When court
opened, the rain ceased, the sun came out and Hale made his way
through the crowd to the battered temple of justice. On one corner
of the square he could see the chief store of the town marked
"Buck Falin--General Merchandise," and the big man in the door
with the bushy redhead, he guessed, was the leader of the Falin
clan. Outside the door stood a smaller replica of the same figure,
whom he recognized as the leader of the band that had nearly
ridden him down at the Gap when they were looking for young Dave
Tolliver, the autumn before. That, doubtless, was young Buck. For
a moment he stood at the door of the court-room. A Falin was on
trial and the grizzled judge was speaking angrily:

"This is the third time you've had this trial postponed because
you hain't got no lawyer. I ain't goin' to put it off. Have you
got you a lawyer now?"

"Yes, jedge," said the defendant.

"Well, whar is he?"

"Over thar on the jury."

The judge looked at the man on the jury.

"Well, I reckon you better leave him whar he is. He'll do you more
good thar than any whar else."

Hale laughed aloud--the judge glared at him and he turned quickly
upstairs to his work in the deed-room. Till noon he worked and yet
there was no trouble. After dinner he went back and in two hours
his work was done. An atmospheric difference he felt as soon as he
reached the door. The crowd had melted from the square. There were
no women in sight, but eight armed men were in front of the door
and two of them, a red Falin and a black Tolliver--Bad Rufe it
was--were quarrelling. In every doorway stood a man cautiously
looking on, and in a hotel window he saw a woman's frightened
face. It was so still that it seemed impossible that a tragedy
could be imminent, and yet, while he was trying to take the
conditions in, one of the quarrelling men--Bad Rufe Tolliver--
whipped out his revolver and before he could level it, a Falin
struck the muzzle of a pistol into his back. Another Tolliver
flashed his weapon on the Falin. This Tolliver was covered by
another Falin and in so many flashes of lightning the eight men in
front of him were covering each other--every man afraid to be the
first to shoot, since he knew that the flash of his own pistol
meant instantaneous death for him. As Hale shrank back, he pushed
against somebody who thrust him aside. It was the judge:

"Why don't somebody shoot?" he asked sarcastically. "You're a
purty set o' fools, ain't you? I want you all to stop this damned
foolishness. Now when I give the word I want you, Jim Falin and
Rufe Tolliver thar, to drap yer guns."

Already Rufe was grinning like a devil over the absurdity of the
situation.

"Now!" said the judge, and the two guns were dropped.

"Put 'em in yo' pockets."

They did.

"Drap!" All dropped and, with those two, all put up their guns--
each man, however, watching now the man who had just been covering
him. It is not wise for the stranger to show too much interest in
the personal affairs of mountain men, and Hale left the judge
berating them and went to the hotel to get ready for the Gap,
little dreaming how fixed the faces of some of those men were in
his brain and how, later, they were to rise in his memory again.
His horse was lame--but he must go on: so he hired a "yaller" mule
from the landlord, and when the beast was brought around, he
overheard two men talking at the end of the porch.

"You don't mean to say they've made peace?"

"Yes, Rufe's going away agin and they shuk hands--all of 'em." The
other laughed.

"Rufe ain't gone yit!"

The Cumberland River was rain-swollen. The home-going people were
helping each other across it and, as Hale approached the ford of a
creek half a mile beyond the river, a black-haired girl was
standing on a boulder looking helplessly at the yellow water, and
two boys were on the ground below her. One of them looked up at
Hale:

"I wish ye'd help this lady 'cross."

"Certainly," said Hale, and the girl giggled when he laboriously
turned his old mule up to the boulder. Not accustomed to have
ladies ride behind him, Hale had turned the wrong side. Again he
laboriously wheeled about and then into the yellow torrent he went
with the girl behind him, the old beast stumbling over the stones,
whereat the girl, unafraid, made sounds of much merriment. Across,
Hale stopped and said courteously:

"If you are going up this way, you are quite welcome to ride on."

"Well, I wasn't crossin' that crick jes' exactly fer fun," said
the girl demurely, and then she murmured something about her
cousins and looked back. They had gone down to a shallower ford,
and when they, too, had waded across, they said nothing and the
girl said nothing--so Hale started on, the two boys following. The
mule was slow and, being in a hurry, Hale urged him with his whip.
Every time he struck, the beast would kick up and once the girl
came near going off.

"You must watch out, when I hit him," said Hale.

"I don't know when you're goin' to hit him," she drawled
unconcernedly.

"Well, I'll let you know," said Hale laughing. "Now!" And, as he
whacked the beast again, the girl laughed and they were better
acquainted. Presently they passed two boys. Hale was wearing
riding-boots and tight breeches, and one of the boys ran his eyes
up boot and leg and if they were lifted higher, Hale could not
tell.

"Whar'd you git him?" he squeaked.

The girl turned her head as the mule broke into a trot.

"Ain't got time to tell. They are my cousins," explained the girl.

"What is your name?" asked Hale.

"Loretty Tolliver." Hale turned in his saddle.

"Are you the daughter of Dave Tolliver?"

"Yes."

"Then you've got a brother named Dave?"

"Yes." This, then, was the sister of the black-haired boy he had
seen in the Lonesome Cove.

"Haven't you got some kinfolks over the mountain?"

"Yes, I got an uncle livin' over thar. Devil Judd, folks calls
him," said the girl simply. This girl was cousin to little June in
Lonesome Cove. Every now and then she would look behind them, and
when Hale turned again inquiringly she explained:

"I'm worried about my cousins back thar. I'm afeered somethin'
mought happen to 'em."

"Shall we wait for them?"

"Oh, no--I reckon not."

Soon they overtook two men on horseback, and after they passed and
were fifty yards ahead of them, one of the men lifted his voice
jestingly:

"Is that your woman, stranger, or have you just borrowed her?"
Hale shouted back:

"No, I'm sorry to say, I've just borrowed her," and he turned to
see how she would take this answering pleasantry. She was looking
down shyly and she did not seem much pleased.

"They are kinfolks o' mine, too," she said, and whether it was in
explanation or as a rebuke, Hale could not determine.

"You must be kin to everybody around here?"

"Most everybody," she said simply.

By and by they came to a creek.

"I have to turn up here," said Hale.

"So do I," she said, smiling now directly at him.

"Good!" he said, and they went on--Hale asking more questions. She
was going to school at the county seat the coming winter and she
was fifteen years old.

"That's right. The trouble in the mountains is that you girls
marry so early that you don't have time to get an education." She
wasn't going to marry early, she said, but Hale learned now that
she had a sweetheart who had been in town that day and apparently
the two had had a quarrel. Who it was, she would not tell, and
Hale would have been amazed had he known the sweetheart was none
other than young Buck Falin and that the quarrel between the
lovers had sprung from the opening quarrel that day between the
clans. Once again she came near going off the mule, and Hale
observed that she was holding to the cantel of his saddle.

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