Books: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine

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

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"You can't never tell whether that ole devil is fer ye or agin ye,
but I've been plum' sick o' these doin's a long time now and
sometimes I think I'll just pull up stakes and go West and git out
of hit--altogether."

"How did you learn so much about yesterday--so soon?"

"Oh, we hears things purty quick in these mountains. Little Dave
Tolliver come over here last night."

"Yes," broke in Bub, "and he tol' us how you carried Loretty from
town on a mule behind ye, and she jest a-sassin' you, an' as how
she said she was a-goin' to git you fer HER sweetheart."

Hale glanced by chance at the little girl. Her face was scarlet,
and a light dawned.

"An' sis, thar, said he was a-tellin' lies--an' when she growed up
she said she was a-goin' to marry---"

Something snapped like a toy-pistol and Bub howled. A little brown
hand had whacked him across the mouth, and the girl flashed
indoors without a word. Bub got to his feet howling with pain and
rage and started after her, but the old man caught him:

"Set down, boy! Sarved you right fer blabbin' things that hain't
yo' business." He shook with laughter.

Jealousy! Great heavens--Hale thought--in that child, and for him!

"I knowed she was cryin' 'bout something like that. She sets a
great store by you, an' she's studied them books you sent her
plum' to pieces while you was away. She ain't nothin' but a baby,
but in sartain ways she's as old as her mother was when she died."
The amazing secret was out, and the little girl appeared no more
until supper time, when she waited on the table, but at no time
would she look at Hale or speak to him again. For a while the two
men sat on the porch talking of the feud and the Gap and the coal
on the old man's place, and Hale had no trouble getting an option
for a year on the old man's land. Just as dusk was setting he got
his horse.

"You'd better stay all night."

"No, I'll have to get along."

The little girl did not appear to tell him goodby, and when he
went to his horse at the gate, he called:

"Tell June to come down here. I've got something for her."

"Go on, baby," the old man said, and the little girl came shyly
down to the gate. Hale took a brown-paper parcel from his saddle-
bags, unwrapped it and betrayed the usual blue-eyed, flaxen-
haired, rosy-cheeked doll. Only June did not know the like of it
was in all the world. And as she caught it to her breast there
were tears once more in her uplifted eyes.

"How about going over to the Gap with me, little girl--some day?"

He never guessed it, but there were a child and a woman before him
now and both answered:

"I'll go with ye anywhar."

* * * * * * *

Hale stopped a while to rest his horse at the base of the big
pine. He was practically alone in the world. The little girl back
there was born for something else than slow death in that God-
forsaken cove, and whatever it was--why not help her to it if he
could? With this thought in his brain, he rode down from the
luminous upper world of the moon and stars toward the nether world
of drifting mists and black ravines. She belonged to just such a
night--that little girl--she was a part of its mists, its lights
and shadows, its fresh wild beauty and its mystery. Only once did
his mind shift from her to his great purpose, and that was when
the roar of the water through the rocky chasm of the Gap made him
think of the roar of iron wheels, that, rushing through, some day,
would drown it into silence. At the mouth of the Gap he saw the
white valley lying at peace in the moonlight and straightway from
it sprang again, as always, his castle in the air; but before he
fell asleep in his cottage on the edge of the millpond that night
he heard quite plainly again:

"I'll go with ye--anywhar."

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 man who was to take up Hale's options--and he had to be taken
home. Still Hale was undaunted: here he was and here he would
stay--and he would try again. Two other young men, Bluegrass
Kentuckians, Logan and Macfarlan, had settled at the gap--both
lawyers and both of pioneer, Indian-fighting blood. The report of
the State geologist had been spread broadcast. A famous magazine
writer had come through on horseback and had gone home and given a
fervid account of the riches and the beauty of the region.
Helmeted Englishmen began to prowl prospectively around the gap
sixty miles to the southwest. New surveying parties were directing
lines for the rocky gateway between the iron ore and the coal.
Engineers and coal experts passed in and out. There were rumours
of a furnace and a steel plant when the railroad should reach the
place. Capital had flowed in from the East, and already a
Pennsylvanian was starting a main entry into a ten-foot vein of
coal up through the gap and was coking it. 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. The Ludlow
brothers, from Eastern Virginia, had started a general store. Two
of the Berkley brothers had come over from Bluegrass Kentucky and
their family was coming in the spring. The bearded Senator up the
valley, who was also a preacher, had got his Methodist brethren
interested--and the community was further enriched by the coming
of the Hon. Samuel Budd, lawyer and budding statesman. As a
recreation, the Hon. Sam was an anthropologist: he knew the
mountaineers from Virginia to Alabama and they were his pet
illustrations of his pet theories of the effect of a mountain
environment on human life and character. Hale took a great fancy
to him from the first moment he saw his smooth, ageless, kindly
face, surmounted by a huge pair of spectacles that were hooked
behind two large ears, above which his pale yellow hair, parted in
the middle, was drawn back with plaster-like precision. A mayor
and a constable had been appointed, and the Hon. Sam had just
finished his first case--Squire Morton and the Widow Crane, who
ran a boarding-house, each having laid claim to three pigs that
obstructed traffic in the town. The Hon. Sam was sitting by the
stove, deep in thought, when Hale came into the hotel and he
lifted his great glaring lenses and waited for no introduction:

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

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

"Well, sir, them intelligent pigs used both them sows as mothers,
and may be they had another mother somewhere else. They would
breakfast with the Widow Crane's sow and take supper with the
squire's sow. And so them witnesses, 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 is
mutually forgivin' and a square division o' spoils, I suggested a
compromise. The widow said the squire was an old rascal an' thief
and he'd never sink a tooth into one of them shoats, but that her
lawyer was a gentleman--meanin' me--and the squire said the widow
had been blackguardin' him all over town and he'd see her in
heaven before she got one, but that HIS lawyer was a prince of the
realm: so the other lawyer 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
for costs."

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

Things were coming. The following week "the booming editor"
brought in a printing-press and started a paper. An enterprising
Hoosier soon established a brick-plant. A geologist--Hale's
predecessor in Lonesome Cove--made the Gap his headquarters, and
one by one the vanguard of engineers, surveyors, speculators and
coalmen drifted in. The wings of progress began to sprout, but the
new town-constable soon tendered his resignation 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 the ground.

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

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

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

"Hold on, boys," he said, still good-naturedly. "The mayor can
attend to this. If you boys want to fight anybody, fight me. I'm
unarmed and you can whip me easily enough," he added with a laugh,
"but you mustn't come in here," he concluded, as though the matter
was settled beyond further discussion. For one instant--the
crucial one, of course--the men hesitated, for the reason that so
often makes superior numbers of no avail among the lawless--the
lack of a leader of nerve--and without another word Hale held the
door. But the frightened mayor inside let the prisoner out at once
on bond and Hale, combining law and diplomacy, went on the bond.

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

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

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

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

"Why is that?" asked Hale.

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

Hale nodded.

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

They were the vanguard of civilization--"crusaders of the
nineteenth century 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
our purpose 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, when they 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 must go back to the standards of the
Revolution. Practically, they are the pioneers of that day and
hardly a bit have they advanced. They are our contemporary
ancestors." And then the Hon. Sam, having dropped his vernacular,
lounged ponderously into what he was pleased to call his
anthropological drool.

"You see, mountains isolate people and the effect of isolation on
human life is to crystallize it. Those people over the line have
had no navigable rivers, no lakes, no wagon roads, except often
the beds of streams. They have been cut off from all communication
with the outside world. They are a perfect example of an arrested
civilization and they are the closest link we have with the Old
World. They were Unionists because of the Revolution, as they were
Americans in the beginning because of the spirit of the
Covenanter. They live like the pioneers; the axe and the rifle are
still their weapons and they still have the same fight with
nature. This feud business is a matter of clan-loyalty that goes
back to Scotland. They argue this way: You are my friend or my
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
an officer, you must not arrest me; you must send me a kindly
request to come 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, all right--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.
Samuel Budd. Other members of that vanguard began to drift in now
by twos and threes from the bluegrass region of Kentucky and from
the tide-water country of Virginia and from New England--strong,
bold young men with the spirit of the pioneer and the birth,
breeding and education of gentlemen, and the war between
civilization and a lawlessness that was the result of isolation,
and consequent ignorance and idleness started in earnest.

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

Many times Hale went over to Lonesome Cove and with every visit
his interest grew steadily in the little girl and in the curious
people over there, until he actually began to believe in the Hon.
Sam Budd's anthropological theories. In the cabin on Lonesome Cove
was a crane swinging in the big stone fireplace, and he saw the
old step-mother and June putting the spinning wheel and the loom
to actual use. Sometimes he found a cabin of unhewn logs with a
puncheon floor, clapboards for shingles and wooden pin and auger
holes for nails; a batten wooden shutter, the logs filled with mud
and stones and holes in the roof for the wind and the rain. Over a
pair of buck antlers sometimes lay the long heavy home-made rifle
of the backwoodsman--sometimes even with a flintlock and called by
some pet feminine name. Once he saw the hominy block that the
mountaineers had borrowed from the Indians, and once a handmill
like the one from which the one woman was taken and the other left
in biblical days. He struck communities where the medium of
exchange was still barter, and he found mountaineers drinking
metheglin still as well as moonshine. Moreover, there were still
log-rollings, house-warmings, corn-shuckings, and quilting
parties, and sports were the same as in pioneer days--wrestling,
racing, jumping, and lifting barrels. Often he saw a cradle of
beegum, and old Judd had in his house a fox-horn made of hickory
bark which even June could blow. He ran across old-world
superstitions, too, and met one seventh son of a seventh son who
cured children of rash by blowing into their mouths. And he got
June to singing transatlantic songs, after old Judd said one day
that she knowed the "miserablest song he'd ever heerd"--meaning
the most sorrowful. And, thereupon, with quaint simplicity, June
put her heels on the rung of her chair, and with her elbows on her
knees, and her chin on both bent thumbs, sang him the oldest
version of "Barbara Allen" in a voice 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 songs that 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
on the 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 ever used in history. He had heard old Judd say once, when
he was speaking of the feud:

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

Always Hale took some children's book for June when he went to
Lonesome Cove, and she rarely failed to know it almost by heart
when he went again. 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--that the mountaineers were of the same class as
the other westward-sweeping emigrants of more than a century
before, that they had simply lain dormant in the hills and--a
century counting for nothing in the matter of inheritance--that
their possibilities were little changed, and that the children of
that day would, if given the chance, wipe out the handicap of a
century in one generation and take their place abreast with
children of the outside world. The Tollivers were of good blood;
they had come from Eastern Virginia, and the original Tolliver had
been a slave-owner. The very name was, undoubtedly, a corruption
of Tagliaferro. So, when the Widow Crane began to build a brick
house for her boarders that winter, and the foundations of a
school-house were laid at the Gap, Hale began to plead with old
Judd to allow June to go over 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'd
lose her, an' he reckoned June was a-larnin' enough without goin'
to school--she was a-studyin' them leetle books o' hers so hard."
But as his confidence in Hale grew and as Hale stated his
intention to take an option on the old man's coal lands, he could
see that Devil Judd, though his answer never varied, was
considering the question seriously.

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

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

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

In late February, old Buck Falin and old Dave Tolliver shot each
other down in the road and the Red Fox, who hated both and whom
each thought was his friend, dressed the wounds of both with equal
care. The temporary lull of peace that Bad Rufe's absence in the
West had brought about, gave way to a threatening storm then, and
then it was that old Judd gave his consent: when the roads got
better, June could go to the Gap to school. A month later the old
man sent word that he did not want June in the mountains while the
trouble was going on, and that Hale could come over for her when
he pleased: and Hale sent word back that within three days he
would meet the father and the little girl at the big Pine. That
last day at home June passed in a dream. She went through her
daily tasks in a dream and she hardly noticed young Dave when he
came in at mid-day, and Dave, when he heard the news, left in
sullen silence. In the afternoon she went down to the mill to tell
Uncle Billy and ole Hon good-by and the three sat in the porch a
long time and with few words. Ole Hon had been to the Gap once,
but there was "so much bustle over thar it made her head ache."
Uncle Billy shook his head doubtfully over June's going, and the
two old people stood at the gate looking 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 and sat on the
old log saying good-by to the comforting spirit that always
brooded for her there, and, when she stood on the porch at sunset,
a new spirit was coming on the wings of the South wind. Hale felt
it as he stepped into the soft night air; he heard it in the
piping of frogs--"Marsh-birds," as he always called them; he could
almost see it in the flying clouds and the moonlight and even the
bare trees seemed tremulously expectant. An indefinable happiness
seemed to pervade the whole earth and Hale stretched his arms
lazily. Over in Lonesome Cove little June felt it more keenly than
ever in her life before. She did not want to go to bed that night,
and when the others were asleep she slipped out to the porch and
sat on the steps, her eyes luminous and her face wistful--looking
towards the big Pine which pointed the way towards the far silence
into which she was going at last.

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