LITMIR.BIZ

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last night, reflected Bear Cat. He was, as he deserved to be, in disgrace.

      Then as the girl stood looking off into the gathering darkness her own face filled wistfully with pain and the boy, dropping to a seat on the floor of the porch, watched her covertly with sidewise glances.

      "Blossom met me down ther road," observed the minister, "an' named ter me thet she hed – " He paused, casting a dubious glance at the stranger, and Lone Stacy interrupted: "She named ter ye thet she stood guard at ther still an' warned Mr. Henderson off?"

      Brother Fulkerson nodded gravely. "I was a little mite troubled in my mind lest she'd put herself in jeopardy of the law. Thet's why I lighted down an' hitched hyar: ter hev speech with ye."

      "Ye needn't worrit yoreself none, Brother Fulkerson," reassured the host. "Mr. Henderson comes vouched fer by Uncle Israel."

      The preacher sat for a space silent and when he next spoke it was still with a remnant of misgiving in his tone.

      "I don't aim to go about crossin' good men and a-cavilin' with thar opinions," he began apologetically. "Like as not heaps of 'em air godlier men than me, but I holds it to be my duty to speak out free." Again he paused and cast a questioning glance at his host as though in deference to the hospitality of the roof, and the tall mountaineer, standing beside the post of his porch, nodded assent with equal gravity.

      "Talk right fer yoreself, Brother Fulkerson. I don't never aim ter muzzle no man's speech."

      "Waal, this day I've rid some twenty miles acrost high ridges and down inter shadowy valleys, I've done traversed some places thet war powerful wild an' laurely. Wharsoever God's work calls me, I'm obleeged ter go, but I raised my voice in song as I fared along amongst them thickets, lest some man thet I couldn't see; some man a-layin' on watch, mout suspicion I was seekin' ter discover somethin' he aimed ter keep hid – jest as ye suspicioned Mr. Henderson, hyar."

      Lone Stacy stroked his beard.

      "I reckon thet war ther wisest way, Brother Fulkerson, unless every man over thar knowed ye."

      "I reckon God likes ther songs of his birds better," declared the preacher, "then ther song of a man thet hes ter sing ter protect his own life. I reckon no country won't ever prosper mightily, whilst hit's a land of hidin' out with rifle-guns in ther laurel."

      There was no wrath in the eyes of the host as he listened to his guest's indictment or the voice of thrilling earnestness in which it was delivered. He only raised one hand and pointed upward where a mighty shoulder of mountain rose hulking through the twilight. Near its top one could just make out the thread-like whiteness of a new fence line.

      "Yonder's my corn patch," he said. "When I cl'ared hit an' grubbed hit out my neighbors all came ter ther workin' an' amongst us we toiled thar from sun-up twell one o'clock at night – daylight an' moonlight. On thet patch I kin raise me two or three master crops o' corn an' atter thet hit won't hardly raise rag weeds! A bushel o' thet corn, sledded over ter ther nighest store fotches in mebby forty cents. But thar's two gallons of licker in hit an' thet's wuth money. Who's a-goin' ter deny me ther rightful license ter do hit?"

      "Ther Law denies ye," replied the preacher gravely, but without acerbity.

      "Thar's things thet's erginst ther law," announced the old man with a swift gathering of fierceness in his tone, "an' thar's things thet's above ther law. A criminal is a man thet's done befouled his own self-respect. I hain't never done thet an' I hain't no criminal. What do you think, Mr. Henderson?"

      Henderson had no wish to be drawn, so soon, into any conflict of local opinion, yet he realized that a candid reply was expected.

      "My opinion is that of theory only," he responded seriously. "But I agree with Brother Fulkerson. A community with secrets to hide is a hermit community – and one of the strangers that is frightened away – is Prosperity."

      Bear Cat Stacy, brooding silently in his place, looked suddenly up. Hitherto he had seen only the sweet wistfulness of Blossom's eyes. Now he remembered the words of the old miller.

      "Some day a mountain man will rise up as steadfast as the hills he sprung from – an' he'll change hit all like ther sun changes fog!" Perhaps Turner Stacy was ripe for hero-worship.

      Over the mountain top appeared the beacon of the evening star – luminous but pale. As if saluting it the timber became wistful with the call of whippoorwills and fireflies began to flit against the sooty curtain of night.

      Something stirred in the boy, as though the freshening breeze brought the new message of an awakening. Here was the talk of wise men, concurring with the voices of his dreams! But at that moment his mother appeared in the doorway and announced

      "You men kin come in an' eat, now."

      CHAPTER VI

      In former days an Appalachian tavern was a "quarter-house"; a hostelry where one paid a quarter for one's bed and a quarter, each, for meals. Now the term has fallen into such disuse as to be no longer generic, but locally it survived with a meaning both specific and malodorous. The press of Kentucky and Virginia had used it often, coupled with lurid stories of blood-lettings and orgies; linking with it always the name of its proprietor, Kinnard Towers.

      How could such things go on in the twentieth century? questioned the readers of these news columns, forgetting that this ramparted isolation lives not in the twentieth century but still in the eighteenth; that its people who have never seen salt water still sing the ballads of Walter Raleigh's sea-rovers, and that from their lips still fall, warm with every-day usage, the colloquialisms of Chaucer and of Piers the Ploughman.

      The Quarterhouse stood in a cleft where the mountains had been riven. Its front door opened into Virginia and its rear door gave into Kentucky. Across the puncheon floor was humorously painted a stripe of whitewash, as constantly renewed as the markings of a well-kept tennis court – and that line was a state boundary.

      Hither flocked refugees from the justice of two states, and if a suddenly materializing sheriff confronted his quarry in the room where each day and each night foregathered the wildest spirits of a wild land, the hounded culprit had only to cross that white line and stand upon his lawful demand for extradition papers. Here, therefore, the hunted foxes of the law ran to ground. The man who presided as proprietor was a power to be feared, admired, hated as individual circumstance dictated, but in any case one whose wrath was not to be advisedly stirred.

      He had found it possible to become wealthy in a land where such achievement involves battening on poverty. Cruel – suave; predatory – charitable, he had taken life by his own hand and that of the hireling, but also he had, in famine-times, succored the poor.

      He had, in short, awed local courts and intimidated juries of the vicinage until he seemed beyond the law, and until office-holders wore his collar.

      Kinnard Towers was floridly blond of coloring, mild of eye and urbanely soft-spoken of voice.

      Once, almost two decades ago, while the feud was still eruptive, it had seemed advisable to him to have Lone Stacy done to death, and to that end he had bargained with Black Tom Carmichael.

      Black Tom had been provided with a double-barreled gun, loaded with buckshot, and placed in a thicket which, at the appointed hour, the intended victim must pass. But it had chanced that fate intervened. On that day Lone Stacy had carried in his arms his baby son, Turner Stacy, and, seeing the child, Black Tom had faltered.

      Later in the seclusion of a room over the Quarterhouse, the employer had wrathfully taken his churl to task.

      "Wa'al, why didn't ye git him?" was the truculent interrogation. "He passed by close enough fer ye ter hit him with a rock."

      "He was totin' his baby," apologized the designated assassin shamefacedly, yet with a sullen obstinacy, "I was only hired ter kill a growed-up man. Ef ye'd a-give me a rifle-gun like I asked ye 'stid of a scatter-gun I could've got him through his damned head an' not harmed ther child none. Thet's why I held my hand."

      Kinnard Towers had scornfully questioned: "What makes ye so tormentin' mincy erbout ther kid? Don't ye know full well thet when he grows up we'll have ter git him, too? Howsoever next

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