LITMIR.BIZ

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a rifle-gun."

      Like all unlettered folk the mountaineer is deeply superstitious and prone to believe in portents and wonders. Often, though he can never be brought to confess it he gives credence to tales of sorcery and witchcraft.

      Turner Stacy was from his birth a "survigrous" child, and he was born on the day of the eclipse. As he came into the world the sun was darkened. Immediately after that a sudden tempest broke which tore the forests to tatters, awoke quiet brooks to swirling torrents, unroofed houses and took its toll of human life. Even in after years when men spoke of the "big storm" they always alluded to that one.

      An old crone who was accounted able to read fortunes and work charms announced that Turner Stacy came into life on the wings of that storm, and that the sun darkened its face because his birth savored of the supernatural. This being so, she said, he was immune from any harm of man's devising. Her absurd story was told and retold around many a smoky cabin hearth, and there were those who accorded it an unconfessed credence.

      Later Black Tom was given a rifle and again stationed in ambush. Again Lone Stacy, favored by chance, carried his baby son in his arms. Black Tom, whose conscience had never before impeded his action, continued to gaze over his gun-sights – without pressing the trigger.

      Towers was furious, but Carmichael could only shake his head in a frightened bewilderment, as if he had seen a ghost.

      "Ther brat looked at me jest as I was about to fire," he protested. "His eyes didn't look like a human bein's. He hain't no baby – he was born a man – or somethin' more then a man."

      As affairs developed, the truce was arranged soon afterward, and also the marked man's death became unnecessary, because he was safe in prison on a charge of moonshining.

      Neither Lone Stacy nor his son had ever known of this occurrence, and now the Stacys and the Towers met on the road and "made their manners" without gun-play.

      But to Kinnard Towers local happenings remained vital and, for all his crudity, few things of topical interest occurred of which he was not duly apprised.

      Into his dwelling place came one day the Honorable Abraham Towers, his nephew, who sat in the state Legislature at Frankfort. The two were closeted together for an hour and as the nephew emerged, at the end of the interview, Kinnard walked with him to the hitching-post where the visitor's horse stood tethered.

      "I'm obleeged ter ye, Abe," he said graciously. "When this man Henderson gits hyar, I'll make hit a point ter hev casual speech with him. I aims ter l'arn his business, an' ef what ye suspicions air true, he'll have dealin's with me – or else he won't hardly succeed."

      So it happened logically enough that on the evening of Jerry's arrival, Kinnard Towers mounted and started out over the hill trails. He rode, as he always did when he went far abroad, under armed escort since tyrants are never secure. Four rifle-equipped vassals accompanied him; two riding as advance guard and two protecting the rear.

      Kinnard's destination was the house of Lone Stacy on Little Slippery, a house whose threshold he could not, in the old days, have crossed without blood-letting; but these were the days of peace.

      Arriving, he did not go direct to the door and knock, but discreetly halting in the highway, lifted his voice and shouted aloud, "Halloo! I'm Kinnard Towers an' I'm a-comin' in."

      The door was thrown promptly open and Lone Stacy appeared, framed between threshold and lintel, holding a lamp aloft and offering welcome.

      "Gentlemen," said the host in a matter-of-fact voice, "ef you'll excuse me, I'll rest yore guns."

      Then in observance of a quaint and ancient ceremonial, each armed guardian passed in, surrendering his rifle at the threshold. In retarded Appalachia so runs the rule. To fail in its fulfilment is to express distrust for the honesty and ability of the householder to protect his guests, and such an implication constitutes a grave discourtesy.

      Inside a fire roared on the hearth, for even in June, the mountain nights are raw.

      Henderson, watching the small cavalcade troop in, smiled inwardly. He was not unmindful of the identity or the power of this modern baron, and he was not without suspicion that he himself was the cause of the visit.

      "I chanced ter be farin' by, Lone," Kinnard Towers enlightened his host easily, "an' I 'lowed I'd light down an' rest a little spell."

      "Ye're welcome," was the simple reply. "Draw up ter ther fire an' set ye a cheer."

      The talk lingered for a space on neighborhood topics, but the host had found time, between hearing the shout outside and replying to it, to say in a low voice to his guest: "I reckon atter Kinnard Towers comes in we won't talk no more erbout my still – jest stills in gin'ral," and that caution was religiously observed.

      The kitchen tasks had been finished now and while the men sat close to the smoking hearth the faces of the women looked on from the shadowed corners of the room, where they sat half obscured upon the huge four-poster beds.

      The man who had crossed Cedar Mountain lighted his pipe from the bed of coals and then, straightening up, he stood on the hearth where his eyes could take in the whole semicircle of listening faces. They were eyes that, for all their seeming of a theorist's engrossment, missed little.

      This house might have been a pioneer abode of two hundred years ago, standing unamended by the whole swelling tide of modernity that had passed it by untouched.

      The leaping blaze glittered on the metal of polished rifles stacked in a corner, and on two others hanging against the smoke-dimmed logs of the walls. Red pods of peppers and brown leaves of tobacco were strung along the rafters. Hardly defined of shape against one shadowy wall, stood a spinning wheel.

      Henderson knew that the room was pregnant with the conflict of human elements. He realized that he himself faced possibilities which made his mission here a thing of delicate manipulation; even of personal danger.

      The blond man with the heavy neck, who sat contemplatively chewing at the stem of an unlighted pipe, listened in silence. He hardly seemed interested, but Henderson recognized him for the sponsor and beneficiary of lawlessness. He more than any other would be the logical foe to a new order which brought the law in its wake – and the law's reckonings.

      Near to the enemy whom he had heretofore faced in pitched battle, sat old Lone Stacy, his brogans kicked off and his bare feet thrust out to the warmth; bearded, shrewd of eye, a professed lover of the law, asking only the exemption of his illicit still. He, too, in the feud days had wielded power, but had sought in the main to wield it for peace.

      And there, showing no disposition to draw aside the skirts of his raiment in disgust, sat the preacher of the hills whose strength lay in his ability to reconcile antagonisms, while yet he stood staunch, abating nothing of self-sacrificial effort. It was almost as though church and crown and commoner were gathered in informal conclave.

      But luminous, like fixed stars, gleamed two other pairs of eyes. As he realized them, Henderson straightened up with such a thrill as comes from a vision. Here were the eyes of builders of the future – agleam as they looked on the present! Blossom's were wide and enthralled and Turner Stacy's burned as might those of a young crusader hearing from the lips of old and seasoned knights recitals of the wars of the Sepulchre.

      Bear Cat Stacy saw in this stranger the prophet bearing messages for which he had longed – and waited almost without hope. But Kinnard Towers saw in him a dangerous and unsettling agitator.

      "You said," declared Henderson, when the theme had swung back again to economic discussion, "that your cornfield was good for a few crops and then the rains would wash it bare, yet as I came along the road I saw an out-cropping vein of coal that reached above my head, and on each side of me were magnificent stretches of timber that the world needs and that is growing scarce."

      "Much profit thet does me," Lone Stacy laughed dryly. "Down at Uncle Israel's store thar's a dollar bill thet looks like hit's a-layin' on ther counter – but when ye aims to pick hit up ye discarns thet hit's pasted under ther glass. Thet coal an' timber of mine air pasted ter ther wrong side of Cedar Mounting."

      "And why? Because there are few roads and fewer schools. It's less the cost and difficulties

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