LITMIR.BIZ

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no need of haste. After all this thinking he could afford to consult his leisure and enjoy the pleasures of anticipation. When once the deed was done, as the warder had reminded him, there was the probable shadow of the gallows. But it should be said for the late Number 813 that in his reflections was no germ of vacillation or indecision. His one definite motive in life was what he deemed just reprisal. He was willing to pay for that without haggling over the cost, but he was not willing to defeat his end by hasty incaution.

      He had been in prison over two years and was still very weak. He recognized with contempt the tremor of his hand. Once that hand had been so steady that all his squirrels fell from the hickories pierced through the head. It would be a little time before he could again command that nicety of rifle-craft. But now he must get home and home lay about a hundred and fifteen miles "over yon." He could reach Jackson by rail, but that would cost money, and there was ammunition to be bought and other matters of importance, and his capital was precisely five dollars. Besides, railroad trains were luxurious and effete; they were not for him. He would "jest natcherly take his foot in his hand and light out" – pausing only for a little "snack" to eat and a flask to cheer his journey.

      He made his way slowly down into the center of the town: a town which had come to recognize at a glance these prison-given suits of black; these faces pasty with the pallor of confinement; this shamble fathered by the slouchy swing of the lock-step. For the June morning when No. 813 became again Newt Spooner was in the year 1897, and the ancient rigors of prison life still held.

      Eyes turned curiously on the shambling derelict, but the only expression on Newt's face was one of surly defiance to the world. The only sentiment that stirred in his breast was such as might have brooded in the narrow and poisoned brain of a rattle-snake, lying close-coiled by the laurel roots along his native creek-beds.

      Prisons are to reform and teach lessons of law. Newt Spooner had been in prison and was now out. He had already known how to hate, but now he knew how to hate with a greater tensity. Also, he had learned to cloak his animosity behind a craftier concealment.

      He had grown up as a cub among wolf-like men, running with the pack. From his mother's shrunken breast he had drawn bitterness toward his foes and "meanness."

      He remembered his boyhood surprise at the shocked face of the circuit rider when his father had laconically announced: "Stranger, thet thar boy's done drunk licker sence he was a baby. We weaned him on hit. Hit's good licker, 'cause we made hit ourselves – an' we hain't paid no damn' Gov'ment tax on hit, neither." But before him no Spooner had worn felon stripes, though many had been felons. That he had done so branded him with disgrace, and until he should remove that stigma by punishing the witness upon whose sworn word his conviction had been based, he must face the scorn of the battle-scarred members of the man-pack that still ranged free. So, as Newt Spooner turned his face homeward between sunny pasture lands and soft woodlands and golden grain fields and set his feet into the Lexington turnpike, young Henry Falkins became a man marked down for death.

      CHAPTER II

      Courts can not enforce laws upon which public opinion sets its embargo. The men of the mountains have lived isolated lives for a hundred years. They inhabit an island of medievalism entirely surrounded by civilization, but the civilization is no more a part of them than the water that surrounds an island is part of the island. "Leave us alone" has been the word of the hills to the gift-bearing Greeks of innovation. The right of men to settle their own quarrels after the method of the Scottish clans from whom they sprang, has been a thing which local courts have made only perfunctory efforts to deny – and which juries of the vicinage stubbornly refused to deny. Among their crude cabins one still hears phrases bequeathed by word of mouth from the England of Elizabeth and the Scotland of Mary Stuart. Immured behind their walls of sandstone, they have lived ignorantly – and fiercely.

      Their peaks are heaped against the skies, and their fields are tilled with the hoe when mules and plows might fall down to destruction. With nature itself they pursue a constant and desperate quarrel for subsistence, and through generations of battle they have grown morose and sullen and vengeful and have lost all sense of life's humor.

      But slowly the tide of outside influence is creeping in upon them and at the contact-points strangely anomalous conditions arise: the clash of incongruous centuries; the war between a stubborn old order and an inevitable new. In such a life there are here and there far-sighted men who, standing like great trees among stunted brethren, look out across a wider perspective with a surer vision.

      The house of McAllister Falkins stands twenty miles from a railroad and is, for this crude environment, a mansion. It was built in the days when the first tide of pioneer life swept out of Virginia, and because it was, in that remote day, nearer kin to the culture of the Old Dominion than to the wilderness, it bore a strange blending of compromises between luxury and the exigency of the frontier.

      The head of the house of Falkins, generation after generation, had clung to the old standards and old ideals. The children of this household had been reared like their cousins of Virginia and the bluegrass. Other branches of the family bearing the surname had gone to seed and lapsed into illiteracy. There were cousins who had to sign their names with cross-marks and who had been embroiled in savage animosities until the "Spooner-Falkins War" had become one of the sanguinary chapters of feudal history, but the head of the house had always stood apart and denounced the godless code of the vendetta.

      And now the time was come when old McAllister Falkins could look ahead and begin to see the pale glow of a coming dawn. The railroads, whose surveyors and chain-bearers his neighbors had fought, were piercing and developing the hills. Here and there rose a circuit judge or a prosecuting attorney who dared to talk from an unterrified soul to grand and petit juries, and occasionally a panel harkened. District schools began to pass into the hands of teachers who could teach. In this place and that rose small colleges and the flickering blaze of enlightenment was struggling into a semblance of steadiness. McAllister Falkins had sent his son Henry away to school and college, and had had the satisfaction of seeing him return unspoiled.

      The life of young Henry Falkins, therefore, had been cast both in and out of the Cumberlands, and he had reached the age of twenty-five with a minimum of enemies and a maximum of friends. His was the breadth of the lowlands and the unflinching strength of the hills. Then the lurking and inevitable shadow of that life had impalpably and suddenly fallen upon him.

      When Bud Mortimer, a "marked man," riding home from Jackson, had slid from his horse and died in a creek-bed with a rifle-hole drilled through his chest, Falkins had been unlucky enough to have been squirrel-shooting near by and to have recognized one of three figures that left the open road and took cover in the laurel. By one of the strange chances of fate, Falkins, who was tramping the woods with no idea of concealment, had been unobserved, while the three assassins, crouching along with all their covert art of hiding out, had not quite escaped his eye. He had not heard the volley because the murder had taken place at a distance. He would not have suspected the men who passed casually below him with their rifles cradled in their elbows, had not a word or two, in the staccato voice of a youth who walked third in the single file, come to his ears. These words were profanely triumphant and boastful of marksmanship. The other two men, the squirrel-hunter did not recognize. Still, Henry Falkins might not have known that the bull's-eye alluded to had been a human breast, and he did not know it till later.

      When the dead man's friends had carried the matter to the courts, with no better evidence perhaps than the bad blood which they knew existed, and when young Newt Spooner, aged eighteen, but precocious in crime, stood at the bar, charged with murder, Henry Falkins told the prosecutor what he had seen. The prosecutor instructed him to keep his secret until he was called as a witness. He knew the conditions and recognized that, should this evidence come prematurely to the ears of the Spooners, he should probably not only lose valuable evidence, but also be saddled with another prosecution for murder – and just now his homicide docket was burdensomely heavy.

      When their cub was indicted, the Spooner pack laughed. When he was haled into court, despite his callow years, he came with insolent confidence, as one above the law. He might have escaped and hidden out, since the court had allowed him bond, but that would have hampered his future freedom of action, so he preferred to go through the farce of a trial, and afterward be free.

      He

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