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Melissa.
Blue-grass and
Rhododendron
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Out-doors in Old Kentucky
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
Out-doors in Old Kentucky
By
John Fox, Jr.
Charles Scribner's Sons New York :::::::::: i 90 I
THE NEW YORK 'J PUBLIC LIBRARY
461S7 7 A
ASTOR, LENOX TILDEN FOl
H 1930 L
Copyright, iqoi, by Charles Scribner's Sons
Published, October, 1901
Trow Directory
Printing &1 Bookbinding Company
New York
To
JOSHUA F. BULLITT
HENRY CLAY McDOWELL
HORACE ETHELBERT FOX
THE
FIRST THREE CAPTAINS
OF
THE GUARD
Contents
Page
The Southern Mountaineer i
The Kentucky Mountaineer 25
Down the Kentucky on a Raft . . . . 55
After Br'er Rabbit in the Blue-grass . . 77
Through the Bad Bend 101
Fox-Hunting in Kentucky 123
To the Breaks of Sandy 149
Br'er Coon in Ole Kentucky 177
Civilizing the Cumberland 207
Man-Hunting in the Pound 237
The Red Fox of the Mountains . . . 257 The Hanging of Talton Hall . . . .271
List of Illustrations
Melissa ...... Frontispiece
Page
Interior of a Log-cabin on Brownie's Creek . 8
"Gritting" Corn and Hand Corn-mill . .16
Breaking Flax near the mouth of Brownie's Creek 22
A Moonshine Still 40
Rockhouse Post-office and Store, Letcher County 48 Ferrying at Jackson, Ky. . . . • • 5&
Down goes her pursuer on top of her . . -94
The rest of us sat on the two beds . . .106
Calling off the Dogs 132
Listening to the Music of the Dogs . . .136
A Bit of Brush 142
They took us for the advance-guard of a circus . 158 Along roads scarce wide enough for one wagon . 162 At the Breaks . . . . . . .168
" Go it, Black Babe ! Go it, my White Chile ! " . 196
ix „
List of Illustrations
Page
The Infant of the Guard ..... 234 " Hev you ever searched for a dead man ? " .252
Going to Circuit Court . . . . .262
Hall stood as motionless as the trunk of an oak . 290
x
The Southern Mountaineer
The Southern Mountaineer
IT was only a little while ago that the materialists declared that humanity was the product of he- redity and environment; that history lies not near but in Nature; and that, in consequence, man must take his head from the clouds and study himself with his feet where they belong, to the earth. Since then, mountains have taken on a new importance for the part they have played in the destiny of the race, for the reason that mountains have dammed the streams of humanity, have let them settle in the valleys and spread out over plains; or have sent them on long detours around. When some unusual pressure has forced a current through some mountain-pass, the hills have cut it off from the main stream and have held it so stagnant, that, to change the figure, mountains may be said to have kept the records of human history somewhat as fossils hold the history of the earth.
Arcadia held primitive the primitive inhabitants of Greece, who fled to its rough hills after the Dorian
3
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
invasion. The Pyrenees kept unconquered and strik- ingly unchanged the Basques — sole remnants perhaps in western Europe of the aborigines who were swept away by the tides of Aryan immigration; just as the Rocky Mountains protect the American Indian in primitive barbarism and not wholly subdued to-day, and the Cumberland range keeps the Southern moun- taineer to the backwoods civilization of the revolution. The reason is plain. The mountain dweller lives apart from the world. The present is the past when it reaches him; and though past, is yet too far in the future to have any bearing on his established order of things. There is, in consequence, no incentive what- ever for him to change. An arrest of development fol- lows; so that once imprisoned, a civilization, with its dress, speech, religion, customs, ideas, may be caught like the shapes of lower life in stone, and may tell the human story of a century as the rocks tell the story of an age. For centuries the Highlander has had plaid and kilt; the peasant of Norway and the mountaineer of the German and Austrian Alps each a habit of his own; and every Swiss canton a distinctive dress. Mountains preserve the Gaelic tongue in which the scholar may yet read the refuge of Celt from Saxon, and in turn Saxon from the Norman-French, just as they keep alive remnants like the Rhaeto-Roman, the
4
The Southern Mountaineer
Basque, and a number of Caucasian dialects. The Car- pathians protected Christianity against the Moors, and in Java the Brahman faith took refuge on the sides of the Volcano Gunung Lawa, and there outlived the ban of Buddha.
So, in the log-cabin of the Southern mountaineer, in his household furnishings, in his homespun, his linsey, and, occasionally, in his hunting-shirt, his coon- skin cap and moccasins, one may summon up the garb and life of the pioneer ; in his religion, his politics, his moral code, his folk-songs, and his superstitions, one may bridge the waters back to the old country, and through his speech one may even touch the remote past of Chaucer. For to-day he is a distinct remnant of Colonial times — a distinct relic of an Anglo-Saxon past.
It is odd to think that he was not discovered until the outbreak of the Civil War, although he was nearly a century old then, and it is really startling to realize that when one speaks of the Southern mountaineers, he speaks of nearly three millions of people who live in eight Southern States — Virginia and Alabama and the Southern States between — and occupy a region equal in area to the combined areas of Ohio and Penn- sylvania, as big, say, as the German Empire, and richer, perhaps, in timber and mineral deposits than any other region of similar extent in the world. This region was
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
and is an unknown land. It has been aptly called " Appalachian America," and the work of discovery- is yet going on. The American mountaineer was dis- covered, I say, at the beginning of the war, when the Confederate leaders were counting on the presumption that Mason and Dixon's Line was the dividing line between the North and South, and formed, therefore, the plan of marching an army from Wheeling, in West Virginia, to some point on the lakes, and thus dissever- ing the North at one blow. The plan seemed so feasible that it is said to have materially aided the sale of Confederate bonds in England, but when Captain Gar- nett, a West Point graduate, started to carry it out, he got no farther than Harper's Ferry. When he struck the mountains, he struck enemies who shot at his men from ambush, cut down bridges before him, carried the news of his march to the Federals, and Garnett himself fell with a bullet from a mountaineer's squirrel rifle at Harper's Ferry. Then the South began to realize what a long, lean, powerful arm of the Union it was that the Southern mountaineer stretched through its very vitals ; for that arm helped hold Ken- tucky in the Union by giving preponderance to the Union sympathizers in the Blue-grass ; it kept the East Tennesseans loyal to the man ; it made West Virginia, as the phrase goes, " secede from secession "; it drew
6
The Southern Mountaineer
out a horde of one hundred thousand volunteers, when Lincoln called for troops, depleting Jackson County, Ky., for instance, of every male under sixty years of age and over fifteen, and it raised a hostile barrier between the armies of the coast and the armies of the Mississippi. The North has never realized, perhaps, what it owes for its victory to this non-slaveholding Southern mountaineer.
The war over, he went back to his cove and his cabin, and but for the wealth of his hills and the pen of one Southern woman, the world would have for- gotten him again. Charles Egbert Craddock put him in the outer world of fiction, and in recent years rail- roads have been linking him with the outer world of fact. Religious and educational agencies have begun work on him; he has increased in political importance, and a few months ago he went down, heavily armed with pistol and Winchester — a thousand strong — to assert his political rights in the State capital of Ken- tucky. It was probably one of these mountaineers who killed William Goebel, and he no doubt thought himself as much justified as any other assassin who ever slew the man he thought a tyrant. Being a Unionist, because of the Revolution, a Republican, because of the Civil War, and having his antagonism aroused against the Blue-grass people, who, he believes,
7
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
are trying to rob him of his liberties, he is now the political factor with which the Anti-Goebel Demo- crats— in all ways the best element in the State — have imperilled the Democratic Party in Kentucky. Sooner or later, there will be an awakening in the mountainous parts of the seven other States; already the coal and iron of these regions are making many a Southern ear listen to the plea of protection ; and some day the Na- tional Democratic Party will, like the Confederacy, find a subtle and powerful foe in the Southern moun- taineer and in the riches of his hills.
In the march of civilization westward, the Southern mountaineer has been left in an isolation almost beyond belief. He was shut off by mountains that have blocked and still block the commerce of a century, and there for a century he has stayed. He has had no navigable rivers, no lakes, no coasts, few wagon-roads, and often no roads at all except the beds of streams. He has lived in the cabin in which his grandfather was born, and in life, habit, and thought he has been merely his grandfather born over again. The first gen- eration after the Revolution had no schools and no churches. Both are rare and primitive to-day. To this day, few Southern mountaineers can read and write and cipher; few, indeed, can do more. They saw little of the newspapers, and were changeless in politics as
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The Southern Mountaineer
in everything else. They cared little for what was going on in the outside world, and indeed they heard nothing that did not shake the nation. To the average mountaineer, the earth was still flat and had four corners. It was the sun that girdled the earth, just as it did when Joshua told it to stand still, and pre- cisely for that reason. The stories of votes yet being cast for Andrew Jackson are but little exagger- ated. An old Tennessee mountaineer once told me about the discovery of America by Columbus. He could read his Bible, with marvellous interpretations of the same. He was the patriarch of his district, the philosopher. He had acquired the habit of delivering the facts of modern progress to his fellows, and it never occurred to him that a man of my youth might be acquainted with that rather well-known bit of history. I listened gravely, and he went on, by and by, to speak of the Mexican War as we would speak of the fighting in China; and when we got down to so recent and burning an issue as the late civil struggle, he dropped his voice to a whisper and hitched his chair across the fireplace and close to mine.
" Some folks had other idees," he said, " but hit's my pussonal opinion that niggahs was the cause o' the war."
When I left his cabin, he followed me out to the fence.
9
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
" Stranger/' he said, " I'd ruther you wouldn' say nothin' about whut I been tellin' ye." He had been a lone rebel in sympathy, and he feared violence at this late day for expressing his opinion too freely. This old man was a " citizen "; I was a " furriner " from the " settlements " — that is, the Blue-grass. Colum- bus was one of the " outlandish," a term that carried not only his idea of the parts hailed from but his personal opinion of Columbus. Living thus, his in- terest centred in himself, his family, his distant neighbor, his grist-mill, his country store, his county town; unaffected by other human influences; having no incentive to change, no wish for it, and remaining therefore unchanged, except where civilization during the last decade has pressed in upon him, the Southern mountaineer is thus practically the pioneer of the Revo- lution, the living ancestor of the Modern West.
The national weapons of the pioneer — the axe and the rifle — are the Southern mountaineer's weapons to- day. He has still the same fight with iSTature. His cabin was, and is yet, in many places, the cabin of the backwoodsman — of one room usually — sometimes two, connected by a covered porch, and built of unhewn logs, with a puncheon floor, clapboards for shingles, and wooden pin and auger-holes for nails. The crev- ices between the logs were filled with mud and stones
10
The Southern Mountaineer
when filled at all, and there were holes in the roof for the wind and the rain. Sometimes there was a window with a batten wooden shutter, sometimes no window at all. Over the door, across a pair of buck antlers, lay the long, heavy, home-made rifle of the back- woodsman, sometimes even with a flint lock. One can yet find a crane swinging in a big stone fireplace, the spinning-wheel and the loom in actual use; some- times the hominy block that the pioneers borrowed from the Indians, and a hand-mill for grinding corn like the one, perhaps, from which one woman was taken and another left in biblical days. Until a decade and a half ago they had little money, and the medium of exchange was barter. They drink metheglin still, as well as moonshine. They marry early, and only last summer I saw a fifteen-year-old girl riding behind her father, to a log church, to be married. After the service her pillion was shifted to her young husband's horse, as was the pioneer custom, and she rode away behind him to her new home. There are still log- rollings, house-raisings, house-warmings, corn-shuck- ings, and quiltings. Sports are still the same — as they have been for a hundred years — wrestling, racing, jumping, and lifting barrels. Brutally savage fights are still common in which the combatants strike, kick, bite, and gouge until one is ready to cry " enough."
ii
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
Even the backwoods bully, loud, coarse, profane, bantering — a dandy who wore long hair and em- broidered his hunting-shirt with porcupine-quills — is not quite dead. I saw one not long since, but he wore store clothes, a gorgeous red tie, a dazzling brass scarf- pin — in the bosom of his shirt. His hair was sandy, but his mustache was blackened jet. He had the air and smirk of a lady-killer, and in the butt of the huge pistol buckled around him was a large black bow — the badge of death and destruction to his ene- mies. Funerals are most simple. Sometimes the coffin is slung to poles and carried by four men. While the begum has given place to hickory bark when a cradle is wanted, baskets and even fox-horns are still made of that material.
Not only many remnants like these are left in the life of the mountaineer, but, occasionally, far up some creek, it was possible, as late as fifteen years ago, to come upon a ruddy, smooth-faced, big-framed old fellow, keen-eyed, taciturn, avoiding the main-trav- elled roads; a great hunter, calling his old squirrel rifle by some pet feminine name — who, with a coon- skin cap, the scalp in front, and a fringed hunting- shirt and moccasins, completed the perfect image of the pioneer as the books and tradition have Landed him down to us.
12
The Southern Mountaineer
It is easy to go on back across the water to the Old Country. One finds still among the mountaineers the pioneer's belief in signs, omens, and the practice of witchcraft ; for whatever traits the pioneer brought over the sea, the Southern mountaineer has to-day. The rough-and-tumble fight of the Scotch and the English square stand-up and knock-down boxing- match were the mountaineer's ways of settling minor disputes — one or the other, according to agreement — until the war introduced musket and pistol. The imprint of Calvinism on his religious nature is yet plain, in spite of the sway of Methodism for nearly a century. He is the only man in the world whom the Catholic Church has made little or no effort to proselyte. Dislike of Episcopalianism is still strong among people who do not know, or pretend not to know, what the word means.
" Any Episcopalians around here? " asked a clergy- man at a mountain cabin. " I don' know," said the old woman. " Jim's got the skins of a lot o' varmints up in the loft. Mebbe you can find one up thar."
The Unionism of the mountaineer in the late war is in great part an inheritance from the intense American- ism of the backwoodsman, just as that Americanism came from the spirit of the Covenanters. His music is thus a trans-Atlantic remnant. In Harlan County,
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
Ky., a mountain girl leaned her chair against the wall of her cabin, put her large, bare feet on one of the rungs, and sang me an English ballad three hundred years old, and almost as long as it was ancient. She said she knew many others. In Perry County, where there are in the French-Eversole feud Mclntyres, Mc- Intoshes, McKnights, Combs, probably McCombs and Fitzpatricks, Scotch ballads are said to be sung with Scotch accent, and an occasional copy of Burns is to be found. I have even run across the modern survival of the wandering minstrel — two blind fiddlers who went through the mountains making up " ballets " to celebrate the deeds of leaders in Kentucky feuds. One of the verses ran :
The death of these two men Caused great trouble in our land, Caused men to say the bitter word, And take the parting hand.
Nearly all songs and dance tunes are written in the so-called old Scotch scale, and, like negro music, they drop frequently into the relative minor; so that if there be any truth in the theory that negro music is merely the adaptation of Scotch and Irish folk- songs, and folk-dances, with the added stamp of the negro's peculiar temperament, then the music
14
The Southern Mountaineer
adapted is to be heard in the mountains to-day as the negro heard it long ago.
In his speech the mountaineer touches a very re- mote past. Strictly speaking, he has no dialect. The mountaineer simply keeps in use old words and mean- ings that the valley people have ceased to use; but nowhere is this usage so sustained and consistent as to form a dialect. To writers of mountain stories the temptation seems quite irresistible to use more peculiar words in one story than can be gathered from the people in a month. Still, unusual words are abundant. There are perhaps two hundred words, meanings, and pronunciations that in the mountaineer's speech go back unchanged to Chaucer. Some of the words are: afeerd, afore, axe, holp, crope, clomb, peert, beest (horse), cryke, eet (ate), farwel, fer (far), fool (foolish — " them fool-women " ), heepe, hit (it), I is, lepte, pore (poor), right (very), slyk, study (think), souple (supple), up (verb), " he up and done it," usen, yer for year, yond, instid, yit, etc. There are others which have English dialect authority: blather, doated, antic, dreen, brash, faze (now modern slang), fernent, fer- ninst, master, size, etc. Many of these words, of course, the upper classes use throughout the South. These, the young white master got from his negro play- mates, who took them from the lips of the poor whites.
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
The double negative, always used by the old English, who seem to have resisted it no more than did the Greeks, is invariable with the mountaineer. With him a triple negative is common. A mountaineer had been shot. His friends came in to see him and kept urging him to revenge. A woman wanted them to stop.
" Hit jes' raises the ambition in him and don't do no good nohow."
The " dialect " is not wholly deterioration, then. What we are often apt to regard as ignorance in the mountaineer is simply our own disuse. Unfortunately, the speech is a mixture of so many old English dialects that it is of little use in tracing the origin of the people who use it.
Such has been the outward protective effect of mountains on the Southern mountaineer. As a human type he is of unusual interest.
No mountain people are ever rich. Environment keeps mountaineers poor. The strength that comes from numbers and wealth is always wanting. Agri- culture is the sole stand-by, and agriculture distributes population, because arable soil is confined to bottom- lands and valleys. Farming on a mountain-side is not only arduous and unremunerative — it is sometimes dangerous. There is a well-authenticated case of a
16
The Southern Mountaineer
Kentucky mountaineer who fell out of his own corn- field and broke his neck. Still, though fairly well- to-do in the valleys, the Southern mountaineer can be pathetically poor. A young preacher stopped at a cabin in Georgia to stay all night. His hostess, as a mark of unusual distinction, killed a chicken and dressed it in a pan. She rinsed the pan and made up her dough in it. She rinsed it again and went out and used it for a milk-pail. She came in, rinsed it again, and went to the spring and brought it back full of water. She filled up the glasses on the table and gave him the pan with the rest of the water in which to wash his hands. The woman was not a slattern; it was the only utensil she had.
This poverty of natural resources makes the moun- taineer's fight for life a hard one. At the same time it gives him vigor, hardihood, and endurance of body ; it saves him from the comforts and dainties that weaken; and it makes him a formidable competitor, when it forces him to come down into the plains, as it often does. For this poverty was at the bottom of the marauding instinct of the Pict and Scot, just as it is at the bottom of the migrating instinct that sends the Southern mountaineers west, in spite of a love for home that is a proverb with the Swiss, and is hardly less strong in the Southern mountaineer to-day. In-
17
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
variably the Western wanderer comes home again. Time and again an effort was made to end a feud in the Kentucky mountains by sending the leaders away. They always came back.
It is this poverty of arable land that further isolates the mountaineer in his loneliness. For he must live apart not only from the world, but from his neighbor. The result is an enforced self-reliance, and through that, the gradual growth of an individualism that has been " the strength, the weakness; the personal charm, the political stumbling-block; the ethical significance and the historical insignificance of the mountaineer the world over." It is this isolation, this individualism, that makes unity of action difficult, public sentiment weak, and takes from the law the righting of private wrongs. It is this individualism that has been a rich mine for the writer of fiction. In the Southern moun- taineer, its most marked elements are religious feel- ing, hospitality, and pride. So far these last two traits have been lightly touched upon, for the reason that they appear only by contrast with a higher civilization that has begun to reach them only in the last few years.
The latch-string hangs outside every cabin-door if the men-folks are at home, but you must shout " hello " always outside the fence.
The Southern Mountaineer
" We uns is pore," you will be told, " but y'u're welcome ef y'u kin put up with what we have."
After a stay of a week at a mountain cabin, a young " furriner " asked what his bill was. The old moun- taineer waved his hand. " Nothin'," he said, " 'cept come agin! "
A belated traveller asked to stay all night at a cabin. The mountaineer answered that his wife was sick and they were " sorter out o' fixin's to eat, but he reckoned he mought step over to a neighbor's an borrer some." He did step over and he was gone three hours. He brought back a little bag of meal, and they had corn- bread and potatoes for supper and for breakfast, cooked by the mountaineer. The stranger asked how far away his next neighbor lived. " A leetle the rise o' six miles I reckon," was the answer.
" Which way? "
" Oh, jes' over the mountain thar."
He had stepped six miles over the mountain and back for that little bag of meal, and he would allow his guest to pay nothing next morning.
I have slept with nine others in a single room. The host gave up his bed to two of our party, and he and his wife slept with the rest of us on the floor. He gave us supper, kept us all night, sent us away next morning with a parting draught of moonshine apple-jack, of
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
his own brewing, by the way, and would suffer no one to pay a cent for his entertainment. That man was a desperado, an outlaw, a moonshiner, and was running from the sheriff at that very time.
Two outlaw sons were supposed to be killed by offi- cers. I offered aid to the father to have them decently clothed and buried, but the old man, who was as bad as his sons, declined it with some dignity. They had enough left for that ; and if not, why, he had.
A woman whose husband was dead, who was sick to death herself, whose four children were almost starved, said, when she heard the " furriners " were talking about sending her to the poor-house, that she " would go out on her crutches and hoe corn fust " (and she did), and that " people who talked about sending her to the po'-house had better save their breath to make prayers with."
It is a fact — in the Kentucky mountains at least — that the poor-houses are usually empty, and that it is considered a disgrace to a whole clan if one of its members is an inmate. It is the exception when a family is low and lazy enough to take a revenue from the State for an idiot child. I saw a boy once, astride a steer which he had bridled with a rope, barefooted, with his yellow hair sticking from his crownless hat, and in blubbering ecstasy over the fact that he was
20
The Southern Mountaineer
no longer under the humiliation of accepting $75 a year from the State. He had proven his sanity by his answer to one question.
"Do you work in the field?" asked the commis- sioner.
" Well, ef I didn't," was the answer, " thar wouldn't be no work done."
I have always feared, however, that there was an- other reason for his happiness than balm to his suf- fering pride. Relieved of the ban of idiocy, he had gained a privilege — unspeakably dear in the mountains — the privilege of matrimony.
Like all mountain races, the Southern mountaineers are deeply religious. In some communities, religion is about the only form of recreation they have. They are for the most part Methodists and Baptists — some- times Ironsides feet-washing Baptists. They will walk, or ride when possible, eight or ten miles, and sit all day in a close, windowless log-cabin on the flat side of a slab supported by pegs, listening to the high- wrought, emotional, and, at times, unintelligible rant- ing of a mountain preacher, while the young men sit outside, whittling with their Barlows and huge jack- knives, and swapping horses and guns.
" If anybody wants to extribute anything to the ex- port of the gospels, hit will be gradually received." A
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
possible remark of this sort will gauge the intelligence of the pastor. The cosmopolitanism of the congrega- tion can be guessed from the fact that certain elders, filling a vacancy in their pulpit, once decided to " take that ar man Spurgeon if they could git him to come." It is hardly necessary to add that the " extribution to the export of the gospels " is very, very gradually received.
Naturally, their religion is sternly orthodox and most literal. The infidel is unknown, and no moun- taineer is so bad as not to have a full share of religion deep down, though, as in his more civilized brother, it is not always apparent until death is at hand. In the famous Howard and Turner war, the last but one of the Turner brothers was shot by a Howard while he was drinking at a spring. He leaped to his feet and fell in a little creek, where, from behind a sycamore- root, he emptied his Winchester at his enemy, and be- tween the cracks of his gun he could be heard, half a mile away, praying aloud.
The custom of holding funeral services for the dead annually, for several years after death, is common. I heard the fourth annual funeral sermon of a dead feud leader preached a few summers ago, and it was consoling to hear that even he had all the virtues that so few men seem to have in life, and so few to lack
22
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The Southern Mountaineer
when dead. But in spite of the universality of religious feeling and a surprising knowledge of the Bible, it is possible to find an ignorance that is almost incredible. The mountain evangelist, George O. Barnes, it is said, once stopped at a mountain cabin and told the story of the crucifixion as few other men can. "When he was quite through, an old woman who had listened in ab- sorbed silence, asked:
" Stranger, you say that that happened a long while ago?"
"Yes," said Mr. Barnes; "almost two thousand years ago."
"And they treated him that way when he'd come down fer nothin' on earth but to save 'em? "
" Yes."
The old woman was crying softly, and she put out her hand and laid it on his knee.
" Well, stranger," she said, " let's hope that hit ain't so."
She did not want to believe that humanity was capable of such ingratitude. While ignorance of this kind is rare, and while we may find men who know the Bible from " kiver to kiver," it is not impossible to find children of shrewd native intelligence who have not heard of Christ and the Bible.
Now, whatever interest the Southern mountaineer 23
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
has as a remnant of pioneer days, as a relic of an Anglo- Saxon past, and as a peculiar type that seems to be the invariable result of a mountain environment — the Kentucky mountaineer shares in a marked degiee. Moreover, he has an interest peculiarly his own; for I believe him to be as sharply distinct from his fellows, as the blue-grass Kentuckian is said to be from his.
24
The Kentucky Mountaineer
The Kentucky Mountaineer
THE Kentucky mountaineers are practically valley people. There are the three forks of the Cumberland, the three forks of the Ken- tucky, and the tributaries of Big Sandy — all with rich river-bottoms. It was natural that these lands should attract a better class of people than the average mountaineer. They did. There were many slave- holders among them — a fact that has never been mentioned, as far as I know, by anybody who has written about the mountaineer. The houses along these rivers are, as a rule, weather-boarded, and one will often find interior decorations, startling in color and puzzling in design, painted all over porch, wall, and ceiling. The people are better fed, better clothed, less lank in figure, more intelligent. They wear less homespun, and their speech, while as archaic as else- where, is, I believe, purer. You rarely hear " you uns " and " we uns," and similar untraceable con- fusions in the Kentucky mountains, except along the
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
border of the Tennessee. Moreover, the mountaineers who came over from West Virginia and from the southwestern corner of old Virginia were undoubtedly the daring, the hardy, and the strong, for no other kind would have climbed gloomy Black Mountain and the Cumberland Range to fight against beast and savage for their homes.
However, in spite of the general superiority that these facts give him, the Kentucky mountaineer has been more isolated than the mountaineer of any other State. There are regions more remote and more sparsely settled, but nowhere in the Southern moun- tains has so large a body of mountaineers been shut off so completely from the outside world. As a result, he illustrates Mr. Theodore Roosevelt's fine observation that life away from civilization simply emphasizes the natural qualities, good and bad, of the individual. The effect of this truth seems perceptible in that any trait common to the Southern mountaineer seems to be in- tensified in the mountaineer of Kentucky. He is more clannish, prouder, more hospitable, fiercer, more loyal as a friend, more bitter as an enemy, and in simple meanness — when he is mean, mind you — he can out- Herod his race with great ease.
To illustrate his clannishness : Three mountaineers with a grievance went up to some mines to drive the
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The Kentucky Mountaineer
book-keeper away. A fourth man joined them and stood with drawn pistol during the controversy at the mines, because his wife was a first cousin by marriage of one of the three who had the grievance. In Re- publican counties, county officers are often Democratic — blood is a stronger tie even than politics.
As to his hospitality: A younger brother of mine was taking dinner with an old mountaineer. There was nothing on the table but some bread and a few potatoes.
" Take out, stranger," he said, heartily. " Have a 'tater — take two of 'em — take damn nigh all of 'em ! "
A mountaineer, who had come into possession of a small saw-mill, was building a new house. As he had plenty of lumber, a friend of mine asked why he did not build a bigger house. It was big enough, he said. He had two rooms — " one fer the family, an' t'other fer company." As his family numbered fifteen, the scale on which he expected to entertain can be im- agined.
The funeral sermon of a mountaineer, who had been dead two years, was preached in Turkey Foot at the base of Mount Scratchum in Jackson County. Three branches run together like a turkey's foot at that point. The mountain is called Scratchum because it is hard to climb. " A funeral sermon," said the old preacher,
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
" can be the last one you hear, or the fust one that's preached over ye atter death. Maybe I'm a-preachin' my own funeral sermon now." If he was, he did him- self justice, for he preached three solid hours. The audience was invited to stay to dinner. Forty of them accepted — there were just forty there — and dinner was served from two o'clock until six. The forty were pressed to stay all night. Twenty-three did stay, sev- enteen in one room. Such is the hospitality of the Kentucky mountaineer.
As to his pride, that is almost beyond belief. I always hesitate to tell this story, for the reason that I can hardly believe it myself. There was a plague in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, AVest Virginia, and the southwest corner of old Virginia in 1885. A cattle convention of St. Louis made up a relief fund and sent it for distribution to General Jubal Early of Virginia. General Early sent it to a lawyer of Ab- ingdon, Va., who persuaded D. E. Campbell, another lawyer now living in that town, to take the money into the mountains. Campbell left several hundred dollars in Virginia, and being told that the AVest Vir- ginians could take care of themselves went with the balance, about $1,000, into Kentucky, where the plague was at its worst. He found the suffering great — nine dead, in one instance, under a single roof.
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The Kentucky Mountaineer
He spent one month going from house to house in the counties of Letcher, Perry, and Pike, carrying the money in his saddle-bags and riding unarmed. Every man, woman, and child in the three counties knew he had the money and knew his mission. He left $5 at a country store, and he got one woman to persuade another woman whose husband and three children were just dead, and who had indignantly refused his per- sonal offer of assistance, to accept $10. The rest of the money he took back and distributed without trouble on his own side of the mountain.
While in Kentucky he found trouble in getting enough to eat for himself and his horse. Often he had only bread and onions; and yet he was permitted to pay but for one meal for either, and that was under protest at a regular boarding-house in a mountain town. Over the three counties, he got the same answer.
" You are a stranger. We are not beggars, and we can take care of ourselves."
" They are a curious people over there," said Camp- bell, who is a born Virginian. " No effort was made to rob me, though a man who was known as ' the only thief in Perry County,' a man whom I know to have been trusted with large sums by his leader in a local war, sent me a joking threat. The people were not sus- picious of me because I was a stranger. They con-
31
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honn 'I. very big dark eyes, Blipping like a
33 da
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
cealed cases of suffering from me. It was pride that made them refuse the money — nothing else. They are the most loyal friends you ever saw. They will do anything for you, if they like you. They will get up and go anywhere for you day or night, rain or snow. If they haven't a horse, they'll walk. If they haven't shoes, they'll go barefooted. They will combine against you in a trade, and take every advantage they can. A man will keep you at his house to beat you out of a dollar, and when you leave, your board-bill is nothing."
This testimony is from a Virginian, and it is a par- ticular pleasure for a representative of one of the second-class families of Virginia who, as the first fami- lies say, all emigrated to Kentucky, to prove, by the word of a Virginian, that we have some advantage in at least one section of the State.
Indeed, no matter what may be said of the mountain- eer in general, the Kentucky mountaineer seems to go the fact one better. Elsewhere, families are large — " children and heepe," says Chaucer. In Jackson County a mountaineer died not long ago, not at an extreme old age, who left two hundred and seven de- scendants. He had fifteen children, and several of his children had fifteen. There was but one set of twins among them — both girls — and they were called
32
The Kentucky Mountaineer
Louisa and Louisa. There is in the same county a woman forty-seven years of age, with a grand-daugh- ter who has been married fifteen months. Only a break in the family tradition prevented her from be- ing a great-grandmother at forty-seven.
It may be that the Kentucky mountaineer is more tempted to an earlier marriage than is the mountaineer elsewhere, for an artist who rode with me through the Kentucky mountains said that not only were the men finer looking, but that the women were far hand- somer than elsewhere in the southern Alleghanies. While I am not able to say this, I can say that in the Kentucky mountains the pretty mountain girl is not always, as some people are inclined to believe, pure fiction. Pretty girls are, however, rare; for usually the women are stoop-shouldered and large waisted from working in the fields and lifting heavy weights; for the same reason their hands are large and so are their feet, for they generally go barefoot. But usually they have modest faces and sad, modest eyes, and in the rich river-bottoms, where the mountain farmers have tenants and do not send their daughters to the fields, the girls are apt to be erect and agile, small of hand and foot, and usually they have a wild shyness that is very attractive. I recall one girl in crimson homespun, with very big dark eyes, slipping like a
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
flame through the dark room, behind me, when I was on the porch; or gliding out of the one door, if I chanced to enter the other, which I did at every oppor- tunity. A friend who was with me saw her dancing in the dust at twilight, next day, when she was driving the cows home. He helped her to milk and got to know her quite well, I believe. I know that, a year later, when she had worn away her shyness and most of her charm at school in her county seat, she asked me about him, with embarrassing frankness, and a look crept into her eyes that told an old tale. Pretty girls there are in abundance, but I have seen only one very beautiful mountain girl. One's standard can be affected by a long stay in the mountains, and I should have distrusted mine had it not been for the artist who was with me, fresh from civilization. We saw her, as we were riding up the Cumberland, and we silently and simultaneously drew rein and asked if we could get buttermilk. We could, and we swung from our horses. The girl was sitting behind a little cabin, with a baby in her lap, and her loveliness was startling. She was slender; her hair was gold- brown; her hands were small and, for a wonder, beau- tifully shaped. Her teeth, for a wonder, too, were very white and even. Her features were delicately perfect ; her mouth shaped as Cupid's bow never was and never
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The Kentucky Mountaineer
would be, said the artist, who christened her eyes after Trilby's — " twin gray stars " — to which the eyebrows and the long lashes gave an indescribable softness. But I felt more the brooding pathos that lay in them, that came from generations of lonely mothers before her, waiting in lonely cabins for the men to come home — back to those wild pioneer days, when they watched with an ever-present fear that they might not come at all.
It was late and we tried to get to stay all night, for the artist wanted to sketch her. He was afraid to ask her permission on so short an acquaintance, for she would not have understood, and he would have frightened her. Her mother gave us buttermilk and we furtively studied her, but we could not stay all night: there were no men-folks at home and no " roughness " for our horses, and we rode regretfully away.
Now, while the good of the mountaineer is empha- sized in the mountaineer of Kentucky, the evil is equally marked. The Kentucky mountaineer may be the best of all — he can be likewise the worst of all.
A mountaineer was under indictment for moon- shining in a little mountain town that has been under the refining influence of a railroad for several years. Unable to give bond, he was ordered to jail by the
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
judge. When the sheriff rose, a huge mountaineer rose, too, in the rear of the court-room and whipped out a big revolver. " You come with me," he said, and the prisoner came, while judge, jury, and sheriff watched him march out. The big fellow took the pris- oner through the town and a few hundred yards up a creek. " You go on home," he said. Then the rescuer went calmly back to his house in town, and nothing further has been said or done to this day. The mountaineer was a United States deputy marshal, but the prisoner was his friend.
This marshal was one of the most picturesque figures in the mountains. When sober, he was kind-hearted, good-tempered, and gentle ; and always he was fearless and cool. Once, while firing at two assailants who were shooting at him, he stopped long enough to blow his nose deliberately, and then calmly went on shooting again. He had a companion at arms who, singularly enough, came from the North, and occasionally these two would amuse themselves. When properly exhil- arated, one would put a horse-collar on the other, and hitch him to an open buggy. He would fill the buggy with pistols, climb in, and drive around the court- house— each man firing off a pistol with each hand and yelling himself hoarse. Then they would execute an Indian war-dance in the court-house square — firing
36
The Kentucky Mountaineer
their pistols alternately into the ground and into the air. The town looked on silently and with great respect, and the two were most exemplary until next time.
A superintendent of some mines near a mountain town went to the mayor one Sunday morning to get permission to do some work that had to be done in the town limits that day. He found the august official in his own jail. Exhilaration!
It was at these mines that three natives of the town went up to drive two young men into the bushes. Be- ing met with some firmness and the muzzle of a Winchester, they went back for reinforcements. One of the three was a member of a famous fighting clan, and he gave it out that he was going for his friends to make the " furriners " leave the country. The young men appealed to the town for protection for themselves and property. There was not an officer to answer. The sheriff was in another part of the county and the constable had just resigned. The young men got Winchester repeating shot-guns and waited a week for their assailants, who failed to come ; but had they been besieged, there would not have been a soul to give them assistance, except perhaps the mar- shal and his New England friend.
In this same county a man hired an assassin to kill 37
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
his rival. The assassin crept to the window of the house where the girl lived, and, seeing a man sitting by the fire, shot through the window and killed him. It was the wrong man. Assassinations from ambush have not been uncommon in every feud, though, in almost every feud, there has been one faction that refused to fight except in the open. I have even heard of a snare being set for a woman, who, though repeat- edly warned, persisted in carrying news from one side to the other. A musket was loaded with slugs and placed so that the discharge would sweep the path that it was believed she would take. A string was tied to the trigger and stretched across the foot road and a mountaineer waited under a bluff to whistle, so that she would stop, when she struck the string. That night the woman happened to take another path. This, however, is the sole instance I have ever known. Elsewhere the Southern mountaineer holds human life as cheap; elsewhere he is ready to let death settle a personal dispute; elsewhere he is more ignorant and has as little regard for law; elsewhere he was divided against himself by the war and was left in sub- sequent conditions just as lawless; elsewhere he has similar clannishness of feeling, and elsewhere is an occasional feud which is confined to family and close kindred. But nowhere is the feud so common, so
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The Kentucky Mountaineer
old, so persistent, so deadly, as in the Kentucky mountains. Nowhere else is there such organization, such division of enmity to the limit of kinship.
About thirty-five years ago two boys were playing marbles in the road along the Cumberland River — down in the Kentucky mountains. 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. Thirty years of local war was the result. The factions fought on after they had forgotten why they had fought at all. While organized warfare is now over, an occasional fight yet comes over the patch on those trousers and a man or two is killed. A county as big as Rhode Island is still bitterly divided on the subject. In a race for the legislature not long ago, the feud was the sole issue. And, without knowing it, perhaps, a mountaineer carried that patch like a flag to victory, and sat under it at the capital — making laws for the rest of the State.
That is the feud that has stained the highland border of the State with blood, and abroad, has engulfed the reputation of the lowland blue-grass, where there are, of course, no feuds — a fact that sometimes seems to require emphasis, I am sorry to say. Almost every mountain county has, or has had, its feud. On one side is a leader whose authority is rarely questioned.
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
Each leader has his band of retainers. Always he arms them; usually he feeds them; sometimes he houses and clothes them, and sometimes, even, he hires them. In one local war, I remember, four dollars per day were the wages of the fighting man, and the leader on one occasion, while besieging his enemies — in the county court-house — tried to purchase a cannon, and from no other place than the State arsenal, and from no other personage than the governor himself.
It is the feud that most sharply differentiates the Kentucky mountaineer from his fellows, and it is extreme isolation that makes possible in this age such a relic of mediaeval barbarism. For the feud means, of course, ignorance, shiftlessness, incredible lawless- ness, a frightful estimate of the value of human life; the horrible custom of ambush, a class of cowardly assassins who can be hired to do murder for a gun, a mule, or a gallon of moonshine.
Now these are the blackest shadows in the only picture of Kentucky mountain life that has reached the light of print through the press. There is another side, and it is only fair to show it.
The feud is an inheritance. There were feuds before the war, even on the edge of the blue-grass; there were fierce family fights in the backwoods before and during the Revolution — when the war between Whig
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The Kentucky Mountaineer
and Tory served as a pretext for satisfying personal animosities already existing, and it is not a wild fancy that the Kentucky mountain feud takes root in Scot- land. For, while it is hardly possible that the enmities of the Revolution were transmitted to the Civil War, it is quite sure that whatever race instinct, old-world trait of character, or moral code the backwoodsman may have taken with him into the mountains — it is quite sure that that instinct, that trait of character, that moral code, are living forces in him to-day. The late war was, however, the chief cause of feuds. When it came, the river-bottoms were populated, the clans were formed. There were more slave-holders among them than among other Southern mountaineers. For that reason, the war divided them more evenly against themselves, and set them fighting. When the war stopped elsewhere, it simply kept on with them, be- cause they were more isolated, more evenly divided; because they were a fiercer race, and because the issue had become personal. The little that is going on now goes on for the same reason, for while civilization pressed close enough in 1890 and 1891 to put an end to organized fighting, it is a consistent fact that after the failure of Baring Brothers, and the stoppage of the flow of English capital into the mountains, and the check to railroads and civilization, these feuds slowly
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
started up again. When I left home for the Cuban war, two companies of State militia were on their way to the mountains to put down a feud. On the day of the Las Guasimas fight these feudsmen fought, and they lost precisely as many men killed as the Rough Riders — eight.
Again : while the feud may involve the sympathies of a county, the number of men actually engaged in it are comparatively few. Moreover, the feud is strictly of themselves, and is based primarily on a privi- lege that the mountaineer, the world over, has most grudgingly surrendered to the law, the privilege of avenging his private wrongs. The non-partisan and the traveller are never molested. Property of the beaten faction is never touched. The women are safe from harm, and I have never heard of one who was subjected to insult. Attend to your own business, side with neither faction in act or word and you are much safer among the Kentucky mountaineers, when a feud is going on, than you are crossing Broadway at Twenty-third Street. As you ride along, a bullet may plough through the road ten yards in front of you. That means for you to halt. A mountaineer will come out of the bushes and ask who you are and where you are going and what your business is. If your answers are satisfactory, you go on unmolested.
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The Kentucky Mountaineer
Asking for a place to stay all night, you may be told, " Go to So and So's house; he'll pertect ye; " and he will, too, at the risk of his own life when you are past the line of suspicion and under his roof.
There are other facts that soften a too harsh judg- ment of the mountaineer and his feud — harsh as the judgment should be. Personal fealty is the corner- stone of the feud. The mountaineer admits no higher law; he understands no conscience that will violate that tie. You are my friend or my kinsman ; your quarrel is my quarrel; whoever strikes you, strikes 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 word to come into court. If I'm innocent, why, maybe I'll come.
Moreover, the worst have the list of rude virtues already mentioned; and, besides, the mountaineer is never a thief nor a robber, and he will lie about one thing and one thing only, and that is land. He has cleared it, built his cabin from the trees, lived on it and he feels that any means necessary to hold it are justifiable. Lastly, religion is as honestly used to cloak deviltry as it ever was in the Middle Ages.
A feud leader who had about exterminated the op- posing faction, and had made a good fortune for a mountaineer while doing it, for he kept his men busy
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
getting out timber when they weren't fighting, said to me, in all seriousness:
" I have triumphed agin my enemies time and time agin. The Lord's on my side, and I gits a better and better Christian ever' year."
A preacher, riding down a ravine, came upon an old mountaineer hiding in the bushes with his rifle.
" What are you doing there, my friend? "
" Ride on, stranger," was the easy answer. " I'm a-waitin' fer Jim Johnson, and with the help of the Lawd I'm goin' to blow his damn head off."
Even the ambush, the hideous feature of the feud, took root in the days of the Revolution, and was borrowed, maybe, from the Indians. Milfort, the Frenchman, who hated the backwoodsman, says Mr. Roosevelt, describes with horror their extreme malevo- lence and their murderous disposition toward one an- other. He says that whether a wrong had been done to a man personally or to his family, he would, if necessary, travel a hundred miles and lurk around the forest indefinitely to get a chance to shoot his enemy.
But the Civil War was the chief cause of bloodshed; for there is evidence, indeed, that though feeling be- tween families was strong, bloodshed was rare and the
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The Kentucky Mountaineer
English sense of fairness prevailed, in certain com- munities at least. Often you shall hear an old moun- taineer say: " Folks usen to talk about how fer they could kill a deer. Now hit's how fer they can kill a man. Why, I have knowed the time when a man would hev been druv outen the county fer drawin' a knife or a pistol, an' if a man was ever killed, hit wus kinder accidental by a Barlow. I reckon folks got used to weepons an' killin' an' shootin' from the bresh endurin' the war. But hit's been gettin' wuss ever sence, and now hit's dirk an' Winchester all the time." Even for the ambush there is an explanation.
" Oh, I know all the excuses folks make. Hit's fair for one as 'tis fer t'other. You can't fight a man far and squar who'll shoot you in the back. A pore man can't fight money in the courts. Thar hain't no witnesses in the lorrel but leaves, an' dead men don't hev much to say. I know hit all. Looks like lots o' decent young folks hev got usen to the idee; thar's so much of it goin' on and thar's so much talk about shootin' from the bresh. I do reckon hit's wuss'n stealin' to take a feller critter's life that way."
It is also a fact that most of the men who have been engaged in these fights were born, or were children, during the war, and were, in consequence, accustomed to bloodshed and bushwhacking from infancy. Still,
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
even among the fighters there is often a strong preju- dice against the ambush, and in most feuds, one or the other side discountenances it, and that is the faction usually defeated. I know of one family that was one by one exterminated because they refused to take to the " bresh."
Again, the secret of the feud is isolation. In the mountains the war kept on longer, for personal hatred supplanted its dead issues. Railroads and newspapers have had their influence elsewhere. Elsewhere court circuits include valley people. Civilization has pressed slowly on the Kentucky mountains. The Kentucky mountaineer, until quite lately, has been tried, when brought to trial at all, by the Kentucky mountaineer. And when a man is tried for a crime by a man who would commit that crime under the same circum- stances, punishment is not apt to follow.
Thus the influence that has helped most to break up the feud is trial in the Blue-grass, for there is no ordeal the mountaineer more hates than trial by a jury of bigoted " furriners."
Who they are — these Southern mountaineers — is a subject of endless conjecture and dispute — a question that perhaps will never be satisfactorily solved. While there are among them the descendants of the old bond servant and redemptioner class, of vicious runaway
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The Kentucky Mountaineer
criminals and the trashiest of the poor whites, the ruling class has undoubtedly come from the old free settlers, English, German, Swiss, French Huguenot, even Scotch and Scotch-Irish. As the German and Swiss are easily traced to North Carolina, the Hugue- nots to South Carolina and parts of Georgia, it is more than probable, from the scant study that has been given the question, that the strongest and largest cur- rent of blood in their veins comes from none other than the mighty stream of Scotch-Irish.
Briefly, the theory is this: From 1720 to 1780, the settlers in southwest Virginia, middle North Carolina and western South Carolina were chiefly Scotch and Scotch-Irish. They were active in the measures pre- ceding the outbreak of the Revolution, and they declared independence at Abington, Va., even before they did at Mecklenburg, N. C. In these districts they were the largest element in the patriot army, and they were greatly impoverished by the war. Being too poor or too conscientious to own slaves, and unable to compete with them as the planter's field hand, black- smith, carpenter, wheelwright, and man-of-all-work, especially after the invention of the cotton-gin in 1792, they had no employment and were driven to mountain and sand-hill. There are some good reasons for the theory. Among prominent mountain fami-
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
lies direct testimony or unquestioned tradition point usually to Scotch-Irish ancestry, sometimes to pure Scotch origin, sometimes to English. Scotch-Irish family names in abundance speak for themselves, as do folk-words and folk-songs and the characteristics, mental, moral, and physical, of the people. Broadly speaking, the Southern mountaineers are characterized as " peaceable, civil, good-natured, kind, clever, nat- urally witty, with a fair share of common-sense, and morals not conscientiously bad, since they do not consider ignorance, idleness, poverty, or the ex- cessive use of tobacco or moonshine as immoral or vicious."
Another student says: " The majority is of good blood, honest, law-abiding blood." Says still another: " They are ignorant of books, but sharp as a rule." Says another: " They have great reverence for the Bible, and are sturdy, loyal, and tenacious." More- over, the two objections to this theory that would naturally occur to anyone have easy answers. The mountaineers are not Presbyterian and they are not thrifty. Curiously enough, testimony exists to the effect that certain Methodist or Baptist churches were once Presbyterian; and many preachers of these two denominations had grandfathers who were Presby- terian ministers. The Methodists and Baptists were
48
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NEW Y BLIC LIBRAE
The Kentucky Mountaineer
perhaps more active; they were more popular in the mountains as they were in the backwoods, because they were more democratic and more emotional. The back- woodsman did not like the preacher to be a preacher only. He, too, must work with his hands.
Scotch-Irish thriftiness decayed. The soil was poor; game was abundant; hunting bred idleness. There were no books, no schools, few church privileges, a poorly educated ministry, and the present illiteracy, thriftlessness, and poverty were easy results. Deed- books show that the ancestors of men who now make their mark, often wrote a good hand.
Such, briefly, is the Southern mountaineer in gen- eral, and the Kentucky mountaineer in particular. Or, rather, such he was until fifteen years ago, and to know him now you must know him as he was then, for the changes that have been wrought in the last decade affect localities only, and the bulk of the mountain-people is, practically, still what it was one hundred years ago. Still, changes have taken place and changes will take place now swiftly, and it rests largely with the outer world what these changes shall be.
The vanguards of civilization — railroads — unless quickly followed by schools and churches, at the ratio of four schools to one church, have a bad effect on
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
the Southern mountaineer. He catches up the vices of the incoming current only too readily. The fine spirit of his hospitality is worn away. He goes to some little " boom " town, is forced to pay the enormous sum of fifty cents for his dinner, and when you go his way again, you pay fifty cents for yours. Care- lessly applied charity weakens his pride, makes him dependent. You hear of arrests for petty thefts some- times, occasionally burglaries are made, and the moun- taineer is cowed by the superior numbers, superior intelligence of the incomer, and he seems to lose his sturdy self-respect.
And yet the result could easily be far different. Not long ago I talked with an intelligent young fellow, a young minister, who had taught among them many years, exclusively in the Kentucky mountains, and is now preaching to them. He says, they are more tractable, more easily moulded, more easily uplifted than the people of a similar grade of intelligence in cities. He gave an instance to illustrate their general susceptibility in all ways. When he took charge of a certain school, every boy and girl, nearly all of them grown, chewed tobacco. The teacher before him used tobacco and even exchanged it with his pupils. He told them at once they must stop. They left off in- stantly.
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The Kentucky Mountaineer
It was a " blab " school, as the mountaineers char- acterize a school in which the pupils study aloud. He put an end to that in one day, and he soon told them they must stop talking to one another. After school they said they didn't think they could ever do that, but they did. In another county, ten years ago, he had ten boys and girls gathered to organize a Sunday- school. None had ever been to Sunday-school and only two knew what a Sunday-school was. He an- nounced that he would organize one at that place a week later. When he reached the spot the following Sunday, there were seventy-five young mountaineers there. They had sung themselves quite hoarse wait- ing for him, and he was an hour early. The Sunday- school was founded, built up and developed into a church.
When the first printing-press was taken to a certain mountain-town in 1882, a deputation of citizens met it three miles from town and swore that it should go no farther. An old preacher mounted the wagon and drove it into town. Later the leader of that crowd owned the printing-press and ran it. In this town are two academies for the education of the moun- taineer. Young fellows come there from every moun- tain-county and work their way through. They curry horses, carry water, work about the houses — do every-
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
thing; many of them cook for themselves and live on four dollars a month. They are quick-witted, strong-minded, sturdy, tenacious, and usually very religious.
Indeed, people who have been among the Southern mountaineers testify that, as a race, they are proud, sensitive, hospitable, kindly, obliging in an unreckon- ing way that is almost pathetic, honest, loyal, in spite of their common ignorance, poverty, and isolation ; that they are naturally capable, eager to learn, easy to uplift. Americans to the core, they make the South- ern mountains a store-house of patriotism; in them- selves, they are an important offset to the Old World outcasts whom we have welcomed to our shores; aud they surely deserve as much consideration from the nation as the negroes, for whom we have done, and are doing so much, or as the heathen, to whom we give millions.
I confess that I have given prominence to the best features of mountain life and character, for the reason that the worst will easily make their own way. It is only fair to add, however, that nothing that has ever been said of the mountaineer's ignorance, shiftlessness, and awful disregard of human life, especially in the Kentucky mountains, that has not its basis, perhaps, in actual fact.
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The Kentucky Mountaineer
First, last, and always, however, it is to be remem- bered that to begin to understand the Southern moun- taineers you must go back to the social conditions and standards of the backwoods before the Revolu- tion, for practically they are the backwoods people and the backwoods conditions of pre-Revolutionary days. Many of their ancestors fought with ours for American independence. They were loyal to the Union for one reason that no historian seems ever to have guessed. For the loyalty of 1861 was, in great part, merely the transmitted loyalty of 1776, imprisoned like a fossil in the hills. Precisely for the same reason, the mountaineer's estimate of the value of human life, of the sanctity of the law, of a duty that overrides either — the duty of one blood kinsman to another — is the estimate of that day and not of this; and it is by the standards of that day and not of this that he is to be judged. To understand the mountaineer, then, you must go back to the Revolution. To do him justice you must give him the awful ordeal of a century of isolation and consequent ignorance in which to de- teriorate. Do that and your wonder, perhaps, that he is so bad becomes a wonder that he is not worse. To my mind, there is but one strain of American blood that could have stood that ordeal quite so well, and that comes from the sturdy Scotch-Irish who are slowly
53
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
wresting from Puritan and Cavalier an equal share of the glory that belongs to the three for the part played on the world's stage by this land in the heroic role of Liberty.
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Down the Kentucky on a Raft
Down the Kentucky on a Raft
THE heart of the Blue-grass in the middle of a sunny afternoon. An hour thence, through a rolling sweep of greening earth and woodland, through the low, poor hills of the brush country and into the oasis of Indian Old Fields, rich in level meadow-lands and wheat-fields. In the good old days of the war-whoop and the scalping-knife, the savage had there one of the only two villages that he ever planted in the " Dark and Bloody Ground." There Daniel Boone camped one night and a pioneer read him " Gulliver's Travels," and the great Daniel called the little stream at their feet Lullibigrub — which name it bears to-day. Another hour between cliffs and pointed peaks and castled rocky summits, and through laurel and rhododendron to the Three Forks of the Kentucky. Up the Middle Fork then and at dusk the end of the railroad in the heart of the mountains and Jackson — the county-seat of " Bloody Breathitt " — once the seat of a lively feud and still the possible
57
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
seat of another, in spite of the fact that with a manual training-school and a branch of a Blue-grass college, it is also the seat of learning and culture for the region drained by Cutshin, Hell-fer-Sartain, Kingdom Come, and other little streams of a nomenclature not less picturesque. Even Hell-fer-Sartain is looking up. A pious lady has established a Sunday-school on Hell-fer- Sartain. A humorous bookseller has offered to give it a library on the condition that he be allowed to design a book-plate for the volumes. And the Sun- day-school is officially known as the " Hell-fer-Sartain Sunday-school." From all these small tributaries of the Kentucky, the mountaineer floats logs down the river to the capital in the Blue-grass. Not many years ago that was his chief reason and his only one for going to the Blue-grass, and down the Kentucky on a raft was the best way for him to get there. He got back on foot. But, coming or going, by steam, water, horseback, or afoot, the trip is well worth while. At Jackson a man with a lantern put me in a " hack," drove me aboard a flat boat, ferried me over with a rope cable, cracked his whip, and we went up a steep, muddy bank into the town. All through the Cumberland valleys, nowadays, little " boom " towns with electric lights, water-works, and a street-railway make one think of the man who said " give him the
58
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Down the Kentucky on a Raft
luxuries of life and he would do without the neces- saries." I did not know that Jackson had ever had a boom, but I thought so when I saw between the flap- ping curtains of the " hack " what seemed to be a white sidewalk of solid cement.
" Hello," I said, " is that a sidewalk? " The driver grunted, quickly:
" Hit's the side you walk on! "
A wheel of the hack went down to the hub in mud just then and I felt the force of his humor better next morning — I was to get such humor in plenty on the trip — when I went back to the river that same way. It was not a sidewalk of cement but a whitewashed board fence that had looked level in the dark, and except along a muddy foot-wide path close to the fence, passing there, for anything short of a stork on stilts, looked dangerous. I have known mules to drown in a mountain mud-hole.
The " tide," as the mountaineer calls a flood, had come the day before and, as I feared, the rafts were gone. Many of them had passed in the night, and there was nothing to do but to give chase. So I got a row-boat and a mountaineer, and, taking turns at the oars, we sped down the swift yellow water at the clip- ping rate of ten miles an hour.
As early as the late days of August the mountaineer 59
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
goes " logging " in order to cut the trees before the sap rises, so that the logs can dry better all winter and float better in the spring. Before frost comes, on river-bank, hill-side, and mountain-top, the cool morn- ing air is resonant with the ring of axes, the singing whistle of big saws, the crash of giant poplar and oak and chestnut down through the lesser growth under them, and the low boom that echoes through the woods when the big trees strike the earth. All winter this goes on. With the hammer of the woodpecker in the early spring, you hear the cries of ox-drivers " snaking " the logs down the mountain-side to the edge of some steep cliff, where they are tumbled pell- mell straight down to the bank of the river, or the bank of some little creek that runs into it. It takes eight yoke of oxen, sometimes, to drag the heart of a monarch to the chute, and there the logs are " rafted " — as the mountaineer calls the work; that is, they are rolled with hand-spikes into the water and lashed side by side with split saplings — lengthwise in the broad Big Sandy, broadside in the narrow Kentucky. Every third or fourth log is a poplar, because that wood is buoyant and will help float the chestnut and the oak. At bow and stern, a huge long limber oar is rigged on a turning stile, the raft is anchored to a tree with a cable of rope or grapevine, and there is a patient wait
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Down the Kentucky on a Raft
for a " tide." Some day in March or April — some- times not until May — mist and clouds loose the rain in torrents, the neighbors gather, the cable is slipped, and the raft swings out the mouth of the creek on its long way to the land of which, to this day, the average mountaineer knows hardly less than that land knows of him.
Steadily that morning we kept the clumsy row-boat sweeping around green-buttressed points and long bends of the river, between high vertical cliffs over- spread with vines and streaked white with waterfalls, through boiling eddies and long, swift, waving riffles, in an exhilaration that seems to come to running blood and straining muscles only in lonely wilds. Once a boy shied a stone down at us from the point of a cliff hundreds of feet sheer overhead.
" I wish I had my 44," said the mountaineer, look- ing wistfully upward.
" You wouldn't shoot at him? "
" I'd skeer him a leetle, I reckon," he said, dryly, and then he told me stories of older and fiercer days when each man carried a " gun," and often had to use it to secure a landing on dark nights when the log- gers had to tie up to the bank. When the moon shines, the rafts keep going night and day.
" When the river's purty swift, you know, it's hard 61
Blue-grass and Rhododendron
to stop a raft. I've seen a raft slash down through the bushes for two miles before a fellow could git a rope around a tree. So sometimes we had to ketch hold of another feller's raft that was already tied up, and, as there was danger o' pullin' his loose, the feller' d try to keep us off. That's whar the 44's come in. And they do it yit," he said, as, later, I learned for myself.
Here and there were logs and splintered saplings thrown out on the bank of the river — signs of wreck- age where a raft had " bowed " ; that is, the bow had struck the bank at the bend of the river, the stern had swung around to the other shore, and the raft had hunched up in the middle like a bucking horse. Standing upright, the mountaineer can ride a single log down a swift stream, even when his weight sinks it a foot or two under the surface, but he finds it hard and dangerous to stay aboard a raft when it " bows."
" I was bringin' a raft out o' Leatherwood Creek below heah " — only that was not the name he gave the creek — " and we bowed just before we got to the river. Thar was a kind of a idgit on board who was just a-ridin' down the creek fer fun, and when I was throwed out in the woods I seed him go up in the air and come clown kerflop in the water. He went under the raft, and crawled out about two hundred yards
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Down the Kentucky on a Raft
down the river. We axed him to git on agin, but that idgit showed more sense than I knowed he had. He said he'd heerd o' hell and high water, and he'd been under one and mighty close to t'other, and he reckoned he'd stay whar he was."
It was getting toward noon now. We had made full forty miles, and Leatherwood was the next stream below.
" We mought ketch a raft thar," said the moun- taineer; and we did. Sweeping around the bend I saw a raft two hundred feet long at the mouth of the creek — tugging at its anchor — and a young giant of a mountaineer pushing the bow-oar to and fro through the water to test its suppleness. He had a smile of pure delight on his bearded, winning face when we shot the row-boat alongside.
" I tell you, Jim," he said, " hit's a sweet-pullin' oar."
" It shorely is, Tom," said Jim. " Heah's a furri- ner that wants to go down the river with ye."
" All right," said the giant, hospitably. " We're goin' just as soon as we can git off."
On the bank was a group of men, women, and chil- dren gathered to watch the departure. In a basin of the creek above, men up to their waists in water were " rafting " logs. Higher above was a chute, and down
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
it rolled more logs, jumping from end to end, like jack- straws. Higher, I could hear the hammer of a wood- pecker; higher still, the fluting of a wood-thrush, and still higher, an ox-driver's sharp cry. The vivid hues of dress and shawl on the bank seemed to strike out sharply every color-note in the green wall behind them, straight up to the mountain-top. It was as primitive and simple as Arcady.
Down the bank came old Ben Sanders, as I learned later, shouting his good-byes, without looking behind him as he slipped down the bank. Close after him, his son, young Ben, with a huge pone of corn-bread three feet square. The boy was so trembling with excitement over his first trip that he came near drop- ping it. Then a mountaineer with lank, long hair, the scholar of the party, and Tim, guilty of humor but once on the trip — solemn Tim. Two others jumped aboard with bacon and coffee — passengers like myself. Tom stood on shore with one hand on the cable, while he said something now and then to a girl in crimson homespun who stood near, looking downward. Now and then one of the other women would look at the two and laugh.
" All right now, Tom," shouted old Ben, " let her loose!"
Tom thrust out his hand, which the girl took shyly- 64
Down the Kentucky on a Raft
" Don't fergit, Tom," she said. Tom laughed — there was little danger that Tom would forget — and with one twist of his sinewy hands he threw the loop of the grapevine clear of the tree and, for all his great bulk, sprang like a cat aboard the raft, which shot for- ward with such lightness that I was nearly thrown from my feet.
"Good-by, Ben!"
"Good-by, Molly!"
"So long, boys!"
" Don't you fergit that caliker, now, Ben."
" I won't."
" Tom," called a mountaineer, " ef you git drunk an' spend yo' money, Nance heah says she won't marry ye when you come back." Nance slapped at the fel- low, and the giant smiled. Then one piping voice:
" Don't fergit my terbacky, Ben."
" All right, Granny — I won't," answered old Ben, and, as we neared the bend of the river, he cried back:
" Take that saddle home I borrowed o' Joe Thomas, an' don't fergit to send that side of bacon to Mandy Longnecker, an' — an' — " and then I got a last glimpse of the women shading their patient eyes to watch the lessening figures on the raft and the creaking oars flash- ing white in the sunlight; and I thought of them go- ing back to their lonely little cabins on this creek to
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
await the home-coming of the men. If the mountain- women have any curiosity about that distant land, the Blue-grass " settlements," they never show it. I have never known a mountain-woman to go down the river on a raft. Perhaps they don't care to go; perhaps it is not proper, for their ideas of propriety are very strict ; perhaps the long trip back on foot deterred them so long that the habit of not going is too strong to overcome. And then if they did go, who would tend the ever-present baby in arms, the ever-numerous chil- dren; make the garden and weed and hoe the young corn for the absent lord and master. I suppose it was generations of just such lonely women, waiting at their cabins in pioneer days for the men to come home, that gives the mountain-woman the brooding look of pathos that so touches the stranger's heart to-day; and it is the watching to-day that will keep unchanged that look of vacant sadness for generations to come.
" Ease her up now ! " called old Ben — we were making our first turn — and big Tom at the bow, and young Ben and the scholar at the stern oar, swept the white saplings through the water with a terrific swish. Footholes had been cut along the logs, and in these the men stuck their toes as they pushed, with both hands on the oar and the oar across their breasts. At the end of the stroke, they threw the oar down and up
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Down the Kentucky on a Raft
with rhythm and dash. Then they went hack on a run to begin another stroke.
" Ease her up — ease her up," said old Ben, sooth- ingly, and then, suddenly:
" Hit her up — hit her up — hell! "
Solemn Tim began to look ashore for a good place to jump. The bow barely slipped past the bend of the river.
"That won't do," said old Ben again; "Hell!" Big Tom looked as crestfallen as a school-boy, and said nothing — we had just escaped " bowing " on our first turn. Ten minutes later we swept into the Narrows — the " Nahrers " as the mountaineer says; and it was quick and dangerous work keeping the unwieldy craft from striking a bowlder, or the solid wall of a vertical cliff that on either side rose straight upward, for the river was pressed into a narrow channel, and ran with terrific force. It was one long exhilarating thrill going through those Narrows, and everybody looked relieved when we slipped out of them into broad water, which ran straight for half a mile — where the oars were left motionless and the men got back their breath and drew their pipes and bottles. I knew the innocent white liquor that revenue man and mountaineer call " moonshine," and a wary sip or two was enough for me. Along with the bottle came the
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
inevitable first question that, under any and all circum- stances, every mountaineer asks the stranger, no mat- ter if the stranger has asked him a question first. " Well, stranger, what mought yo' name be?" Answering that, you are expected to tell in the same breath, as well, what your business is. I knew it was useless to tell mine — it would not have been under- stood, and would have engendered suspicion. I was at Jackson; I had long wanted to go down the river on a raft, and I let them think that I was going for curiosity and fun; but I am quite sure they were not wholly satisfied until I had given them ground to be- lieve that I could afford the trip for fun, by taking them up to the hotel that night for supper, and giv- ing them some very bad cigars. For, though the moon was full, the sky was black with clouds, and old Ben said we must tie up for the night. That tying up was exciting work. The raft was worked cautious- ly toward the shore, and a man stood at bow and stern with a rope, waiting his chance to jump ashore and coil it about a tree. Tom jumped first, and I never realized what the momentum of the raft was until I saw him, as he threw the rope about a tree, jerked like a straw into the bushes, the rope torn from his hands, and heard the raft crashing down through the undergrowth. Tom gave chase along the bank, and
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Down the Kentucky on a Raft
everybody yelled and ran to and fro. It was crash — swish — bump — grind and crash again ; and it was only by the hardest work at the clumsy oars that we kept the raft off the shore. From a rock Tom made a fly- ing leap aboard again, and luckily the river broadened there, and just past the point of a thicket we came upon another raft already anchored. The boy Ben picked up his rope and prepared to leap aboard the stranger, from the other end of which a mountaineer ran toward us.
" Keep off," he shouted, " keep off, I tell ye," but the boy paid no attention, and the other man pulled his pistol. Ben dropped his rope, then looked around, laughed, picked up his rope again and jumped aboard. The fellow lowered his pistol and swore. I looked around, too, then. Every man on board with us had his pistol in his hand. We tugged the stranger's cable sorely, but it held him fast and he held us fast, and the tying up was done.
" He'd 'a' done us the same way," said old Ben, in palliation.
Next day it was easy sailing most of the time, and we had long rests from the oars, and we smoked, and the bottles were slowly emptied, one by one, while the mountaineers " jollied " each other and told drawling stories. Once we struck a long eddy,
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
and were caught by it and swept back up-stream; twice this happened before we could get in the current again. Then they all laughed and " jollied " old Ben.
It seemed that the old fellow had taken too much one dark night and had refused to tie up. There was a house at the head of this eddy, and when he struck it there was a gray horse hitched to the fence outside; and inside was the sound of fiddles and furious danc- ing. Xext morning old Ben told another raftsman that he had seen more gray horses and heard more fiddling that night than he had seen and heard since he was born.
" They was a-fiddlin' an' a-dancin' at every house I passed last night," he said, " an' I'm damned if I didn't see a gray hoss hitched outside every time I heerd the fiddlin'. I reckon they was ha'nts." The old fellow laughed good-naturedly while the scholar was telling his story. He had been caught in the eddy and had been swung around and around, passing the same house and the same horse each time.
I believe I have remarked that those bottles were emptying fast. By noon they were quite empty, and two hours later, as we rounded a curve, the scholar went to the bow, put his hands to his mouth and shouted:
"Whis-kee!"
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Down the Kentucky on a Raft
And again:
"Wkiss-kee-ee!"
A girl sprang from the porch of a cabin far down the stream, and a moment later a canoe was pushed from the bushes, and the girl, standing erect, paddled it up-stream close to the bank and shot it out alongside the raft.
"Howdye, Mandy! "
" Howdye, boys! "
Young Ben took two bottles from her, gave her some pieces of silver, and, as we sped on, she turned shoreward again and stood holding the bushes and looking after us, watching young Ben, as he was watching her; for she was black-eyed and pretty.
The sky was broken with hardly a single cloud that night. The moon was yellow as a flame, and we ran all night long. I lay with my feet to the fire that Ben had built on some stones in the middle of the raft, looking up at the trees that arched over us, and the steep, moonlit cliffs, and the moon itself riding high and full and so brilliant that the stars seemed to have fallen in a shower all around the horizon. The raft ran as noiselessly as a lily-pad, and it was all as still and wild as a dream. Once or twice we heard the yelp of a fox-hound and the yell of a hunter out in the hills, and the mountaineers yelled back in answer
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
and hied the dog on. Sometimes young Ben and the scholar, and even solemn Tim, sang some weird old ballad that one can hear now only in the Southern hills ; and twice, to my delight and surprise, the scholar " yodelled." I wondered where he had learned how. He did not know — he had always known how. It was perhaps only another of the curious Old World sur- vivals that are of ceaseless interest to a speculative " furriner," and was no stranger than the songs he sang. I went to sleep by and by, and woke up shiv- ering. It was yet dark, but signs of day were evi- dent; and in the dim light I could see young Ben at the stern-oar on watch, and the huge shape of big Tom standing like a statue at the bow and peering ahead. We had made good time during the night — the moun- taineers say a raft makes better time during the night — why, I could not see, nor could they explain, and at daybreak we were sweeping around the hills of the brush country, and the scholar who had pointed out things of interest (he was a school-teacher at home) began to show his parts with some pride. Every rock and cliff and turn and eddy down that long river has some picturesque name that the river-men have given it — names known only to them. Two rocks that shoved their black shoulders up on either side of the stream have been called Buck and Billy, after some
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old fellow's favorite oxen, for more than half a cen- tury. Here was an eagle's nest. A bear had been seen not long ago, looking from a black hole in the face of a cliff. How he got there no one could un- derstand. The scholar told some strong stories — now that we were in a region of historical interest — where Boone planted his first fort and where Boonesborough once stood, but he always prefaced his tale with the overwhelming authority that —
"Hist'ry says! "
He declared that history said that a bull, seeing some cows across the river, had jumped from the point of a high cliff straight down into the river; had swum across and fallen dead as he was climbing the bank.
" He busted his heart," said the scholar.
Oddly enough, solemn Tim, who had never cracked a smile, was the first to rebel.
" You see that cliff yander? " said the scholar. " Well, hist'ry says that Dan'l Boone druv three Injuns once straight over that cliff down into the river."
I could see that Tim was loath to cast discredit on the facts of history. If the scholar had said one or even two Indians, I don't think Tim would have called a halt; but for Daniel, with only one load in his gun
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
— and it not a Winchester — to drive three — it was too much. And yet Tim never smiled, and it was the first time I heard him voluntarily open his lips.
" Well, hist'ry mought 'a' said that," he said, " but I reckon Dan' I was in the lead! " The yell that went up routed the scholar and stilled him. History said no farther down that stream, even when we were pass- ing between the majestic cliffs that in one place are spanned by the third highest bridge in the world. There a ferry was crossing the river, and old Ben grew reminiscential. He had been a ferryman back in the mountains.
" Thar was a slosh of ice runnin' in the river," he said, " an' a feller come a-lopin' down the road one day, an' hollered an' axed me to take him across. I knowed from his voice that he was a-drinkin', and I hollered back an' axed him if he was drunk.
"'Yes, I'm drunk!'
" ' How drunk? ' I says.
" ' Drunk as hell! ' he says, ' but I can ride that boat.'
" Well, there was a awful slosh o' ice a-runnin', but I let him on, an' we hadn't got more'n ten feet from the bank when that feller fell off in that slosh o' ice. Well, I ketched him by one foot, and I drug him an' I drug him an' I drug his face about twenty feet in
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the mud, an' do you know that damn fool come might' nigh a-drownin' before I could change eends ! "
Thence on, the trip was monotonous except for the Kentucldan who loves every blade of grass in his land — for we struck locks and dams and smooth and slower water, and the hills were low but high enough to shut off the blue-grass fields. But we knew they were there — slope and woodland, bursting into green — and the trip from highland to lowland, barren hillside to rich pasture -land — from rhododendron to blue-grass — was done.
At dusk that day we ran slowly into the little Ken- tucky capital, past distilleries and brick factories with tall smoking stacks and under the big bridge and, wonder of wonders to Ben, past a little stern-wheel steamboat wheezing up-stream. We climbed the bank into the town, where the boy Ben and solemn Tim were for walking single file in the middle of the streets until called by the scholar to the sidewalk. The boy's eyes grew big with wonder when he saw streets and houses of stone, and heard the whistles of factories and saw what was to him a crush of people in the sleepy little town. I parted from them that night, but next morning I saw big Tom passing the station on foot. He said his companions had taken his things and gone on by train, and that he was
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
going to walk back. I wondered, and while I asked no questions, I should like to wager that I guessed the truth. Tom had spent every cent of his money for the girl in crimson homespun who was waiting for him away back in the hills, and if I. read her face aright I could have told him that she would have given every trinket he had sent her rather than wait a day longer for the sight of his face. We shook hands, and I watched him pass out of sight with his face set homeward across and beyond the blue-grass, through the brush country and the Indian Old Fields, back to his hills of laurel and rhododendron.
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After Br'er Rabbit in the Blue-grass
11
After Br'er Rabbit in the Blue-grass
FOR little more than a month Jack Frost has been busy — that arch-imp of Satan who has got himself enshrined in the hearts of little children. After the clear sunset of some late October day, when the clouds have hung low and kept the air chill, he has a good night for his evil work. By dawn the little magician has spun a robe of pure white, and drawn it close to the breast of the earth. The first light turns it silver, and shows the flowers and jewels with which wily Jack has decked it, so that it may be mistaken for a wedding-gown, perhaps, instead of a winding-sheet. The sun, knowing better, lifts, lets loose his tiny warriors, and, from pure love of beauty, with one stroke smites it gold. Then begins a battle which ends soon in crocodile tears of reconciliation from dauntless little Jack, with the blades of grass and the leaves in their scarlet finery sparkling with the joy of another day's deliverance, and the fields grown gray and aged in a single night. On just such a morning, and before the fight is quite done, saddle-
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
horses are stepping from big white barns in certain counties of the Blue-grass, and, sniffing the cool air, are being led to old-fashioned stiles, from which a lit- tle later they bear master or mistress out to the turn- pike and past flashing fields to the little county-seat several miles away. There in the court-house square they gather, the gentlefolk of country and town, and from that point they start into the country the other way. It is a hunting-meet. Br'er Rabbit is the quarry, and they are going for him on horseback with- out dog, stick, snare, or gun — a unique sport, and, so far as I know, confined wholly to the Blue-grass. There is less rusticity than cosmopolitanism in that happy land. The townspeople have farms, and the farmers own stores; intercourse between town and country is unrestrained ; and as for social position, that is a question one rarely hears discussed : one either has it unquestioned, or one has it not at all. So out they go, the hunters on horseback, and the chaperons and spectators in buggies, phaetons, and rockaways, through a morning that is cloudless and brilliant, past fields that are sober with autumn, and woods that are dingy with oaks and streaked with the fire of sumac and maple. New hemp lies in shining swaths on each side, while bales of last year's crop are going to mar- ket along the white turnpike. Already the farmers
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After Br'er Rabbit
are turning over the soil for the autumn sowing of wheat. Corn-shucking is just over, and ragged darkies are straggling from the fields back to town. Through such a scene move horse and vehicle, the rid- ers shouting, laughing, running races, and a quartet, perhaps, in a rockaway singing some old-fashioned song full of tune and sentiment. Six miles out, they turn in at a gate, where a big square brick house with a Grecian portico stands far back in a wooded yard, with a fish-pond on one side and a great smooth lawn on the other. Other hunters are waiting there, and the start is made through a Blue-grass woodland, greening with a second spring, and into a sweep of stubble and ragweed. There are two captains of the hunt. One is something of a wag, and has the voice of a trumpet.
" Form a line, and form a good un! " he yells, and the line stretches out with a space of ten or fifteen feet between each horse and his neighbor on each side. The men are dressed as they please, the ladies as they please. English blood gets expression, as usual, in in- dependence absolute. There is a sturdy disregard of all considerations of form. Some men wear leggings, some high boots; a few have brown shooting-coats. Most of them ride with the heel low and the toes turned, according to temperament. The Southern
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
woman's long riding-skirt lias happily been laid aside. These young Dianas wear the usual habit; only the hat is a derby, a cap, sometimes a beaver with a white veil, or a tam-o'-shanter that has slipped down behind and left a frank bare head of shining hair. They hold the reins in either hand, and not a crop is to be seen. There are plenty of riding-whips, however, and some- times one runs up the back of some girl's right arm, for that is the old-fashioned position for the whip when riding in form. On a trip like this, however, every- body rides to please his fancy, and rides anywhere but off his horse. The men are sturdy country youths, who in a few years will make good types of the beef- eating young English squire — sunburned fellows with big frames, open faces, fearless eyes, and a manner that is easy, cordial, kindly, independent. The girls are midway between the types of brunette and blonde, with a leaning toward the latter type. The extreme brunette is as rare as is the unlovely blonde, whom Oliver Wendell Holmes differentiates from her daz- zling sister with locks that have caught the light of the sun. Radiant with freshness these girls are, and with good health and strength ; round of figure, clear of eye and skin, spirited, soft of voice, and slow of speech.
There is one man on a sorrel mule. He is the host back at the big farm-house, and he has given up every
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liorse he has to guests. One of the girls has a broad white girth running all the way around both horse and saddle. Her habit is the most stylish in the field ; she has lived a year in Washington, perhaps, and has had a finishing touch at a fashionable school in New York. Near her is a young fellow on a black thoroughbred — a graduate, perhaps, of Yale or Princeton. They rarely put on airs, couples like these, when they come back home, but drop quietly into their old places with friends and kindred. From respect to local prejudice, which has a hearty contempt for anything that is not carried for actual use, she has left her riding-crop at home. He has let his crinkled black hair grow rather long, and has covered it with a black slouch-hat. Con- tact with the outer world has made a difference, how- ever, and it is enough to create a strong bond of sympa- thy between these two, and to cause trouble between country-bred Phyllis, plump, dark-eyed, bare-headed, who rides a pony that is trained to the hunt, as many of the horses are, and young farmer Corydon, who is near her on an iron-gray. Indeed, mischief is brewing among those four. At a brisk walk the line moves across the field, the captain at each end yelling to the men — only the men, for no woman is ever anywhere but where she ought to be in a Southern hunting-field — to keep it straight.
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" Billy," shouts the captain with the mighty voice, " I fine you ten dollars." The slouch-hat and the white girth are lagging behind. It is a lovers' quar- rel, and the girl looks a little flushed, while Phyllis watches smiling. " But you can compromise with me," adds the captain, and a jolly laugh runs down the line. Xow comes a " rebel yell." Somewhere along the line, a horse leaps forward. Other horses jump too; everybody yells, and everybody's eye is on a little bunch of cotton that is being whisked with astonishing speed through the brown weeds. There is a massing of horses close behind it; the white girth flashes in the midst of the melee, and the slouch-hat is just behind. The bunch of cotton turns suddenly, and doubles back between the horses' feet. There is a great crash, and much turning, twisting, and sawing of bits. Then the crowd dashes the other way, with Corydon and Phyllis in the lead. The fun has begun.
II
Feom snow to snow in the Blue-grass, Br'er Rabbit has two inveterate enemies — the darky and the school- boy — and his lot is a hard one. Even in the late spring and early summer, when " ole Mis' " Rabbit is keeping house, either one of her foes will cast a de-
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struetive stone at her, if she venture into open lane or pasture. When midsummer comes even, her tiny, long-eared brood is in danger. Not one of the little fellows is much larger than your doubled fist when the weeds get thick and high, and the elderberries are ripe, and the blackberries almost gone, but he is a ten- der morsel, and, with the darky, ranks in gastronomical favor close after the 'possum and the coon. You see him then hopping about the edge of hemp and har- vest fields, or crossing the country lanes, and he is very pretty, and so innocent and unwary that few have the heart to slay him, except his two ruthless foes. When the fields of grain are cut at harvest-time, both are on a close lookout for him. For, as the grain is mown about him, he is penned at last in a little square of uncut cover, and must make a dash for liberty through stones, sticks, dogs, and yelling darkies. Af- ter frost comes, the school-boy has both eyes open for him, and a stone ready, on his way to- and from his books, and he goes after him at noon recess and on Saturdays. The darky travels with a " rabbit-stick " three feet long in hand and a cur at his heels. Some- times he will get his young master's bird-dog out, and give Br'er Rabbit a chase, in spite of the swearing that surely awaits him, and the licking that may. Then he makes a " dead fall " for him — a broad board sup-
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porting a heavy rock, and supported by triggers that are set like the lines of the figure 4; or he will bend the top of a young sapling to the ground, and make a snare of a string, and some morning there is innocent Br'er Rabbit strung up like a murderer. Sometimes he will chase him into a rock fence, and then what is a square yard or so of masonry to one fat rabbit? Sometimes Br'er Rabbit will take a favorite refuge, a hollow tree; for, while he cannot climb a tree in the usual way, he can arch his back and rise spryly enough on the inside. Then does the ingenious darky con- trive a simple instrument of torture — a long, limber stick with a prong, or a split end. This lie twists into Br'er Rabbit's fur until he can gather up with it one fold of his slack hide, and down comes the game. This hurts, and with this provocation only will the rabbit snap at the hunter's hand. If this device fails the hunter, he will try smoking him out; and if that fails, there is left the ax. Always, too, is the superstitious darky keen for the rabbit that is caught in a grave- yard, by a slow hound, at midnight, and in the dark of the moon. The left hind foot of that rabbit is a thing to conjure with.
On Saturdays, both his foes are after him with dog and gun. If they have no dog they track him in the snow, or they " look for him settin' " in thick bunches
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of winter blue-grass, or under briers and cut thorn- bushes that have been piled in little gullies; and, alas! they " shoot him settin' " until the darky has learned fair play from association, or the boy has had it thumped into him at school. Then will the latter give Br'er Rabbit a chance for his life by stirring him up with his brass-toed boot and taking a crack at him as he lopes away. It will be a long time before this boy will get old enough, or merciful enough to resist the impulse to get out of his buggy or off his horse, no matter where he is going or in how great a hurry, and shy a stone when a cottontail crosses his path. In- deed, a story comes down that a field of slaves threw aside their hoes once and dashed pell-mell after a pass- ing rabbit. An indignant observer reported the fact to their master, and this was the satisfaction he got.
" Run him, did they? " said the master, cheerfully. " Well, I'd have whipped the last one of them, if they hadn't."
And yet it is not until late in October that Br'er Rabbit need go into the jimson-weeds and seriously " wuck he haid " (work his head) over his personal safety; but it is very necessary then, and on Thanks- giving Day it behooves him to say his prayers in the thickest cover he can find. Every man's hand is against him that day. All the big hunting-parties are
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out, and the Iroquois Club of Lexington goes for him with horse and greyhound. And that is wild sport. Indeed, put a daredevil Kentuckian on a horse or be- hind him, and in a proper mood, and there is always wild sport — for the onlooker as well. It is hard to fathom the spirit of recklessness that most sharply dif- ferentiates the Southern hunter from his Northern brother, and that runs him amuck when he comes into contact with a horse, whether riding, driving, or bet- ting on him. If a thing has to be done in a hunting- field, or can be done, there is little difference between the two. Only the thing must, with the Northerner, be a matter of skill and judgment, and he likes to know his horse. To him, or to an Englishman, the Southern hunter's performances on a green horse look little short of criminal. In certain counties of Vir- ginia, where hunters follow the hounds after the Eng- lish fashion, the main point seems to be for each man to " hang up " the man behind him, and desperate risks are run. " I have stopped that boyish foolish- ness, though," said an aged hunter under thirty; " I give my horse a chance." In other words, he had stopped exacting of him the impossible. In Georgia, they follow hounds at a fast gallop through wooded bogs and swamps at night, and I have seen a horse go down twice within a distance of thirty yards, and
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the rider never leave his back. The same is true of Kentucky, and I suppose of other Southern States. I have known one of my friends in the Blue-grass to amuse himself by getting into his buggy an unsus- pecting friend, who was as sedate then as he is now (and he is a judge now), and driving him at full speed through an open gate, then whizzing through the woods and seeing how near he could graze the trunks of trees in his course, and how sharply he could turn, and ending up the circuit by dashing, still at full speed, into a creek, his companion still sedate and fearless, but swearing helplessly. Being bantered by an equally reckless friend one dark midnight while going home, this same man threw both reins out on his horse's back, and gave the high-strung beast a smart cut with his whip. He ran four miles, kept the pike by some mercy of Providence, and stopped ex- hausted at his master's gate.
A Northern visitor was irritated by the apparently reckless driving of his host, who is a famous horseman in the Blue-grass.
" You lunatic," he said, " you'd better drive over those stone piles ! " meaning a heap of unbroken rocks that lay on one side of the turnpike.
" I will," was the grave answer, and he did.
This is the Kentuckian in a buggy. 89
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Imagine him on horseback, with no ladies present to check the spirit or the spirits of the occasion, and we can believe that the Thanksgiving hunt of the Iro- quois Club is perhaps a little more serious business than playing polo, or riding after anise-seed. And yet there is hardly a member of this club who could sit in his saddle over the course at Meadowbrook or Chevy Chase, for the reason that he has never prac- tised jumping a horse in his stride, and because when he goes fast he takes the jockey seat, which is not, I believe, a good seat for a five-foot fence; at the same time, there is hardly a country-bred rider in the Blue- grass, man or woman, who would not try it. Still, accidents are rare, and it is yet a tenet in the creed of the Southern hunter that the safer plan is to take no care. On the chase with greyhounds the dogs run, of course, by sight, and the point with the huntsman is to be the first at the place of the kill. As the grey- hound tosses the rabbit several feet in the air and catches it when it falls, the place is seen by all, and there is a mad rush for that one spot. The hunters crash together, and often knock one another down. I have known two fallen horses and their riders to be cleared in a leap by two hunters who were close be- hind them. One of the men was struck by a hoof fly- ing over him.
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" I saw a shoe glisten," he said, " and then it was darkness for a while."
But it is the hunting without even a dog that is in- teresting, because it is unique and because the ladies share the fun. The sport doubtless originated with school-boys. They could not take dogs, or guns, to school; they had leisure at " big recess," as the noon hour was called ; they had horses, and the rabbits were just over the school-yard fence. One day two or three of them chased a rabbit down, and the fun was discovered. These same boys, perhaps, kept up the hunt after their school-days were over, and gave the fever to others, the more easily as foxes began to get scarce. Then the ladies began to take part, and the sport is what it is to-day. The President signs a great annual death-warrant for Br'er Rabbit in the Blue- grass when he fixes a day for Thanksgiving.
Ill
Again Br'er Rabbit twists, and Phyllis's little horse turns after him like a polo pony after a ball. The black thoroughbred makes a wide sweep; Corydon's iron-gray cuts in behind, and the whole crowd starts in a body toward the road. This rabbit is an old hand at this business, and he knows where safety lies. A
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moment later the horses come to their haunches at the pike fence. Br'er Rabbit has gone into a culvert un- der the road, and already a small boy and a yellow dog are making for that culvert from p farm-house near. Again the trumpet, "Form a line! " Again the long line starts. There has been a shifting of po- sitions. Corydon is next the white girth and stylish habit now, and he looks very much pleased. The slouch-hat of the college man and Phyllis's bare head are together, and the thoroughbred's master is talking earnestly. Phyllis looks across the field and smiles. Silly Corydon! The slouch-hat is confessing his trou- ble to Phyllis and asking advice. Yes, she will help, as women will, out of pure friendship, pure unselfish- ness; sometimes they have other reasons, and Phyllis had two. Another yell, another rabbit. Off they go, and then, midway, still another cry and still another rabbit. The hunters part in twain, the black thorough- bred leading one wing, the iron-gray the other. Watch the slouch-hat now, and you shall see how the thing is done. The thoroughbred is learning what his master is after, and he swerves to the right; others are com- ing in from that direction ; the rabbit must turn again ; others that way, too. Poor Mollie is confused ; which- ever way her big, startled eyes turn, that way she sees a huge beast and a yelling demon bearing down on
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her. The slouch-hat swoops near her first, flings him- self from his horse, and, in spite of the riders pressing in on him, is after her on foot. Two others swing from their horses on the other side. Mollie makes several helpless hops, and the three scramble for her. The riders in front cry for those behind to hold their horses back, but they crowd in, and it is a miracle that none of the three is trampled down. The rabbit is hemmed in now; there is no way of escape, and in- stinctively she shrinks frightened to the earth. That is the crucial instant; down goes her pursuer on top of her as though she were a football, and the quarry is his. One blow of the hand behind the long ears, or one jerk by the hind legs, which snaps the neck as a whip cracks, and the slouch-hat holds aloft the brush, a little puff of down, and turns his eye about the field. The white girth is near, and as he starts toward her he is stopped by a low " Ahem ! " behind him. Cory- don has caught the first rabbit, and already on the derby hat above the white girth is pinned the brush. The young fellow turns again. Phyllis, demure and unregarding, is there with her eyes on the horns of her saddle; but he understands, and a moment later she smiles with prettily feigned surprise, and the white puff moves off in her loosening brown hair. The white girth is betrayed into the faintest shadow of
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vexation. Corydon heard that eloquent little clear- ing of the throat with a darkling face, and, indeed, no one of the four looks very happy, except Phyllis.
" Form a line! "
Again the rabbits jump — one, two, three — and the horses dash and crash together, and the men swing to the ground, and are pushed and trampled in a mad clutch for Mollie's long ears; for it is a contest be- tween them as to who shall catch the most game. The iron-gray goes like a demon, and when Corydon drops, the horse is trained to stop and to stand still. This gives Corydon an advantage which balances the su- perior quickness of the thoroughbred and the agility of his rider. The hunting-party is broken up now into groups of three and four, each group after a rab- bit, and, for the time, the disgusted captains give up all hope of discipline. A horse has gone down in a gully. Two excited girls have jumped to the ground for a rabbit. The big mule threshes the weeds like a tornado. Crossing the field at a heavy gallop, he stops suddenly at a ditch, the girth of the old saddle breaks, and the host of the day goes on over the long ears. When he rises from the weeds, there is a shriek of laughter over the field, and then a mule-race, for, with a bray of freedom, the sorrel makes for home. Not a rabbit is jumped on the next circuit; that field
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is hunted out. ISTo matter; there is another just across the meadow, and they make for it. More than a dozen rabbits dangle head downward behind the sad- dles of the men. Corydon has caught seven, and the slouch-hat five. The palm lies between them plainly, as does a bigger motive than the game. It is a mat- ter of gallantry — conferring the brush in the field; indeed, secrets are hidden rather than betrayed in that way: so Corydon is free to honor the white girth, and the slouch-hat can honor Phyllis without suspicion. The stylish habit shows four puffs of down; Phyllis wears five — every trophy that the slouch-hat has won. That is the way Phyllis is helping a friend, getting even with an enemy, and putting down a rebellion in her own camp. Even in the meadow a rabbit starts up, and there is a quick sprint in the open; but Br'er Rabbit, another old hand at the hunt, slips through the tall palings of a garden fence. In the other field the fun is more furious than ever, for the rabbits are thicker and the rivalry is very close. Corydon is get- ting excited; once, he nearly overrides his rival.
The field has gone mad. The girl with the white girth is getting flushed with something more than ex- citement, and even Phyllis, demure as she still looks, is stirred a little. The pony's mistress is ahead by two brushes, and the white girth is a little vexed. She
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declares she is going to catch a rabbit herself. The slouch-hat hears, and watches her, thereafter, uneasily. And she does spring lightly, recklessly, to the ground just as the iron-gray and the thoroughbred crash in toward her, and, right between the horses' hoofs, Br'er Rabbit is caught in her little black riding-gloves. In- deed, the front feet of a horse strike her riding-skirt, mashing it into the soft earth, and miss crushing her by a foot. The slouch-hat is on the ground beside her. "You mustn't do that again! " he says with sharp authority.
" Mr. ," she says, quietly, but haughtily, to
Corydon, who is on the ground, too, " will you please help me on my horse? "
The slouch-hat looks as red as a flame, but Phyllis whispers comfort. " That's all right," she says, wise- ly ; and it is all right. Under the slouch-hat, the white face meant fear, anxiety, distress. The authority of the voice thrilled the girl, and in the depths of her heart she was pleased, and Phyllis knew.
The sun is dropping fast, but they will try one more field, which lies beyond a broad pasture of blue-grass. Now comes the chase of the day. Something big and gray leaps from a bunch of grass and bounds away. It is the father of rabbits, and there is a race indeed — an open field, a straight course, and no favor. The
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devil take the hindmost! Listen to the music of the springy turf, and watch that thoroughbred whose master has stayed behind to put up the fence! He hasn't had half a chance before. He feels the grip of knees as his master rises to the racing-seat, and know- ing what that means, he lengthens. No great effort is apparent; he simply stretches himself close to the earth and skims it as a swallow skims a pond. Within two hundred yards he is side by side with Corydon, who is leading, and Corydon, being no fool, pulls in and lets him go on. Br'er Rabbit is going up one side of a long, shallow ravine. There is a grove of locusts at the upper end. The hunters behind see the slouch- hat cut around the crest of the hill, and, as luck would have it, Br'er Rabbit doubles, and comes back on the other side of the ravine. The thoroughbred has closed up the gap that the turn made, and is not fifty yards behind. Br'er Rabbit is making either for a rain-washed gully just opposite, or for a brier-patch farther down. So they wait. The cottontail clears the gully like a ball of thistledown, and Phyllis hears a little gasp behind her as the thoroughbred, too, rises and cleaves the air. Horse and rabbit dash into the weedy cover, and the slouch-hat drops out of sight as three hunters ride yelling into it from the other side. There is a scramble in the bushes, and the slouch-hat
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emerges with the rabbit in his hand. As he rides slowly toward the waiting party, he looks at Phyllis as though to receive further orders. lie gets them. Wily Phyllis shakes her head as though to say :
" Not me this time; her."
And with a courtly inclination of the slouch-hat, the big brush goes to the white girth, in lieu of an olive-branch, for peace.
The shadows are stretching fast; they will not try the other field. Back they start through the radiant aiv homeward, laughing, talking, bantering, living over the incidents of the day, the men with one leg swung over the pommel of their saddles for rest; the girls with habits disordered and torn, hair down, and a little tired, but all flushed, clear-eyed, and happy. The leaves, russet, gold, and crimson, are dropping to the green earth; the sunlight is as yellow as the wings of a butterfly ; and on the horizon is a faint haze that foreshadows the coming Indian summer. If it be Thanksgiving, a big dinner will be waiting for them at the stately old farm-house, or if a little later in the year, a hot supper instead. If the hunt is very in- formal, and there be neither, which rarely happens, everybody asks everybody else to go home with him, and everybody means it, and accepts if possible. This time it is warm enough for a great spread out in the
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yard on the lawn and under the big oaks. What a feast that is — chicken, turkey, cold ham, pickles, croquettes, creams, jellies, "beaten" biscuit! And what happy laughter, and thoughtful courtesy, and mellow kindness!
Inside, most likely, it is cool enough for a fire in the big fireplace with the shining old brass andirons; and what quiet, solid, old-fashioned English comfort that light brings out! Two darky fiddlers are wait- ing on the back porch — waiting for a dram from " young cap'n," as " young marster " is now called. They do not wait long. By the time darkness settles, the fiddles are talking old tunes, and the nimble feet are busy. Like draws to like now, and the window- seats and the tall columns of the porch hear again what they have been listening to for so long. Corydon has drawn near. Does Phyllis sulk or look cold? Not Phyllis. You would not know that Corydon had ever left her side. It has been a day of sweet mischief to Phyllis.
At midnight they ride forth in pairs into the crisp, brilliant air and under the kindly moon. The white girth turns toward town with the thoroughbred at her side, and Corydon and Phyllis take the other way. They live on adjoining farms, these two. Phyllis has not forgotten; oh, no! There is mild torture await-
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ing Corydon long after he shall have forgotten the day, and he deserves it. Silly Corydon! to quarrel over nothing, and to think that he could make her jealous over that — the white girth is never phrased, for Phyllis stops there. It is not the first time these two girls have crossed foils. But there is peace now, and the little comedy of the day, seen by nearly every woman and by hardly a man, comes that night to a happy end.
ioo
Through the Bad Bend
H
Through the Bad Bend
A WILDLY beautiful cleft through the Cum- berland Range opens into the head of Powell's Valley, in Virginia, and forms the Gap. From this point a party of us were going bass-fishing on a fork of the Cumberland River over in the Ken- tucky mountains. It was Sunday, and several Kentucky mountaineers had crossed over that day to take their first ride on the cars, and to see " the city " — as the Gap has been prophetically called ever since it had a cross-roads store, one little hotel, two farm- houses, and a blacksmith's shop. From them we learned that we could ride down Powell's Valley and get to the fork of the Cumberland by simply climb- ing over the mountain. As the mountaineers were going back home the same day, Breck and I boarded the train with them, intending to fish down the fork of the river to the point where the rest of the party would strike the same stream, two days later.
At the second station down the road a crowd of Virginia mountaineers got on board. Most of them
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had been drinking, and the festivities soon began. One drunken young giant pulled his revolver, swung it back over his shoulder — the muzzle almost grazing a woman's face behind him — and swung it up again to send a bullet crashing through the top of the car. The hammer was at the turning-point when a com- panion caught his wrist. At the same time, the fel- low's sister sprang across the aisle, and, wrenching the weapon from his grasp, hid it in her dress. Simul- taneously his partner at the other end of the car was drawing a .45 Colt's half as long as his arm. A quick panic ran through the car, and in a moment there was no one in it with us but the mountaineers, the conductor, one brakeman, and one other man, who sat still in his seat, with one hand under his coat. The prospect was neither pleasant nor peaceful, and we rose to our feet and waited. The disarmed giant was raging through the aisle searching and calling, with mighty oaths, for his pistol. The other had backed into a corner of the car, waving his revolver, turning his head from side to side to avoid a surprise in the rear, white with rage, and just drunk enough to shoot. The little conductor was unmoved and smiling, and, by some quiet mesmerism, he kept the two in subjection until the station was reached.
The train moved out and left us among the drunken 104
Through the Bad Bend
maniacs, no house in sight, the darkness settling on us, and the unclimbed mountain looming up into it. The belligerents paid no attention to us, however, but disappeared quickly, with an occasional pistol-shot and a yell from the bushes, each time sounding farther away. The Kentucky mountaineers were going to climb the mountain. A storm was coming, but there was nothing else to do. So we shouldered our traps and followed them.
There were eight of us — an old man and his two daughters, the husband of one of these, the sweet- heart of the other, and a third man, who showed sus- picion of us from the beginning. This man with a flaring torch led the way; the old man followed him, and there were two mountaineers deep between the girls and us, who went last.
It was not long before a ragged line of fire cut through the blackness overhead, and the thunder began to crash and the rain to fall. The torch was beaten out, and for a moment there was a halt. Breck and I could hear a muffled argument going on in the air above us, and, climbing toward the voices, we felt the lintel of a mountain-cabin and heard a long drawl of welcome.
The cabin was one dark room without even a loft, the home of a newly married pair. They themselves
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Blue-grass and Rhododendron
liad evidently just gotten home, for the hostess was on her knees at the big fireplace, blowing a few coals into a blaze. The rest of us sat on the two beds in the room waiting for the fire-light, and somebody began talking about the trouble on the train.
" Did you see that feller settin' thar with his hand under his coat while Jim was tryin' to shoot the brake- man? " said one. " Well, Jim killed his brother a year ago, an' the feller was jus' waitin' fer a chance to git Jim right then. I knowed that."
" Who was the big fellow who started the row, by flourishing his pistol around? " I asked.
A man on the next bed leaned forward and laughed slightly. " Well, stranger, I reckon that was me."
This sounds like the opening chapter of a piece of fiction, but we had really stumbled upon this man's cabin in the dark, and he was our host. A little spinal chill made me shiver. He had not seen us yet, and I began to wonder whether he would recognize us when the light blazed up, and whether he would know that we were ready to take part against him in the car, and what would happen, if he did. When the blaze did kindle, he was reaching for his hip, but he drew out a bottle of apple-jack and handed it over the foot of the bed.
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Through the Bad Bend
" Somebody ought to 'a' knocked my head off," he said.
" That's so," said the younger girl, with sharp bold- ness. " I never seed sech doin's."
The old mountaineer, her father, gave her a quick rebuke, but the man laughed. He was sobering up, and, apparently, he had never seen us before. The young wife prepared supper, and we ate and went to bed — the ten of us in that one room. The two girls took off their shoes and stockings with frank inno- cence, and warmed their bare feet at the fire. The host and hostess gave up their bed to the old moun- taineer and his son-in-law, and slept, like the rest of us, on the floor.
"We were wakened long before day. Indeed it was pitch dark when, after a mountain custom, we stum- bled to a little brook close to the cabin and washed our faces. A wood-thrush was singing somewhere in he darkness, and its cool notes had the liquid fresh- ness of the morning. "We did not wait for breakfast, so anxious were the Kentuckians to get home, or so fearful were they of abusing their host's hospitality, though the latter urged us strenuously to stay. Not i cent would he take from anybody, and I know now that he was a moonshiner, a feudsman, an outlaw, and that he was running from the sheriff at that very time.
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With a parting pull at the apple-jack, we began, on an empty stomach, that weary climb. Not far up the mountain Breck stopped, panting, while the moun- taineers were swinging on up the path without an effort, even the girls; but Breck swore that he had heart disease, and must rest. When I took part of his pack, the pretty one looked back over her shoulder and smiled at him without scorn. Both were shy, and had not spoken a dozen words with either of us. Half-way up we overtook a man and a boy, one carrying a tremendous demijohn and the other a small hand-barrel. They had been over on the Virginia side selling moonshine, and I saw the light of gladness in Breck's eye, for his own flask was wellnigh empty from returning our late host's cour- tesy. But both man and boy disappeared with a magical suddenness that became significant later. Already we were suspected as being revenue spies, though neither of us dreamed what the matter was.
We reached the top after daybreak, and the beauty of the sunrise over still seas of white mist and wave after wave of blue Virginia hills was unspeakable, as was the beauty of the descent on the Kentucky side, down through primeval woods of majestic oak and poplar, under a trembling world of dew-drenched leaves, and along a tumbling series of waterfalls that
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Through the Bad Bend
flashed through tall ferns, blossoming laurel, and shining leaves of rhododendron.
The sun was an hour high when we reached the foot of the mountain. There the old man and the young girl stopped at a little cabin where lived the son-in-law. We, too, were pressed to stop, but we went on with the suspicious one to his house, where we got breakfast. There the people took pay, for their house was weather-boarded, and they were more civilized; or perhaps for the reason that the man thought us spies. I did not like his manner, and I got the first unmistakable hint of his suspicions after breakfast. I was down behind the barn, and he and another mountaineer came down on the other side.
" Didn't one o' them fellers come down this way? " I heard him ask.
I started to make my presence known, but he spoke too quickly, and I concluded it was best to keep still.
" No tellin' whut them damn fellers is up to. I don't like their occupation."
That is, we were the first fishermen to cast a minnow with a reel into those waters, and it was beyond the mountaineer's comprehension to under- stand how two men could afford to come so far and spend time and a little money just for the fun of fish- ing. They supposed we were fishing for profit, and
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later they asked us how we kept our fish fresh, and how we got them over the mountain, and where we sold them. With this idea, naturally it was a puzzle to them how we could afford to give a boy a quarter for a dozen minnows, and then, perhaps, catch not a single fish with them.
When I got back to the house, Breck was rigging his rod, with a crowd of spectators around him. Such a rod and such a fisherman had never been seen in that country before. Breck was dressed in a white tennis-shirt, blue gymnasium breeches, blue stockings, and white tennis-shoes. With a cap on his shock of black hair and a .38 revolver in his belt, he was a thing for those women to look at and to admire, and for the men to scorn — secretly, of course, for there was a look in his black eyes that forced guarded re- spect in any crowd. The wonder of those moun- taineers when he put his rod together, fastened the reel, and tossed his hook fifty feet in the air was worth the morning's climb to see. At the same time they made fun of our rods, and laughed at the idea of get- ting out a big " green pyerch " — as the mountaineers call bass — with " them switches." Their method is to tie a strong line to a long hickory sapling, and, when they strike a bass, to put the stout pole over one shoulder and walk ashore with it. Before the sun
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was over the mountain, we were wading down the stream, while two boys carried our minnows and clothes along the bank. The news of our coming went before us, and every now and then a man would roll out of the bushes with a gun and look at us with much suspicion and some wonder. For two luckless hours we cast down that too narrow and too shallow stream before we learned that there was a dam two miles farther down, and at once we took the land for it. It was after dinner when we reached it, and there the boys left us. We could not induce them to go farther. An old miller sat outside his mill across the river, looking at us with some curiosity, but no surprise, for the coming of a stranger in those moun- tains is always known miles ahead of him.
We told him our names and that we were from Virginia, but were natives of the Blue-grass, and we asked if he could give us dinner. His house was half a mile farther down the river, he said, but the women folks were at home, and he reckoned they would give us something to eat. When we started, I shifted my revolver from my pocket to a kodak-camera case that I had brought along to hold fishing-tackle.
"I suppose I can put this thing in here?" I said to Breck, not wanting to risk arrest for carrying con- cealed weapons and the confiscation of the pistol,
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which was valuable. Breck hesitated, and the old miller studied us keenly.
" Well/' he said, " if you two air from Kanetucky, hit strikes me you ought to know the laws of yo' own State. You can carry it in thar as baggage," he added, quietly, and I knew that my question had added another fagot to the flame of suspicion kindling against us.
In half an hour we were in the cool shade of a spreading apple-tree in the miller's yard, with our bare feet in thick, cool grass, while the miller's wife and his buxom, red-cheeked daughter got us dinner. And a good dinner it was ; and we laughed and cracked jokes at each other till the sombre, suspicious old lady relaxed and laughed, too, and the girl lost some of her timidity and looked upon Breck with wide-eyed ad- miration, while Breck ogled back outrageously.
After dinner a scowling mountaineer led a mule through the yard and gave us a surly nod. Two horsemen rode up to the gate and waited to escort us down the river. One of them carried our baggage, for no matter what he suspects, the mountaineer will do anything in the world for a stranger until the moment of actual conflict comes. In our green in- nocence, we thought it rather a good joke that we should be taken for revenue men, so that, Breck's flask
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being empty, he began by telling one of the men that we had been wading the river all the morning, that •the water was cold, and that, anyway, a little swallow now and then often saved a fellow from a cold and fever. He had not been able to get any from any- body— and couldn't the man do something? The mountaineer was touched, and he took the half-dollar that Breck gave him, and turned it over, with a whis- pered consultation, to one of two more horsemen that we met later on the road. Still farther on we found a beautiful hole of water, edged with a smooth bank of sand — a famous place, the men told us, for green " pyerch." Mountaineers rolled out of the bushes to watch us while we were rigging up, some with guns and some without. We left our pistols on the shore, and several examined them curiously, especially mine, which was hammerless. Later, I showed them how it worked, and explained that one advantage of it was that, in close quarters, the other man could not seize your pistol, get his finger or thumb under your ham- mer, and prevent you from shooting at all. This often happens in a fight, of course, and the point ap- pealed to them strongly, but I could see that they were wondering why I should be carrying a gun that was good for close quarters, since close quarters are rarely necessary except in case of making arrests.
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Pretty soon the two men who had gone for Breck's " moonshine " returned, and a gleam rose in Breck's eye and went quickly down. Instead of a bottle, the boy handed back the half-dollar.
" I couldn't git any," he said. He lied, of course, as we both knew, and the disappointment in Breck's face was so sincere that his companion, with a gesture that was half sympathy, half defiance, whisked a bottle from his hip.
" Well, by I'll give him a drink! "
It was fiery, white as water, and so fresh that we could taste the smoke in it, but it was good, and we were grateful. All the afternoon, from two to a dozen people watched us fish, but we had poor luck, which is never a surprise, fishing for bass. Perhaps the fish had gone to nesting, or the trouble may have been the light of the moon, during which they feed all night, and are not so hungry through the day; or it may have been any of the myriad reasons that make the mystery and fascination of catching bass. At another time, and from the same stream, I have seen two rods take out one hundred bass, ranging from one to five pounds in weight, in a single day. An hour by sun, we struck for the house of the old man with whom we had crossed the mountain, and, that night, we learned that we had passed through a local-
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ity alive with moonshiners, and banded together with such system and determination that the revenue agents rarely dared to make a raid on them. We were supposed to be two spies who were expected to come in there that spring. We had passed within thirty yards of a dozen stills, and our host hinted where we might find them. We thanked him, and told him we preferred to keep as far away from them as possible. He was much puzzled. He also said that we had been in the head-quarters of a famous desperado, who was the leader of the Howard faction in the famous Howard- Turner feud. He was a non-combatant himself, but he had " feelin's," as he phrased it, for the other side. He was much surprised when we told him we were going back there next day. We had told the people we were coming back, and next morning we were foolish enough to go.
As soon as we struck the river, we saw a man with a Winchester sitting on a log across the stream, as though his sole business in life was to keep an eye on us. All that day we were never out of sight of a mountaineer and a gun; we never had been, I pre- sume, since our first breakfast on that stream. Still, everybody was kind and hospitable and honest — how honest this incident will show. An old woman cooked dinner especially for us, and I gave her two
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quarters. She took them, put them away, and while she sat smoking her pipe, I saw something was troubling her. She got up presently, went into a room, came back, and without a word dropped one of the quarters into my hand. Half a dollar was too much. They gave us moonshine, too, and Breck remarked casually that we were expecting to meet our friends at Uncle Job Turner's, somewhere down the river. They would have red whiskey from the Blue-grass and we would be all right. Then he asked how far down Uncle Job lived. The remark and the question occasioned very badly concealed ex- citement, and I wondered what had happened, but I did not ask. I was getting wary, and I had become quite sure that the fishing must be better down, very far down, that stream. When we started again, the mountaineers evidently held a quick council of war. One can hear a long distance over water at the quiet of dusk, and they were having a lively discussion about us and our business over there. Somebody was de- fending us, and I recognized the voice as belonging to a red-whiskered fellow, who said he had lived awhile in the Blue-grass, and had seen young fellows starting to the Kentucky River to fish for fun. " Oh, them damn fellers ain't up to nothin'," we could hear him say, with the disgust of the cosmopolitan. " I tell
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ye, they lives in town an' they likes to git out this way! "
I have always believed that this man saved us trouble right then, for next night the mountaineers came down in a body to the house where we had last stopped. But we had gone on rather hastily, and when we reached Uncle Job Turner's, the trip behind us became more interesting than ever in retrospect. All along we asked where Uncle Job lived, and once we shouted the question across the river, where some women and boys were at work, weeding corn. As usual, the answer was another question, and always the same — what were our names? Breck yelled, in answer, that we were from Virginia, and that they would be no wiser if we should tell — an answer that will always be unwise in the mountains of Kentucky as long as moonshine is made and feuds survive. We asked again, and another yell told us that the next house was Uncle Job's. The next house was rather pretentious. It had two or three rooms, apparently, and a loft, and was weather-boarded; but it was as silent as a tomb. We shouted "Hello! " from out- side the fence, which is etiquette in the mountains. Not a sound. We shouted again — once, twice, many times. It was most strange. Then we waited, and shouted again, and at last a big gray-haired old fel-
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low slouched out and asked rather surlily what we wanted.
" Dinner."
He seemed pleased that that was all, and his man- ner changed immediately. Ilis wife appeared; then, as if by magic, two or three children, one a slim, wild, dark-eyed girl of fifteen, dressed in crimson homespun. As we sat on the porch I saw her passing through the dark rooms, but always, while we were there, if I entered one door she slipped out of the other. Breck was more fortunate. He came up behind her the next day at sundown while she was dancing barefooted in the dust of the road, driving her cows home. Later I saw him in the cow-pen, helping her milk. He said she was very nice, but very shy.
We got dinner, and the old man sent after a bottle of moonshine, and in an hour he was thawed out won- derfully.
We told him where we had been, and as he slowly began to believe us, he alternately grew sobered and laughed aloud.
" Went through thar fishin', did ye ? Wore yo' pistols? Axed whar thar was branches whar you could ketch minners? Oh, Lawd! Didn't ye know that the stills air al'ays up the branches? Tol' 'em you was goin' to meet a party at my house, and stay
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here awhile fishin'? Oh, Lawdy! Ef that ain't a good un! "
We didn't see it, but we did later, when we knew that we had come through the " Bad Bend," which was the head-quarters of the Howard leader and his chief men; that Uncle Job was the most prominent man of the other faction, and lived farthest up the river of all the Turners; that he hadn't been up in the Bend for ten years, and that we had given his deadly enemies the impression that we were friends of his. As Uncle Job grew mellow, and warmed up in his confidences, something else curious came out. Every now and then he would look at me and say:
" I seed you lookin' at my pants." And then he would throw back his head and laugh. After he had said this for the third time, I did look at his " pants," and I saw that he was soaking wet to the thighs — why, I soon learned. A nephew of his had killed a man at the county-seat only a week before. Uncle Job had gone on his bond. "When we shouted across the river, he was in the cornfield, and when we did not tell our names, he got suspicious, and, mistaking our rod-holders for guns, had supposed that his nephew had run away, and that we were officers come to arrest him. He had run down the river on the other side, had waded the stream, and was up in the loft with his
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Winchester on us while we were shouting at his gate. He told us this very frankly. Nor would even he believe that we were fishing. He, too, thought that we were officers looking through the Bad Bend for some criminal, and the least innocent mission that struck him as plausible was that, perhaps, we might be looking over the ground to locate a railroad, or pros- pecting for coal veins. When Uncle Job went down the road with us the next morning, he took his wife along, so that no Howard would try to ambush him through fear of hitting a woman. And late that afternoon, when we were fishing with Uncle Job's son in some thick bushes behind the house, some women passed along in the path above us, and, seeing us, but not seeing him, scurried out of sight as though fright- ened. Little Job grinned.
" Them women thinks the Howards have hired you fellers to layway dad."
The next morning I lost Breck, and about noon I got a note from him, written with a trembling lead- pencil, to the effect that he believed he would fish up a certain creek that afternoon. As the creek was not more than three feet wide and a few inches deep, I knew what had happened, and I climbed one of Job's mules and went to search for him. Breck had stumbled upon a moonshine still, and, getting hilari-
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cms, had climbed a barrel and was making to a crowd of mountaineers a fiery political speech. Breck had captured that creek, " wild-cat " still and all, and to this day I never meet a mountaineer from that region who does not ask, with a wide grin, about Breck.
When we reached the county-seat, the next day, we met the revenue deputy. He said the town was talk- ing about two spies who were up the Fork. We told him that we must be the spies. The old miller was the brains of the Bend, he said, both in outwitting the revenue men and in planning the campaign of the Howard leader against the Turners, and he told us of several fights he had had in the Bad Bend. He said that we were lucky to come through alive; that what saved us was sticking to the river, hiring our minnows caught, leaving our pistols on the bank to be picked up by anybody, the defence of the red-whiskered man from the Blue-grass, and Breck's popularity at the still. I thought he was exaggerating — that the mountaineers, even if convinced that we were spies, would have given us a chance to get out of the country — but when he took me over to a room across the street and showed me where his predecessor, a man whom I had known quite well, was shot through a window at night and killed, I was not quite so sure.
But still another straw of suspicion was awaiting us. 121
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When we reached the railroad again — by another route, you may be sure — Breck, being a lawyer, got permission for us to ride on a freight-train, and thus save a night and a day. The pass for us was tech- nically charged to the mail service. The captain and crew of the train were overwhelmingly and mysteri- ously polite to us — an inexplicable contrast to the surliness with which passengers are usually treated on a freight-train. When we got off at the Gap, and several people greeted us by name, the captain laughed.
" Do you know what these boys thought you two were?" he asked, referring to his crew. "They thought you were freight ' spotters.' "
The crew laughed. I looked at Breck, and I didn't wonder. He was a ragged, unshaven tramp, and I was another.
Months later, I got a message from the Bad Bend. Breck and I mustn't come through there any more. We have never gone through there any more, though anybody on business that the mountaineers understand, can go more safely than he can cross Broadway at Twenty-third Street, at noon. As a matter of fact, however, there are two other forks to the Cumberland in which the fishing is very good indeed, and just now I would rather risk Broadway.
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Fox-Hunting in Kentucky
Fox-Hunting in Kentucky
THE Judge parted his coat-tails to the big pine- wood blaze, and, with one measuring, vertical glance, asked me two questions: " Do you hunt coons? Do you hunt gray foxes? " A plea of not guilty was made to both, and the Judge waved his hand.
" If you do," he said, " I decline to discuss the subject with you."
Already another fox-hunter, who was still young, and therefore not quite lost to the outer world, had warned me. " They are cranks," he said, " fox-hunt- ers are — all of 'em."
And then he, who was yet sane, went on to tell about his hound, Red Star: how Red Star would seek a lost trail from stump to stump, or on top of a rail-fence; or, when crows cawed, would leave the trail and make for the crows; how he had once followed a fox twenty hours, and had finally gone after him into a sink-hole,
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from which he had been rescued several days later, almost starved. On cold winter nights the young hunter would often come on the lonely figure of the old Judge, who had walked miles out of town merely to sit on the fence and listen to the hounds. Against him, the warning was particular. I made a tentative mention of the drag-hunt, in which the hounds often ran mute, and the fun was in the horse, the ride, and the fences. For a moment the Judge was re- flective.
" I remember," he said, slowly, as though he were a century back in reminiscence, " that the darkies used to drag a coonskin through the woods, and run mon- grels after it."
A hint of fine scorn was in his tone, but it was the scorn of the sportsman and not of the sectionalist, though the Judge, when he was only fifteen, had carried pistol and sabre after John Morgan, and was, so the General said, a moment later, the gamest man in the Confederacy.
" Why, sir, there is but one nobler animal than a long-eared, deep-mouthed, patient fox-hound — and that is a woman! Think of treating him that way! And the music is the thing! Many an old Virginian would give away a dog because his tongue was not in harmony with the rest. The chorus should be a
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chord. I shall never hear sweeter music, unless, by the grace of Heaven, I hear some day the choiring of angels."
I was about to speak of the Maine and Massachu- setts custom of shooting the fox before the hounds, but the Judge forestalled me.
" I believe, sir, that is worse — if worse be possible. I do not know what excuse the gentlemen make. They say, I believe, that their dogs cannot catch their red fox — that no dogs can. Well, the ground up there, being rough, is favorable to the fox, but our dogs can catch him. Logan, a Kentucky dog, has just caught a Massachusetts fox for the Brunswick Fur Club, and we have much better dogs here than Logan.
" Yes," he added, tranquilly; " I believe it is gen- erally conceded now that the Kentucky dog has taken a stand with the Kentucky horse. The winnings on the bench and in the field, the reports wherever Ken- tucky dogs have been sent, the advertisements in the sporting papers, all show that. Steve Walker, who, by the way, will never sell a dog, and who will buy any dog that can beat his own, has tried every strain in this country except the Wild Goose Pack of Tennes- see. He has never gone outside the State without getting a worse dog. T reckon phosphate of lime has
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something to do with it. The same natural forces in the Blue-grass region that make horses better im- prove the dogs. Since the war, too, we have bred with more care; we have hunted more than people elsewhere, and we have bred the dog as we have the race-horse. Why, the Walkers — ah!" — the Judge stopped to listen — " There's Steve's horn now! "
Only one man could blow that long mellow call, swelling and falling without a break, and ending like a distant echo.
" We better go, boys," he said.
Outside the hotel, the hunter's moon was tipped just over one of the many knobs from which Daniel Boone is said to have looked first over the Blue-grass land. A raindrop would have slipped from it into the red dawn just beneath. And that was the trouble, for hunters say there is never rain to drop when the moon is tipped that way. So the field trials had been given up; the country was too rough; and the ele- ments and the local sportsmen, who hunted the ground by night that we were to hunt by day, held the effort in disfavor. That day everybody and everybody's hound were to go loose for simple fun, and the fun was beginning before dawn. In the stable-yard, darkies and mountaineers were bridling and saddling horses. The hunters were noisily coming and going from the
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little hotel that was a famous summer-resort in the Bath County Hills forty years ago, and, once owned by a great Kentuckian, was, the tradition goes, lost by him in a game of poker. Among them were several Blue- grass girls in derby hats, who had been in the saddle with us on the previous day from dark to dark, and on to midnight, and who were ready to do it again. There were fox-hunters from Maine, the Virginias, Ohio, and from England; and the contrasts were marked even among the Kentuckians who came from the Iroquois Club, of Lexington, with bang-tailed horses and top-boots; from the Strodes Valley Hunt Club and the Bourbon Kennels, who disdain any ac- coutrement on horseback that they do not wear on foot; and from the best-known fox-hunting family in the South, who dress and hunt after their own way, and whom I shall call Walkers, because they are never seen on foot. No Walker reaches the age of sixteen with- out being six feet high. There were four with us, and the shortest was six feet two, and weighed 185 pounds. They wore great oilskin mackintoshes, and were superbly mounted on half thoroughbreds. Not long ago they carried their native county Democratic for one friend by 250 majority. At the next election they carried it Republican by the same majority for an- other friend. " We own everything in common," said
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one, who asked me to come over and spend a few months, or a year, or the rest of my natural life with him, " except our dogs." Xo Walker's dog will follow any other Walker, or come to his horn. All the Walk- ers had great, soft musical voices and gentle manners. All were church members, and, mirabile didu, only one of the four touched whiskey, and he lightly. About one of them the General told a remarkable story.
This Walker, he said, got into a difficulty with an- other young man just after the war. The two rode into the county town, hitched their horses, and met in the court-house square. They drew their pistols, which were old-fashioned, and emptied them, each man getting one bullet. Then they drew knives. They closed in after both had been cut slightly. The other man made for Walker's abdomen, just as Walker's knife was high over his head for a terrible downward stroke. Walker had on an old army belt, and the knife struck the buckle and broke at the hilt. Walker saw it as his knife started down. He is a man of fierce passion, but even at that moment he let his knife fall and walked away.
" It's easy enough in a duel," commented the Gen- eral, " when everything is cool and deliberate, to hold up if your adversary's pistol gets out of order; but in
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a hand-to-hand fight like that ! They have been close friends ever since — naturally."
Being such a company, we rode out of the stable- yard through the frosty dawn toward the hills, which sink by and by to the gentle undulations of Blue-grass pasture and woodland.
II
In Kentucky, the hunting of the red fox antedates the war but little. The old Kentucky fox-hound was of every color, loose in build, with open feet and a cowhide tail. lie had a good nose, and he was slow, but he was fast enough for the gray fox and the deer. Somewhere about 1855 the fox-hunters discovered that their hounds were chasing something they could not catch. A little later a mule-driver came through Cumberland Gap with a young hound that he called Lead. Lead caught the eye of old General Maupin, who lived in Madison County, and whose name is now known to every fox-hunter North and South. Maupin started poor, and made a fortune in a frolic. He would go out hunting with his hounds, and would come back home with a drove of sheep and cattle. He was a keen trader, and would buy anything. He bought Lead, and, in the first chase, Lead slipped away
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from the old deer-hounds as though he knew what he was after; and it was not long before he captured the strange little beast that had been puzzling man and dog so long. Lead was thus the first hound to catch a red fox in Kentucky; and since every fox-hound in the State worthy of the name goes back to Lead, he is a very important personage. General Maupin never learned Lead's exact origin; perhaps he did not try very hard, for he soon ran across a suspicion that Lead had been stolen. He tried other dogs from the same locality in Tennessee from which he supposed the hound came, but with no good results. Lead was a lusus naturae, and old fox-hunters say that his like was never before him, and has never been since.
People came for miles to see the red fox that Lead ran down, and the event was naturally an epoch in the history of the chase in Kentucky. Nobody knows why it took the red fox so long to make up his mind to emigrate to Kentucky, not being one of the second families of Virginia, and nobody knows why he came at all. Perhaps the shrewd little beast learned that over the mountains the dogs were slow and old-fash- ioned, and that he could have great fun with them and die of old age; perhaps the prescience of the war moved him; but certain it is that he did not take the " Wilderness Road " until the fifties, when began the
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inexplicable movement of his race south and south- west. But he took the trail of the gray fox then, just as the tide-water Virginians took the trail of the pioneers, and the gray fox gave way, and went farther west, as did the pioneer, and let the little red- coated aristocrat stamp his individuality on the Blue- grass as his human brother had done. For a long while he did have fun with those clumsy old hounds, running a hundred easy lengths ahead, dawdling time and again past his den, disdaining to take refuge, and turning back to run past the hounds when they had given up the chase — great fun, until old Lead came. After that, General Maupin and the Walkers imported Martha and Rifler from England, and, since then, the red fox has been kept to his best pace so steadily that he now shows a proper respect for even a young Ken- tucky fox-hound. He was a great solace after the war, for Kentucky was less impoverished than other South- ern States, horses were plentiful, it was inexpensive to keep hounds, and other game was killed off. But fox-hunting got into disrepute. Hunting in Southern fashion requires a genius for leisure that was taken advantage of by ne'er-do-weels and scapegraces, young and old, who used it as a cloak for idleness, drinking, and general mischief. They broke down the farmer's fences, left his gates open, trampled his grain, and
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brought a reproach on the fox-hunter that is alive yet. It is dying rapidly, however, and families like the Clays, of Bourbon, the Robinsons and Hamiltons, of Mount Sterling, the Millers and Winns, of Clark, and the Walkers, of Garrard, are lifting the chase into high favor. Hitherto, the hunting has been done in- dividually. Now hunt clubs are being formed. Chief among them are the Bourbon Kennels, the Strodes Valley Hunt Club, and the Iroquois Club, the last having been in existence for ten years. This club does not confine itself to foxes, but is democratic enough to include coons and rabbits.
Except in Maine and Massachusetts, where the fox is shot before the hounds, fox-hunting in the North is modelled after English ways. In Kentucky and else- where in the South, it is almost another sport. The Englishman wants his pack uniform in color, size, tongue, and speed — a hound that is too fast must be counted out. The Kentuckian wants his hound to leave the rest behind, if he can. He has no whipper- in, no master of the hounds. Each man cries on his own dog. Nor has he any hunting terms, like " cross- country riding," or " riding to hounds." To hunt for the pleasure of the ride is his last thought. The fun is in the actual chase, in knowing the ways of the plucky little animal, in knowing the hounds indi-
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vidually, and the tongue of each, in the competition of one man's dog with another, or of favorites in the same pack. It is not often that the hounds are fol- lowed steadily. The stake-and-ridered fences every- where, and the barbed wire in the Blue-grass, would make following impossible, even if it were desirable. Instead, the hunters ride from ridge to ridge to wait, to listen, and to see. The Walkers hunt chiefly at night. The fox is then making his circuit for food, and the scent is better. Less stock is moving about to be frightened, or among which the fox can confuse the hounds. The music has a mysterious sweetness, the hounds hunt better, it seems less a waste of time, and it is more picturesque. At night the hounds trot at the horses' heels until a fire is built on some ridge. Then they go out to hunt a trail, while the hunters tie their horses in the brush, and sit around the fire telling stories until some steady old hound gives tongue.
"There's old Rock! Whoop-ee! Go it, old boy!" Only he doesn't say "old boy" exactly. The actual epithet is bad, though it is endearing. It reaches old Rock if he is three miles away, and the crowd listens.
" There's Ranger ! Go it, Alice, old girl ! Lead's ahead! "
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Then they listen to the music. Sometimes the fox takes an unsuspected turn, and they mount and ride for another ridge; and the reckless, daredevil race they make through the woods in the dark is to an out- sider pure insanity. Sometimes a man will want to go on one side of the tree when his horse prefers an- other, and the man is carried home senseless. Some- times a horse is killed, but no lesson is learned. The idea prevails that the more reckless one is, the better is his chance to get through alive, and it seems to hold good. In their county, the Walkers have both hills and blue-grass in which to hunt. The fox, they say, is leaving the hills, and taking up his home in the plan- tations, because he can get his living there with more ease. They hunt at least three nights out of the week all the year around, and they say that May is the best month of the year. The fox is rearing her young then. The hunters build a fire near a den, the she- fox barks to attract the attention of the dogs, and the race begins. At that time, the fox will not take a straight line to the mountains and end the chase as at other times of the year, but will circle about the den. It is true, perhaps, that at such times the male fox relieves the mother and takes his turn in keeping the hounds busy. The hunters thus get their pleas- ure without being obliged to leave their camp-fire.
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Listening to the Music of the Dogs.
Fox-Hunting in Kentucky
Rarely at this time is the fox caught, and provided he has had the fun of the chase, the Kentucky hunter is secretly glad, I believe, that the little fellow has gone scot-free.
Such being the hunt, there is, of course, no cere- mony whatever in its details; it is " go as you please," as to horse, way of riding, dress, and riding accoutre- ments. The effect is picturesque and individual. Each man dresses, usually, as he dresses on foot, his seat is the military seat, his bridle has one rein, his horse is bridle-wise, and his hunter is his saddle-horse. The Kentuckian does not like to trot anywhere in the saddle. He prefers to go in a " rack," or a running walk. His horse, when he jumps at all, does not take fences in his stride, but standing. And I have yet to see anything more graceful than the slow rear, the calculating poise, the leap wholly from the hind feet, and the quick, high gather to clear the fence. It is not impossible to find a horse that will feel for the top rail with his knees, and if they are not high enough, he will lift them higher before making his leap. I have known of one horse that, while hitched to a stake- and-ridered fence, would jump the fence without unhitching himself.
It was an odd and interesting crowd that went through the woods that morning — those long-maned,
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long-tailed horses, and their riders, the giants in slouched hats and oilskins, the pretty girls with a soft fire of anticipation in their straight, clear eyes — especially to the hunters from the East, and to the Englishman with his little hunting-saddle, his short stirrups, his top-boots thrust into them to the heels, and his jockey-like seat — just as he was odd to them. I saw one Kentuckian double on his horse, laughing at the apparent inefficiency of his appearance, little knowing that in the English hunting-field the laugh would have been the other way.
To the stranger, the hounds doubtless looked small and wiry, being bred for speed, as did the horses, be- cause of the thoroughbred blood in them, livery hacks though most of them were. Perhaps he was most surprised at the way those girls dashed through the woods, and the way the horses galloped over stones and roots, and climbed banks, for which purpose the East- ern hunter would have been inadequate, through lack of training. The Southern way of riding doubtless struck him as slovenly — the loose rein, the toes in the stirrups (which upheld merely the weight of the legs), the easy, careless, graceful seat; but he soon saw that it was admirably adapted to the purpose at hand — staying on the horse and getting out all that there was in him. For when the Southern fox-hunter starts
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after his hounds through wood and thicket, in day- light or dark, you know whence came the dashing horsemanship that gave the South a marked advantage some thirty years ago. And when he gets warmed up, and opens his throat to cry on his favorite hound, you know at last the origin of the " rebel yell," and you hear it again but little changed to-day.
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Within ten minutes after the dogs were unleashed, there was an inspiriting little brush through the woods. A mule went down, and his rider executed a somersault. Another rider was unhorsed against a tree. How the girls came through with their skirts was a mystery ; but there they were, eager and smiling, when we halted on the edge of a cleared field. The hounds were circling far to the left. The General pointed to a smouldering fire which the local sportsmen had used through the night.
" It's an old trail," he said, and we waited there, as we waited anywhere, with an unwearying patience that would have thrown an Eastern hunter into hysteria.
" No, sir," said the General, courteously, in answer to a question; " I never sell a fox-dog; I consider him
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a member of my household. It would be a sacrilege to sell him." Then he continued learnedly and calmly:
" As is the fox, so in time is the dog; that is the theory. The old English dog was big-boned, coarse, and heavy, and he had to have greyhound blood before he could catch the English red fox. The Eng- lish dog has always been, and is now, inadequate for the American red fox. By selection, by breeding winner with winner, we have got a satisfactory dog, and the more satisfactory he is, the more is he like the fnx, having become smaller in size, finer in bone, and more compacl in shape. The hunted moulds the hunter: the American red fox is undoubtedly superior to the English red fox in speed, endurance, and stratagem, and he has made the American dog superior. The principle was illustrated when old Lead came over to Cumberland; for he was rather small and compact, his hair was long and his brush heavy, though his cent was coal-black except for a little tan about the face and eyes. The Virginia red fox had already fashioned Lead."
The hounds were coming back now ; they were near when the music ceased. The great yellow figure of a Walker was loping toward them through the frost- tipped sedge, with his hat in his hand and his thick
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gray hair catching the first sunlight. The General was right; the trail was old, and it was lost. As we rode across the field, however, an old hound gave tongue. Sharp, quick music began, and ceased just as another Walker was reaching down into his trousers' pocket for his plug of tobacco.
" I believe that was a rabbit," he said. " I'm going over there and knock old Rock in the head." With- out taking his hand from his pocket, he touched his horse, and the animal rose in his tracks, poised, and leaped, landing on a slippery bank. The plug of tobacco was in one corner of the rider's mouth when both struck the road. lie had moved in his saddle no more than if his horse had stepped over a log. Nothing theatrical was intended. The utter non- chalance of the performance was paralyzing. He did not reach old Rock. Over to the right, another hound raised so significant a cry that Rock, with an answer- ing bay, went for him. In a moment they were sweeping around a knoll to the right, and the third Walker turned his horse through the sedge, loping easily, his hat still in his hand, a mighty picture on horseback; and as I started after him, I saw the fourth brother scramble up a perpendicular bank twice the length of his horse — each man gone accord- ing to his own judgment. I followed the swinging
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black hat, and caught up, and we halted in the woods to listen, both jerking the reins to keep the horses from champing their bits. One peculiar, deep, musical tongue rose above the pack's cry. The big Walker stood in his stirrup, with his face uplifted, and I saw in it what fox-hunting means to the Kentuckian. Had he been looking into heaven, his face could not have been more rapt.
"That's Rock!" he said, breathlessly, and then he started through the woods. He weighed over 200, and was six feet four. A hole through the woods that was big enough for him, was, I thought, big enough for me, and I had made up my mind to follow him half an hour, anyhow. My memory of that ride is a trifle confused. I saw the big yellow oilskin and the thick gray hair ahead of me, whisking around trees and stumps, and over rocks and roots. I heard a great crashing of branches and a clatter of stones. Every jump something rapped me across the breast or over the head; my knees grazed trees on each side; a thorn dug into my face not far from one eye; and then I lay down on my horse's neck and thought of my sins. I did not know what it was all about, but I learned when I dared to lift my head. "We had been running for a little hollow between the hills to see the fox pass, but we were too quick. Several
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hunters had crossed the trail before the hounds, and fox and scent were lost.
" You've bu'sted up the chase," said a hunter, with deep disgust.
« Who— we? " said the Walker. " Why, we have just been riding quietly up the ridge, haven't we?" Quietly — that was his idea of riding quietly!
I told the General about that ride, and the General laughed. " That's him" he said, with ungram- matical emphasis. " He's fifty-three now, but he's the hardest hunter in this State to follow."
We had to end the chase that day, and we went back to the hotel, early in the afternoon, so disheart- ened that the General threw his pride and his hunting traditions to the wind, and swore with a beautiful oath that the ladies should have a chase. He got a moun- taineer to climb a mule and drag a coonskin around the little valley. The natives brought in their dogs, and entered them for a quart of whiskey. The music started, and Logan was allowed to let out his noble length for exercise, and Patsy Powell slipped her leash and got away, while her master swore persistently that she was running because the others were — that she scorned the scent of a drag, and would hardly run a gray fox, let alone the skin of a coon. Logan came in ahead- but a native got the whiskey, and in half an
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hour every one of his friends owned the best dog in the county.
That last night, after a game of blind-man's-buff, we had intersectional toasts and congratulations, and wel- comes to come again. The conditions had all been antagonistic. It was too early; it was too dry; and there were many other reasons.
The man from the Brunswick Fur Club explained that in his country the sportsmen shot the foxes be- cause the hounds could not catch them fast enough. The foxes were so thick up there that the people could hardly raise a Thanksgiving turkey. So they shot them to appease the farmers, whom they had to fight annually in the Legislature to prevent them from hav- ing the fox exterminated by law as a pest. The Southern sportsmen were glad to hear that, and drank to his health, and argued that the solution of the diffi- culty was to try more dogs like Logan. Then every- body discussed phases and problems of the chase that emphasized the peculiarities of hunting in the South —how the hounds, like the race-horse, have grown lighter, more rangy in form, smaller, solider in bone; and how, in spite of the increase in speed, they yet win by bottom, rather than by speed; that it was, after all, a question of the condition of the fox, whether he was gorged or not; that rough ground
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Fox-Hunting in Kentucky- being favorable to the fox, more kills were made south of Virginia, because the ground is favorable to the hound ; how, since the war, the breeding has been tow- ard better feet, rougher hair, better brush, gameness, nose, and speed. Yet the Walkers say that hounds are not as good as they were twenty years ago; that the English dogs are tougher and have more bottom and less nose and speed; that the half thorough-bred makes the best hunter, the thorough-bred being too high-strung, too fretful; that the right proportion of English blood in the hound is one-fourth. And everybody wondered why some Kentucky horseman has never bred hunters for the Eastern market, argu- ing that the Kentucky hunter should excel, as the race-horse and the trotter have excelled.
One and another told how a fox will avoid a corn- field, because a muddy tail impedes him; how he will swim a creek simply to wash it out; and how, in "Florida, he will swim a river to escape the dogs, knowing that they will not follow him through fear of the alligators. How he will turn up-stream when he is not hard pressed, and down-stream when he is. Does the red fox actually kill out the gray? One man had come on the fresh-bitten carcass of a gray in the snow, and, about it, there was not another sign than the track of a red fox. Or, does the gray disappear be-
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cause lie is more easily caught, or does an instinctive terror of the red drive the gray off to other hunting- grounds? A hunter declared that a full-grown gray would show mortal terror of a red cub. Is the red fox a coward, or is he the only sporting member of the animal kingdom? Does he really enjoy the chase? Many had seen him climb a stump, or fence, to look back and listen to the music. One man claimed that he often doubled out of curiosity to see where the dogs were, though another had seen a fox go through the window of a deserted house, through the floor, and out under it; and in doubling, go through it just the other way. He always did that, and that did not look like curiosity. Several had known a fox, after the hounds had given up the chase and turned homeward, to turn, too, and run past the dogs with a plain challenge to try it again. Another said he had known a fox to run till tired, and then let a fresh fox take up the trail, and lead the hounds on while he rested in a thicket twenty yards away. All except one hunter had known foxes to run past their holes several times dur- ing the chase, and often to be caught within one or two hundred yards of a den. One opinion was that a fox would not go into his hole because he was too hot and would smother; another said he was game. But the doubting hunter, an old gentleman who was nearly
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seventy, and who had kept close behind the hounds on a big sorrel, with an arm that had been thrown out of place at the shoulder only the night before, declared that most fox-stories were moonshine, that the fox was a sneaking little coward, and would make for a hole as soon as he heard a dog bark. There was one man who knew another man who had seen a strange thing. All the others had heard of it, and many believed it, A fox, hard pressed, had turned, and, with every bristle thrown forward, had run back, squealing piteously, into the jaws of the pack.
" That's a bluff game," said the old hunter.
"No," said another; "he knew that his end had come, and he went to meet it with his colors flying, like the dead-game little sport that he is."
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To the Breaks of Sandy
To the Breaks of Sandy
DOWN in the southwestern corner of Virginia, and just over the Kentucky line, are the Gap and " The Gap " — the one made by nature and the other by man. One is a ragged gash down through the Cumberland Mountains, from peak to water level; and the other is a new little, queer little town, on a pretty plateau which is girdled by two run- ning streams that loop and come together like the framework of an ancient lute. Northeast the range runs, unbroken by nature and undisturbed by man, until it crumbles at the Breaks of Sandy, seventy miles away. There the bass leaps from rushing waters, and there, as nowhere else this side of the Rockies, is the face of nature wild and shy.
It was midsummer, the hour was noon, and we were bound for the Breaks of Sandy, seventy miles away.
No similar aggregate of man, trap, and beast had ever before penetrated those mountain wilds. The wagon was high-seated and the team was spiked, with Rock and Ridgling as wheel horses, Diavolo as
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leader, and Dolly, a half-thorough-bred, galloping be- hind under Sam, the black cook, and a wild Western saddle, with high pommels, heavily hooded stirrups, hand-worked leather, and multitudinous straps and shaking rawhide strings; and running alongside, Tiger, bull-terrier. Any man who was at Andover, Cornell, or Harvard during certain years will, if he sees these lines, remember Tiger.
As for the men — there was Josh, ex-captain of a Kentucky Horse Guard, ex-captain of the volunteer police force back at " The Gap," and, like Henry Clay, always captain whenever and wherever there was anything to be done and more than one man was needed to do it; now, one of the later-day pioneers who went back over the Cumberland, not many years ago, to reclaim a certain wild little corner of old Vir- ginia, and then, as now, the first man and the leading lawyer of the same. There was another Kentuckian, fresh from the Blue-grass — Little Willie, as he was styled on this trip — being six feet three in his bare feet, carrying 190 pounds of bone and muscle; chamj)ion heavy-weight with his fists in college (he could never get anybody to fight with him), centre-rush in foot-ball, with this grewsome record of broken bones: collar-bone, one leg, one knee three times, and three teeth smashed — smashed by
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biting through his nose guard against each other when he set his jaws to break through a hostile line. Also, Willie was ex-bugler of a military school, singer of coon songs unrivalled, and with other accomplish- ments for which there is no space here to record. There was Dan, boy-manager of a mighty coal com- pany, good fellow, and of importance to the dog-lover as the master of Tiger. I include Tiger here, be- cause he was so little less than human. There are no words to describe Tiger. He was prepared for Yale at Andover, went to Cornell in a pet, took a post-grad- uate course at Harvard, and, getting indifference and world-weariness there, followed his master to pioneer in the Cumberland. Tiger has a white collar, white- tipped tail, white feet; his body is short, strong, close- knit, tawny, ringed; and his peculiar distinctions are intelligence, character, magnetism. All through the mountains Tiger has run his fifty miles a day behind Dolly, the thorough-bred ; so that, in a radius of a hun- dred miles, there is nobody who does not know that dog. Still, he never walks unless it is necessary, and his particular oscillation is between the mines and " The Gap," ten miles apart. Being a coal magnate, he has an annual pass and he always takes the train — alone, if he pleases — changing cars three times and paying no attention, until his stations are called.
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Sometimes he is too weary to go to a station, so he sits down on the track and waits for the train. I have known the engineer of a heavily laden freight-train to slacken up when he saw Tiger trotting ahead between the rails, and stop to take him aboard, did Tiger but nod on him. I have never seen man, woman, or child, of respectable antecedents, whom that dog didn't love, and nobody, regardless of antecedents, who didn't love that dog.
Such, we rattled out of " The Gap " that mid- summer noon. Northward, through the Gap, a cloud of dun smoke hung over the Hades of coke ovens that Dan had planted in the hills. On the right was the Ridge, heavy with beds of ore. Straight ahead was a furnace, from which the coke rose as pale-blue smoke and the ore gave out a stream of molten iron. Farther on, mountains to the right and mountains to the left came together at a little gap, and toward that point we rattled up Powell's Valley — smiling back at the sun ; furnace, ore-mine, coke-cloud, and other ugly signs of civilization dropping behind us fast, and our eyes set toward one green lovely spot that was a shrine of things primeval.
In the wagon we had a tent, and things to eat, and a wooden box that looked like a typewriter case, under lock and key, and eloquently inscribed:
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" Glass, 2 gal." It is a great way to carry the indispensable — in a wagon — and I recommend it to fishermen.
At the foot of the first mountain was a spring and we stopped to water the horses and unlock that case. Twenty yards above, and to one side of the road, a mountaineer was hanging over the fence, looking down at us.
"Have a drink?" said Josh.
" Yes," he drawled, " if ye'll fetch it up."
" Come an' get it," said Josh, shortly.
" Are you sick? " I asked.
" Sort o' puny."
We drank.
" Have a drink? " said Josh once more.
" If ye'll fetch it up."
Josh drove the cork home with the muscular base of his thumb.
" I'm damned if I do."
Dan whistled to Diavolo, and we speculated. It was queer conduct in the mountaineer — why didn't he come down?
" I don't know," said Dan.
" He really came down for a drink," I said, know- ing the mountaineer's independence, " and he wanted to prove to himself and to us that he didn't."
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" A smart Alec," said Little Willie.
" A plain damn fool," said Josh.
Half an hour later we were on top of the moun- tain, in the little gap where the mountains came together. Below us the valley started on its long, rich sweep southward, and beyond were the grim shoulders of Black Mountains, which we were to brush now and then on our way to the " Breaks."
There Dan put Tiger out of the wagon and made him walk. After three plaintive whines to his mas- ter to show cause for such an outrage, Tiger dropped nose and eyes to the ground and jogged along with such human sullenness that Willie was led to speak to him. Tiger paid no attention. I called him and Dan called him. Tiger never so much as lifted eye or ear, and Willie watched him, wondering.
" Why, that dog's got a grouch," he said at last, delightedly. " I tell you he's got a grouch." It was Willie's first observation of Tiger. Of course he had a " grouch " as distinctly as a child who is old enough to show petulance with dignity. And having made us feel sufficiently mean, Tiger dropped quite behind, as though to say: " I'm gettin' kind o' tired o' this. Now ' It's come here, Tiger,' and ' Stick in the mud, Tiger,' and straightway again, ' Tiger, come here.' I don't like it. I'd go home if it weren't for Dolly and
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this nigger here, whom I reckon I've got to watch. But I'll stick in the mud." And he did.
At dusk we passed through Norton, where Talt Hall, desperado, killed his thirteenth and last man, and on along a rocky, muddy, Stygian-black road to Wise Court-house, where our police guard from " The Gap," with Josh as captain, guarded Talt for one month to keep his Kentucky clan from rescuing him. And there we told Dan and the big Ken- tuckian how banker, broker, lawyer, and doctor left his business and his home, cut port-holes in the court- house, put the town under martial law, and, with twenty men with Winchesters in the rude box that enclosed the scaffold, and a cordon of a hundred more in a circle outside, to keep back a thousand mountain- eers, thus made possible the first hanging that the county had ever known. And how, later, in the same way we hung old Doc Taylor, Hall's enemy — Sweden- borgian preacher, herb doctor, revenue officer, and des- perado— the " Ked Fox of the Mountains."
The two listeners were much interested, for, in truth, that police guard of gentlemen who hewed strictly to the line of the law, who patrolled the streets of " The Gap " with billy, whistle, and pistol, knocking down toughs, lugging them to the calaboose, appearing in court against them next morning, and maintaining a
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fund for the prosecution of them in the higher courts, was as unique and successful an experiment in civiliza- tion as any borderland has ever known.
Next day we ran the crests of long ridges and struck good roads, and it was then that we spiked Rock and Ridgling, with Diavolo as leader.
" Tool 'em! " shouted Willie, and we " tooled " joyously. A coach-horn was all that we lacked, and we did not lack that long. Willie evolved one from his unaided throat, in some mysterious way that he could not explain, but he did the tooting about as well as it is ever done with a horn. It was hot, and the natives stared. They took us for the advance-guard of a circus.
" Where are you goin' to show? " they shouted. We crossed ridges, too, tooling recklessly about the edges of precipices and along roads scarcely wide enough for one wagon — Dan swinging to the brake with one hand and holding Josh in the driver's seat with the other — Willie and I speculating, meanwhile, how much higher the hind wheel could go from the ground before the wagon would overturn. It was great fun, and dangerous.
" Hank Monks is not in it," said Willie.
The brake required both of Dan's hands just then and Josh flew out into space and landed on
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To the Breaks of Sandy
his shoulder, some ten feet down the mountain, un- hurt.
Rock, though it was his first work under harness, was steady as a plough-horse. Ridgling now and then would snort and plunge and paw, getting one foot over the wagon tongue. Diavolo, like his master, was a born leader, or we should have had trouble indeed.
That night we struck another county-seat, where the court-house had been a brick bone of contention for many, many years — two localities claiming the elsewhere undisputed honor, for the reason that they alone had the only two level acres in the county on which a court-house could stand. A bitter fight it was, and they do say that not many years ago, in a similar conflict, the opposing factions met to de- cide the question with fist and skull — 150 picked men on each side — a direct and curious survival of the ancient wager of battle. The women prevented the fight. Over in Kentucky there would have been a bloody feud. At that town we had but fitful sleep. Certain little demons of the dark, which shall be nameless, marked us, as they always mark fresh vic- tims, for their own.
" I'll bet they look over the register every night," said Willie — baring a red-splotched brawny arm next morning.
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" Wingless victory! " he said, further.
And then on. Wilder and ever wilder, next day, grew the hills and woods and the slitting chasms be- tween them. First one hind wheel dished — we braced it with hickory saplings. Then the other — we braced that. The harness broke — Dan mended that. A horse cast a shoe — Josh shod him then and there. These two were always tinkering, and were happy. Inefficiency made Willie and me miserable — it was plain that we were to be hewers of wood and drawers of water on that trip, and we were.
And still wilder and ever wilder was the face of Xature, which turned primeval — turned Greek. Willie swore he could see the fleeting shapes of nymphs in the dancing sunlight and shadows under the beeches. Where the cane-rushes shivered and shook along the bank of a creek, it was a satyr chasing a dryad through them; and once — it may have been the tinkle of water — but I was sure I heard her laugh float from a dark little ravine high above, where she had fled to hide. ~Ko wonder! We were approach- ing the most isolated spot, perhaps, this side of the Rockies. If this be hard to believe, listen. Once we stopped at a cabin, and Sam, the black cook, went in for a drink of water. A little girl saw him and was thrown almost into convulsions of terror. She had
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never seen a negro before. Her mother had told her, doubtless, that the bad man would get her some day and she thought Sam was the devil and that he had come for her. And this in Virginia. I knew there were many white people in Virginia, and all through- out the Cumberland, who had never seen a black man, and why they hate him as they do has always been a mystery, especially as they often grant him social equality, even to the point of eating at the same table with him, though the mountaineer who establishes certain relations with the race that is still tolerated in the South, brings himself into lasting disgrace. Perhaps the hostility reaches back to the time when the poor white saw him a fatal enemy, as a slave, to the white man who must work with his hands. And yet, to say that this competition with the black man, along with a hatred of his aristocratic master, was the reason for the universal Union sentiment of the Southern mountaineer during the war is absurd. Competition ceased nearly a century ago. Negro and aristocrat were forgotten — were long unknown. No historian seems to have guessed that the mountaineer was loyal because of 1776. The fight for the old flag in 1812 and the Mexican War helped, but 1776 was enough to keep him loyal to this day; for to-day, in life, charac- ter, customs, speech, and conviction, he is practically
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what he was then. But a change is coming now, and down in a little hollow we saw, suddenly, a startling sign — a frame house with an upper balcony, and, moving along that balcony, a tall figure in a pink un- girded Mother Hubbard. And, mother of all that is modern, we saw against the doorway below her — a bicycle. We took dinner there and the girl gave me her card. It read:
AMANDA TOLLIVER,
EXECUTRIX TO JOSIAH TOLLIVER.
Only that was not her name. She owned coal lands, was a woman of judgment and business, and realizing that she could not develop them alone, had advertised for a partner in coal, and, I was told, in love as well. Anyhow there were numerous pictures of young men around, and I have a faint suspicion that as we swung over the brow of the hill, we might have been taken for suitors four. She had been to school at the county-seat where we spent the first night, and had thus swung into the stream of Progress. She had live gold fish in a glass tank and jugs with plants growing out of the mouth and out of holes in the sides. And she had a carpet in the parlor and fire-screens of red calico and red plush albums, a birthday book, and, of
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course, a cottage organ. It was all prophetic, I sup- pose, and the inevitable American way toward higher things; and it was at once sad and hopeful.
Just over the hill, humanity disappeared again and Nature turned primeval — turned Greek again. And again nymphs and river gods began their play. Pretty soon a dryad took human shape in some black- berry bushes, and Little Willie proceeded to take mythological shape as a faun. We moderns jollied him on the metamorphosis.
The Breaks were just ahead. Somewhere through the green thickness of poplar, oak, and maple, the river lashed and boiled between gray bowlders, eddied and danced and laughed through deep pools, or leaped in waves over long riffles, and we turned toward the low, far sound of its waters. A slip of a bare-footed girl stepped from the bushes and ran down the wood- path, and Willie checked her to engage in