Gena of the Appalachians

By CLARENCE MONROE WALLIN
Cochrane Publishing Company Tribune Building New York 1910
Copyright, 1910, by Clarence Monroe Wallin
To Alma, my wife, and the thousands of other noble daughters of the great Appalachian country.
If, in the lines of this humble narrative, the reader should find anything of truth; anything of uplift; anything of human life, then the author shall have been fully repaid for the time employed in writing it.
Clarence Monroe Wallin.
Gena of the Appalachians
It was late in the afternoon of a cold winter’s day when they sent for him to go and perform the last sad rites at the burial of Lucky Joe.
Lucky Joe had outstripped the law in his crimes for more than forty years—hence the people had well dubbed him “Lucky.” For more than three decades his name had been the synonym of dread and fear among the people of the hills. He had at length whipped them into granting him whatever he exacted of them, whether the thing in itself was right or wrong. But one memorable day, the tardy finger of the law apprehended him, and he stood up before the bar of Justice and heard the court pronounce, “Joseph Filson, guilty!” Quickly he was ushered away to the penitentiary—down to a Southern jail and to hard and endless toil for the remainder of his life. The gates of the prison closed and locked their iron jaws behind him: his keeper admonished him to be obedient, and he immediately chose to work at the blacksmith’s forge. Day after day, he swung the sledge in silence. Then the days crowded into months and into years, but he pounded away at the anvil unmindful of the end. Finally death came and knocked at the door of his narrow cell and took him away.
The news of the great outlaw’s death flashed back to the hills, and horse and rider took up the message and sped over the peaks and down into the narrow gorges to tell the mountainfolk of the end. Many a mountain mother and son ran out to the roadside to meet the rider, and received the news with gladness. Men and boys gathered in groups about the forks of the roads and doubted that it could be true. But, when the remains were forwarded to the railroad station nearest the mountain home, doubt and distrust gave way to the evidence, and all were satisfied.