CHAPTER V
While Spicer South and his cousins had been sustaining themselves or building up competences by tilling their soil, the leaders of the other faction were basing larger fortunes on the profits of merchandise and trade. So, although Spicer South could neither read nor write, his chief enemy, Micah Hollman, was to outward seeming an urbane and fairly equipped man of affairs. Judged by their heads, the clansmen were rougher and more illiterate on Misery, and in closer touch with civilization on Crippleshin. A deeper scrutiny showed this seeming to be one of the strange anomalies of the mountains.
Micah Hollman had established himself at Hixon, that shack town which had passed of late years from feudal county seat to the section's one point of contact with the outside world; a town where the ancient and modern orders brushed shoulders; where the new was tolerated, but dared not become aggressive. Directly across the street from the court-house stood an ample frame building, on whose side wall was emblazoned the legend: "Hollman's Mammoth Department Store." That was the secret stronghold of Hollman power. He had always spoken deploringly of that spirit of lawlessness which had given the mountains a bad name. He himself, he declared, believed that the best assets of any community were tenets of peace and brotherhood. Any mountain man or foreigner who came to town was sure of a welcome from Judge Micah Hollman, who added to his title of storekeeper that of magistrate.
As the years went on, the proprietor of the "Mammoth Department Store" found that he had money to lend and, as a natural sequence, mortgages stored away in his strong box. To the cry of distress, he turned a sympathetic ear. His infectious smile and suave manner won him fame as "the best-hearted man in the mountains." Steadily and unostentatiously, his fortune fattened.
When the railroad came to Hixon, it found in Judge Hollman a "public- spirited citizen." Incidentally, the timber that it hauled and the coal that its flat cars carried down to the Bluegrass went largely to his consignees. He had so astutely anticipated coming events that, when the first scouts of capital sought options, they found themselves constantly referred to Judge Hollman. No wheel, it seemed, could turn without his nod. It was natural that the genial storekeeper should become the big man of the community and inevitable that the one big man should become the dictator. His inherited place as leader of the Hollmans in the feud he had seemingly passed on as an obsolete prerogative.
Yet, in business matters, he was found to drive a hard bargain, and men came to regard it the part of good policy to meet rather than combat his requirements. It was essential to his purposes that the officers of the law in his county should be in sympathy with him. Sympathy soon became abject subservience. When a South had opposed Jesse Purvy in the primary as candidate for High Sheriff, he was found one day lying on his face with a bullet-riddled body. It may have been a coincidence which pointed to Jim Asberry, the judge's nephew, as the assassin. At all events, the judge's nephew was a poor boy, and a charitable Grand Jury declined to indict him.
In the course of five years, several South adherents, who had crossed Hollman's path, became victims of the laurel ambuscade. The theory of coincidence was strained. Slowly, the rumor grew and persistently spread, though no man would admit having fathered it, that before each of these executions star-chamber conferences had been held in the rooms above Micah Hollman's "Mammoth Department Store." It was said that these exclusive sessions were attended by Judge Hollman, Sheriff Purvy and certain other gentlemen selected by reason of their marksmanship. When one of these victims fell, John South had just returned from a law school "down below," wearing "fotched-on" clothing and thinking "fotched-on" thoughts. He had amazed the community by demanding the right to assist in probing and prosecuting the affair. He had then shocked the community into complete paralysis by requesting the Grand Jury to indict not alone the alleged assassin, but also his employers, whom he named as Judge Hollman and Sheriff Purvy. Then, he, too, fell under a bolt from the laurel.
That was the first public accusation against the bland capitalist, and it carried its own prompt warning against repetition. The Judge's High Sheriff and chief ally retired from office, and went abroad only with a bodyguard. Jesse Purvy had built his store at a cross roads twenty-five miles from the railroad. Like Hollman, he had won a reputation for open -handed charity, and was liked—and hated. His friends were legion. His enemies were so numerous that he apprehended violence not only from the Souths, but also from others who nursed grudges in no way related to the line of feud cleavage. The Hollman-Purvy combination had retained enough of its old power to escape the law's retribution and to hold its dictatorship, but the efforts of John South had not been altogether bootless. He had ripped away two masks, and their erstwhile wearers could no longer hold their old semblance of law-abiding philanthropists. Jesse Purvy's home was the show place of the country side. To the traveler's eye, which had grown accustomed to hovel life and squalor, it offered a reminder of the richer Bluegrass. Its walls were weather-boarded and painted, and its roof two stories high. Commodious verandahs looked out over pleasant orchards, and in the same enclosure stood the two frame buildings of his store—for he, too, combined merchandise with baronial powers. But back of the place rose the mountainside, on which Purvy never looked without dread. Twice, its impenetrable thickets had spat at him. Twice, he had recovered from wounds that would have taken a less-charmed life. And in grisly reminder of the terror which clouded the peace of his days stood the eight-foot log stockade at the rear of the place which the proprietor had built to shield his daily journeys between house and store. But Jesse Purvy was not deluded by his escapes. He knew that he was "marked down." For years, he had seen men die by his own plotting, and he himself must in the end follow by a similar road. Rumor had it that he wore a shirt of mail, certain it is that he walked in the expectancy of death.
"Why don't you leave the mountains?" strangers had asked; and to each of them Purvy had replied with a shrug of his shoulders and a short laugh: "This is where I belong."
But the years of strain were telling on Jesse Purvy. The robust, full- blooded face was showing deep lines; his flesh was growing flaccid; his glance tinged with quick apprehension. He told his intimates that he realized "they'd get him," yet he sought to prolong his term of escape.
The creek purled peacefully by the stile; the apple and peach trees blossomed and bore fruit at their appointed time, but the householder, when he walked between his back door and the back door of the store, hugged his stockade, and hurried his steps.
Yesterday morning, Jesse Purvy had risen early as usual, and, after a satisfying breakfast, had gone to his store to arrange for the day's business. One or two of his henchmen, seeming loafers, but in reality a bodyguard, were lounging within call. A married daughter was chatting with her father while her young baby played among the barrels and cracker boxes.
The daughter went to a rear window, and gazed up at the mountain. The cloudless skies were still in hiding behind a curtain of mist. The woman was idly watching the vanishing fog wraiths, and her father came over to her side. Then, the baby cried, and she stepped back. Purvy himself remained at the window. It was a thing he did not often do. It left him exposed, but the most cautiously guarded life has its moments of relaxed vigilance. He stood there possibly thirty seconds, then a sharp fusillade of clear reports barked out and was shattered by the hills into a long reverberation. With a hand clasped to his chest, Purvy turned, walked to the middle of the floor, and fell.
The henchmen rushed to the open sash. They leaped out, and plunged up the mountain, tempting the assassin's fire, but the assassin was satisfied. The mountain was again as quiet as it had been at dawn. Its impenetrable mask of green was blank and unresponsive. Somewhere in the cool of the dewy treetops a squirrel barked. Here and there, the birds saluted the sparkle and freshness of June. Inside, at the middle of the store, Jesse Purvy shifted his head against his daughter's knee, and said, as one stating an expected event:
"Well, they've got me."
An ordinary mountaineer would have been carried home to die in the darkness of a dirty and windowless shack. The long-suffering star of Jesse Purvy ordained otherwise. He might go under or he might once more beat his way back and out of the quicksands of death. At all events, he would fight for life to the last gasp.
Twenty miles away in the core of the wilderness, removed from a railroad by a score of semi-perpendicular miles, a fanatic had once decided to found a school. The fact that the establishment in this place of such a school as his mind pictured was sheer madness and impossibility did not in the least deter him. It was a thing that could not be done, and it was a thing that he had done none the less.
Now a faculty of ten men, like himself holding degrees of Masters of Dreams, taught such as cared to come such things as they cared to learn. Substantial two-and three-storied buildings of square-hewn logs lay grouped in a sort of Arts and Crafts village around a clean-clipped campus. The Stagbone College property stretched twenty acres square at the foot of a hill. The drone of its own saw-mill came across the valley. In a book-lined library, wainscoted in natural woods of three colors, the original fanatic often sat reflecting pleasurably on his folly. Higher up the hillside stood a small, but model, hospital, with a modern operating table and a case of surgical instruments, which, it was said, the State could not surpass. These things had been the gifts of friends who liked such a type of God-inspired madness. A "fotched-on" trained nurse was in attendance. From time to time, eminent Bluegrass surgeons came to Hixon by rail, rode twenty miles on mules, and held clinics on the mountainside.
To this haven, Jesse Purvy, the murder lord, was borne in a litter carried on the shoulders of his dependents. Here, as his steadfast guardian star decreed, he found two prominent medical visitors, who hurried him to the operating table. Later, he was removed to a white bed, with the June sparkle in his eyes, pleasantly modulated through drawn blinds, and the June rustle and bird chorus in his ears—and his own thoughts in his brain.
Conscious, but in great pain, Purvy beckoned Jim Asberry and Aaron Hollis, his chiefs of bodyguard, to his bedside, and waved the nurse back out of hearing.
"If I don't get well," he said, feebly, "there's a job for you two boys. I reckon you know what it is?"
They nodded, and Asberry whispered a name:
"Samson South?"
"Yes," Purvy spoke in a weak whisper; but the old vindictiveness was not smothered. "You got the old man, I reckon you can manage the cub. If you don't, he'll get you both one day."
The two henchmen scowled.
"I'll git him to-morrer," growled Asberry. "Thar hain't no sort of use in a-waitin'."
"No!" For an instant Purvy's voice rose out of its weakness to its old staccato tone of command, a tone which brought obedience. "If I get well, I have other plans. Never mind what they are. That's my business. If I don't die, leave him alone, until I give other orders." He lay back and fought for breath. The nurse came over with gentle insistence, ordering quiet, but the man, whose violent life might be closing, had business yet to discuss with his confidential vassals. Again, he waved her back.
"If I get well," he went on, "and Samson South is killed meanwhile, I won't live long either. It would be my life for his. Keep close to him. The minute you hear of my death—get him." He paused again, then supplemented, "You two will find something mighty interestin' in my will."
It was afternoon when Purvy reached the hospital, and, at nightfall of the same day, there arrived at his store's entrance, on stumbling, hard -ridden mules, several men, followed by two tawny hounds whose long ears flapped over their lean jaws, and whose eyes were listless and tired, but whose black muzzles wrinkled and sniffed with that sensitive instinct which follows the man-scent. The ex-sheriff's family were instituting proceedings independent of the Chief's orders. The next morning, this party plunged into the mountain tangle, and beat the cover with the bloodhounds in leash.
The two gentle-faced dogs picked their way between the flowering rhododendrons, the glistening laurels, the feathery pine sprouts and the moss-covered rocks. They went gingerly and alertly on ungainly, cushioned feet. Just as their masters were despairing, they came to a place directly over the store, where a branch had been bent back and hitched to clear the outlook, and where a boot heel had crushed the moss. There one of them raised his nose high into the air, opened his mouth, and let out a long, deep-chested bay of discovery.