The Call of the Cumberlands

by Charles Neville Buck

The officer went back, and distributed his forces under such cover as offered itself, about the four walls. Then, a volley was fired over the roof, and instantly the two buildings in the public square awoke to a volcanic response of rifle fire.

All day, the duel between the streets and county buildings went on with desultory intervals of quiet and wild outbursts of musketry. The troops were firing as sharpshooters, and the court-house, too, had its sharpshooters. When a head showed itself at a barricaded window, a report from the outside greeted it. Samson was everywhere, his rifle smoking and hot-barreled. His life seemed protected by a talisman. Yet, most of the firing, after the first hour, was from within. The troops were, except for occasional pot shots, holding their fire. There was neither food nor water inside the building, and at last night closed and the cordon drew tighter to prevent escape. The Hollmans, like rats in a trap, grimly held on, realizing that it was to be a siege. On the following morning, a detachment of F Company arrived, dragging two gatling guns. The Hollmans saw them detraining, from their lookout in the courthouse cupola, and, realizing that the end had come, resolved upon a desperate sortie. Simultaneously, every door and lower window of the court-house burst open to discharge a frenzied rush of men, firing as they came. They meant to eat their way out and leave as many hostile dead as possible in their wake. Their one chance now was to scatter before the machine-guns came into action. They came like a flood of human lava, and their guns were never silent, as they bore down on the barricades, where the single outnumbered company seemed insufficient to hold them. But the new militiamen, looking for reassurance not so much to Callomb as to the granite-like face of Samson South, rallied, and rose with a yell to meet them on bayonet and smoking muzzle. The rush wavered, fell back, desperately rallied, then broke in scattered remnants for the shelter of the building.

Old Jake Hollman fell near the door, and his grandson, rushing out, picked up his fallen rifle, and sent farewell defiance from it, as he, too, threw up both arms and dropped.

Then, a white flag wavered at a window, and, as the newly arrived troops halted in the street, the noise died suddenly to quiet. Samson went out to meet a man who opened the door, and said shortly:

"We lays down."

Judge Hollman, who had not participated, turned from the slit in his shuttered window, through which he had since the beginning been watching the conflict.

"That ends it!" he said, with a despairing shrug of his shoulders. He picked up a magazine pistol which lay on his table, and, carefully counting down his chest to the fifth rib, placed the muzzle against his breast.

CHAPTER XXX

Before the mountain roads were mired with the coming of the rains, and while the air held its sparkle of autumnal zestfulness, Samson South wrote to Wilfred Horton that, if he still meant to come to the hills for his inspection of coal and timber, the time was ripe. Soon, men would appear bearing transit and chain, drawing a line which a railroad was to follow to Misery and across it to the heart of untouched forests and coal-fields. With that wave of innovation would come the speculators. Besides, Samson's fingers were itching to be out in the hills with a palette and a sheaf of brushes in the society of George Lescott.

For a while after the battle at Hixon, the county had lain in a torpid paralysis of dread. Many illiterate feudists on each side remembered the directing and exposed figure of Samson South seen through eddies of gun smoke, and believed him immune from death. With Purvy dead and Hollman the victim of his own hand, the backbone of the murder syndicate was broken. Its heart had ceased to beat. Those Hollman survivors who bore the potentialities for leadership had not only signed pledges of peace, but were afraid to break them; and the triumphant Souths, instead of vaunting their victory, had subscribed to the doctrine of order, and declared the war over. Souths who broke the law were as speedily arrested as Hollmans. Their boys were drilling as militiamen, and—wonder of wonders!—inviting the sons of the enemy to join them. Of course, these things changed gradually, but the beginnings of them were most noticeable in the first few months, just as a newly painted and renovated house is more conspicuous than one that has been long respectable.