The Code of the Mountains

by Charles Neville Buck

There was the starving eagerness for something very different from what wares life had ever spread to her gaze, some yearning that had crept down through lapsed generations from an ancestor or ancestress who had known the courtly life of Old Virginia before the pioneer tide swept them westward to their stranding. This hunger was a fiery thing, which made the eagerness to learn blaze hotly because its attainment meant struggle.

Then there was the conflict between that loyalty which the code of the Cumberlands impresses as a cardinal duty upon its children, and an insurgent hatred for the squalid family into which her father's second marriage had thrown her.

The law of feudalism and of the clan writes at the head of its decalogue, "Kith and kin above all." Minerva would have resented an implication of wanted staunchness, and yet as she sat with her small and well-chiseled chin cradled in the hands, which drudgery must soon make hard and shapeless, her eyes filled with tears and her slender body trembled with instinctive repulsion at the thought of return to the cabin where the razor-backed hogs would scratch their backs under the gaping floor timbers, and where darkness hung day-long between smoke-blackened rafters.

And though she did not admit that either, a part of the restlessness was the awakening of womanhood, and the woman's hunger for love. She thought of all the young men she knew back there; of the boorish creatures whose breath reeked with moonshine whiskey, and whose thoughts were as coarse as their brogans, and once more a shiver ran through her.

It all made her feel very wicked. She had come to the college and learned a little, and she had learned above all a fastidious discontent, which was poisoning her thoughts.

She told herself she ought to be very happy. Then a smile stole across her face as she sat there in the moonlight, and she drew from the collar of her calico dress a small medal on a string. It was a medal that had a few days before been awarded her for proficiency, but to her it stood for the nearest glimpse she had ever had of romance, though of romance passing by like a caravan which she had viewed from the wayside.

There had been spelling matches and recitations and the award of small prizes at the college, and the rough folk had trooped in from the countryside, riding mules or walking from many miles about. Women had come in bright-hued calicoes and sun-bonnets, and bearded, gaunt men in hodden-gray. Through that gathering and above it, since one who is very young and very inexperienced may be pardoned for a finger-touch from the gods of romance, a figure had stood out for Minerva Rawlins, endowed with every superiority.

The guests of honor on that occasion had been Old Mack Falkins and his son Henry. Old Mack had made a speech and, in awarding the prizes, his son had followed him. The people of the countryside had listened, and their applause had rocked the rafters, with that sincerity of admiration which they accorded to his native-born eloquence. But it was the younger man who had brought to Minerva Rawlins her first stir of hero-worship; the adulation of the inexperienced young girl for the first man she had seen who seemed an exemplar and a revelation.

Comparison is the one yard-stick of life, and by comparison this young man, who had lived the life of the outer world as well as that at home, might well have loomed large to such impressionable eyes.

Minerva was seeing that scene again; the school-room with its shuffling audience, and the young speaker whose words carried no taint of dialect or inelegance, as he spoke of the torch which was being lighted here to dispel the murk of illiteracy.