“I would certainly appreciate it,” Scott said, as he settled himself down on the fence to listen. “I have come here to run this forest, and if that store down there has anything to do with it, I want to know about it.”
“Come in, come in,” the old man repeated hospitably. “It’s a long story, and you might as well sit down to listen to it.”
Scott gladly stepped inside the fence, and took a seat opposite his host on the porch. “By the way,” he said, “I thought I saw two stores down there in the village. Which one do you mean?”
“That’s just the point. If there was only one store there you could buy all you pleased, but if you buy anything from one of those stores now, the fellow who owns the other one would sure get you.”
“But can’t a man buy where he pleases in this country?” Scott asked indignantly. His spirit rebelled at any one dictating to him the way he should run what he considered to be his own business.
“Not and live in peace,” the old man answered sadly. “I’ll tell you the story, and then you can do as you please.
“You see the people here in the mountains don’t move around much. When a man gets used to these mountains he never wants to live anywhere else. The children don’t marry, and go off somewhere else to live; they just put up another shanty, and live close to home. The families stick close together, and form a kind of settlement. Most everybody in the settlement is kin to somebody else.
“The Morgans live in the settlement up on this side of the valley, and the Waits over there on the other side. They were good friends and getting along fine till the railroad come down the valley. They called old Zeb Morgan and old Foster Wait together to decide where the station ought to be. They got into a row over it somehow, and before anybody could interfere Foster had pulled a gun and shot Zeb through the heart. That was forty years ago. Well, it was a murder all right, and no excuse for it except Foster’s notorious temper. The sheriff took Foster off to jail, and that ought to have ended it. Would have ended it, too, if it had not been for Zeb’s half-witted brother Jim. Everybody knew Jim wasn’t exactly right in his head, but he worshiped Zeb, and when Zeb was shot he went plumb crazy, disappeared and nobody saw or heard of him for a week. Next thing anybody knew Jim had turned up in the middle of the Wait settlement and shot two of Foster’s brothers.
“Well, they should not have held the Morgans responsible for the actions of a crazy man, but they did, and the fight was on. The dead line was drawn down the middle of the village street, and every time a Wait stepped over that dead line, he had to duck Morgan lead, and the Waits were just as quick on the trigger on the other side. Every once in a while some one on one side or the other would get drunk and shoot across the line.
“It got pretty bad. All the kin folks got mixed up in it, and there was a funeral every two or three months. There has not been much shooting for the past five years. The Morgans got the worst of the scrap in the early days, and there’s only old Jarred and his two sons left of the direct descendants of Zeb. Unless you count his little granddaughter Vic. She’s the fightenest little wildcat in the whole bunch. Of course there are lots of relatives, but they had cooled off pretty much till this national forest business came along to stir them up again.