Yes, it meant trouble. The men on both sides eased off their pistol belts, loosened their holsters, under pretense of settling their coat tails or fumbling for tobacco.
But David Joslin raised his hand at once. “Wait!” said he. So, still silent, still motionless, they sat and looked at him, many in contempt, as many in judgment suspended.
He seemed thinner even than when he had left. His face bore a certain scholarly whiteness visible even under the burning of the sun—Joslin did not tell them so, but the truth was he had walked more than half the way from Brandon College—where for two years he had slaved at learning as no man in all the history of that school had been thought able to slave. Penniless at his hopeless start, he still was penniless after his overleaping of all rules and schedules and curricula. He had walked to this, his great trial. In some way he had been fed. In his own conviction that had been by direct act of God.
Better clad than when he had left, in a dark suit of clothing which did not fit him ill, with shoes at least not badly broken, and with certain touches of refinements of the civilization outside, none the less he remained the mountain man they had known so well. But something in his voice seemed different His diction had altered perceptibly, if not consistently. He stood before them now at ease, a leader, a speaker, even an orator of some sort, at least in the possession of that gift of oratory which in simple terms commands the attention of an audience.
“Wait!” said David Joslin. “Don’t make any move. I know why you’re here as well as you do, maybe a good deal better. I sent word in for you all to come. I’ve asked you to come here myself—I arranged this meeting with some of my friends here at the Forks. I wanted every moonshiner and feudist in the mountains to be right here to-night, where I could look him in the eye, and he could look me in the eye, and we could have it out together.
“No! I don’t mean to have it out in the old way. I want to tell you those times are past I see you sitting there, Absalom Gannt—I know you’re not a-scared of me, and I’m not a-scared of you. You’re fighting men, every one of you. And you’ve come here to fight each other once more—to kill each other, just like you and I and our fathers have been doing here in these mountains farther back than any of us can remember. You don’t know why you do that, but you think you ought to do it. It’s a sort of religion with us, just to kill each other. We don’t know no better—we never have.
“You thought I was a coward because I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I didn’t tell any of my own people. In a way, I just sneaked out of this country, that’s true, because I wasn’t yet sure about it all. I went down the river. I got to the railroad. I went up North. After a while I got so that I could go to school. That’s what taken me out of the mountains.
“Before I left these hills I had resolved to learn how to read and write and to cipher a little bit. I didn’t know then how much there was to be learned in the world. I didn’t know how hard it was to start—nor how easy once you get started.
“I’ve been at school less than a quarter of the time any boy of these hills ought to have been there. I’ve learned more than I thought there was to be learned anywhere. And this is the first thing I’ve learned—that it’s time we mountaineers stopped raising our children for the slaughter.