Why the menacing hand of an outer world was lifted against him was a problem he had long since despaired of solving. Fondly now he gazed down toward the spot where the new cedar clapboards of the meeting-house shimmered like a disk of true gold beneath the moon's whiteness; beckoning to him with an insistence that stirred his stoic heart to its depths.
A tender look softened the old man's opaque mask-like features, as fumbling in his shirt-pocket and bringing forth a worn tintype picture of a woman, swathed in buckskin, he held it to the moon's rays and for a full minute peered tenderly at the kindly pictured eyes and smiling lips. Then, clasping the tintype reverently between his two mighty hands, he leaned against the natural buttress at his back, and his great head, crowned with its hoary white mane, was bowed down.
"To-morry—to-morry," he whispered, and he knew that the picture smiled forgivingly and happily back to him.
With the proceeds of moonshine whiskey, backed by the brawn of heredity and a righteous purpose, old Cap Lutts had at last realized the dream of two lives—his own and that of his dead wife, Maw Lutts. Although grievously late, he had now moulded this double dream into a tangible reality; for now before him, in the center of the clearing at the frowsy, feudal base of Moon mountain, and just where the rabid waters of Hellsfork leaped like live, wild things in their down-grade race across forty-odd rugged miles of Kentucky, this grizzled hillman viewed in sober, pious exultation, the product of his log church, all but finished.
A church is an acquisition strangely alien to this mountain-piled country, where the strategy of family wars and illicit distilling is religiously pursued. Nevertheless, he and Maw Lutts had dreamed in unison for years and had longed for the culmination of this extravagant, divine purpose.
Formerly, it had appeared to him that the propitious hour in their furtive existence had not arrived, although daily he had clearly foreseen it in the rising sun of the morrow. Always with the firm intention to do, he had added postponement to delay, and another broken promise on the creased brow of Maw Lutts and another prayer in her sorrowing heart.
However, the belated church was finally upon the perilous premises. Then with the poignant achings that many desirable citizens had felt before him, the old man had gone to the orchard like a penitent truce-breaker, where on his knees in supplicant whispers he had unfolded his tardy atonement and laid it like a tarnished sceptre at the woman's mute, unseeing grave-side.
Since the majority of native adults were babies, the magic name of Cap Lutts was mouthed in every cabin on the border range. He held the novel status where popularity was abreast with notoriety. Long since the populace had heard of his intention to build a church. Looking across the epitome of delay, they told themselves that this was the first pledge the old man had ever made, which he had not kept, so now the redeeming news of Cap Lutts' finished meeting-house and the day of dedication had penetrated the remotest habitants of the mountains. This intelligence had gone hither to friend and enemy, pious and wicked alike, with the same mysterious agency and puzzling rapidity that characterizes winged warnings of the on-coming revenuer.
Every man and woman in the district, big enough to pull a trigger, knew that he held a certain latent stock in this meeting-house. It came like an unknown heritage suddenly delivered. While some would, surreptitiously, have exchanged their interest for a mustard plaster, they knew that it was not negotiable. They lied aloud, but in their hearts they knew that sooner or later they would follow that magnetic spark Luttsward. They knew that they would either cross the hypnotic threshold of that sanctuary into the halo of sacred enlightenment, or halt without in the darkness of superstition and feudal malice and spend their ammunition to help crush it.
There was no intermediate platform. There was no neutral grand-stand wherein the indifferent could take refuge. The populace stood either for or against. Even the lethargic, voteless clay-eaters sat up and took notice like a nest of snakes in the sunshine. The relatives and friendly factions representing the prospective congregation, did homage to Cap Lutts and clamored to make the church a success. The enemy over in Southpaw had already advanced the prophecy that they would take the meeting-house. But the flapping of feudal wings did not perturb this veteran hawk of the hills. His one apprehension was of the common enemy, the "revenuer."