There was now but one day between the new church and its dedication. In secret service circles, down in Frankfort, it had long been mooted that the pet aim of Peter H. Burton was to capture old Cap Lutts.
Burton had, during his service, previously captured many members of the Lutts faction. The commissioners were ready enough to bind them over, but trials never carried a conviction. Burton had even juggled cases, alternately, on venue writs, between the six Federal Courts in the Eastern District, but the Lutts blood invariably cropped up, stealthful and rich in sympathy, in the precincts of the petit jury room. Acquittal followed acquittal.
But now Burton, feeling himself close upon the heels of the King of Moonshiners, altered his procedure and, armed with a premature change of venue to Frankfort, he hunted Lutts with a renewed zeal, keen and pleasurable.
Indeed, the younger attachés of the office regarded Cap Lutts as an historic myth. In jest, knowing Burton's affinity for wildcat skins, they hinted that the Lutts in question was merely a wraith-pilot pointing toward new skins—a favorite platitude upon which to stage another hunting vacation. But to Chief Burton, the subject of this jest was far removed from joking premises; mainly for the adequate reason that he himself, like many of his predecessors, had eyed old Cap Lutts more than once. His corporeal being had felt Lutts' lead.
Although the astute Burton had toiled a part of each season for eleven consecutive years on the border trail of this subtle law-breaker, Lutts had as yet never seen the county calaboose, or the barriers of a blue-grass jail. Burton had surprised him time and again, but inventory of these encounters always told the same trite story—the moonshiner had simply melted into absence.
After the smoke of some of these sorties, Burton had either limped or loped away with hopes mounting over a trail of blood. But these red splotches never led to the man. This feud leader and distilling chieftain of the range still reigned and the stereotyped report to headquarters was simply dated and signed with open blanks, a form to apprise headquarters that the officer was still alive.
Under pressure the county authorities periodically sought old Lutts. The times when they did find him, they merely flirted mutually with the faction and subsided harmlessly.
With the completion of the meeting-house, Cap Lutts had attained his goal; nor had he suffered the neighboring denizens of the foothills to raise an axe, or donate a single clapboard toward the erection of this infantile sanctuary. It was an enshrined monument to Maw Lutts. It was a mural hanging against Moon mountain, the place of her birth and the scene of her death. It was her own cherished endowment to the rifle-toting, tobacco-swallowing, snuff-chewing community. It was Maw Lutts's and his individual, holy triumph. All Cap Lutts expected of the people was, he told them:
"T' cum when th' ridin' pahson rid up t' ded'cate th' gawspel-house; an' tote thar sins t' th' altar, an' donate 'em at th' cross t' be wyshed 'way with th' blood uv Calv'ry—an' keep on a comin' thet they mought be clean an' onspotted an'—Gawd an' my gun'll damn ary hillbilly what darst lift a han' to hender."
The church represented months of hard toil, interrupted only when Cap Lutts fled up to the rock-ribbed pockets of the mountain or down into some untrodden ravine to escape Burton, the revenuer. Even in such intervals, the old man had sallied out into the night like the crag-panther, when the moon had turned white; and climbed high, with rifle ready and the hollow-flanked hound at his heels, to visit the clearing and gloat in solitude beneath the trembling stars over the progress of his sacred enterprise.