The church itself stood on "squatted" soil. Crowned with rhododendrons and laurel blossoms, it reared its exotic head in defiant challenge to Satan, like a single star upon the horizon of feudal gloom.
The level space had cost Lutts nothing but labor. The logs had cost him nothing but work. With his own hands and crude appliances of the back forests he had split, shaped and trimmed eleven thousand cedar clapboards; but when it came to interior finish he was extravagant and fastidious.
The white-pine tongue-and-grooved boards that he used to make the platform and the altar, the window and door plates; and the wide, smooth planks turned into benches, all represented cash—and cash was a rarity in the sterile Moon mountain district. And, too, the new gold-hued bell, which now nestled in its cotlike belfry, about to utter its virgin exhortation across those Godless hills, cost money.
Cap Lutts had paid this money ungrudgingly, for it was his own. Had he not, together with his son Lem, and Slab, the negro, and the two red steers, plowed the slanting plot that hung on the hip of the mountain and sown the grain, and tilled it, and reaped it, and carried it to the hidden still, where he had brewed it into money?
It was Lutts's own scant, hard-earned dollars that had bought the boards, the nails, and the bell.
True, it was not a regular church bell; but it was the largest farm bell he could procure and it had taken the steers five hot days to go to Flat Gap Junction and haul back the bell, and the nails, and the polished boards and glass.
CHAPTER II
BELLE-ANN BENSON
Beneath Eagle Crown the four-room cabin reposed in a shelter of spruce-pine, hemlock and cedar. Its plot was covered with countless quaint flowers and its rock-hemmed path to the horse-block in front was lined with pink wild roses and forget-me-nots. Here the creeping ivy and honeysuckle ran wild.