Hatfield had a smattering of education, and was reputed as upstanding as a mountain fighter could well be. Certainly, Johnse did not stand up and invite hot pellets of lead. He did not scorn a rock or a tree any more than did his opposing belligerents. But throughout his life the value of his given word was equal to a fulfillment. Those who bargained for this man's word felt that on the spot where Johnse defaulted they would find his dead body.
When Lem Lutts had disappeared so inexplicably from the mountains, Hatfield had, after a hasty search, hied himself out and visited every calaboose and county jail in the surrounding country. He knew the cunning of Burton, the revenuer, well enough, but little did he anticipate such a flagrant irregularity as the transfer of a "moonshiner" to the capital of the State, with a dozen counties separating the place of offense. Such a procedure was depriving a defendant of all constitutional rights, and an effrontery to county jurisprudence, the enormity of which Hatfield could not ascribe to the power of even the wily, murderous revenuer.
CHAPTER XV
BUDDY FORCES AN ISSUE
After getting authentic information from the offices of the six Federal commissioners in the eastern district, and finding, to his deep chagrin, absolutely no trace of Lem Lutts, Johnse returned, and calling fifty men, he instituted a search that lasted for weeks. He beat every mountain side up to its crest. He scoured every cave and cove, and creek bottom. There was not a square yard of rock or earth or tangled brush that had escaped his search for Lem. But they did not find Lem's bones, and finally, Hatfield had resumed the regular routine amidst daily conjectures and prophecies, and dire maledictions from the men, directed toward the McGills.
While Johnse made no outward preparations for hostilities, his mind was busy. This disappearance of Lem Lutts was not a closed incident to be relegated to forgetfulness. On the contrary, as the months passed, the temper of the Lutts' faction waxed to such a stage of suppressed fury that Hatfield knew it was only a matter of time, and a brief time at that, before he would be compelled to head a massacre over in Southpaw. It was while Johnse was making preparations after careful deliberations, to force a fight with the McGills and square for the supposed annihilation of Lem Lutts, that an unlooked-for incident occurred which hastened the conflict, but changed the site of battle.
Prior to the death of old Cap Lutts, he had moved his distillery to a new site. Some fifty yards distant from the blind mouth of a cave he drilled a hole downward through forty feet of rock and earth and into a cave. Then he ran a channel pipe up through this hole and directly over the outlet he built a two-room cabin. This pipe was merged into the structure behind the fireplace in the cabin and continued upward some feet to where it opened out into the chimney proper; wherefore all the pungent odors and smoke from the distillery in the cave beneath the cabin followed this pipe and issued into the atmosphere through the chimney in a most natural manner.
Nothing short of destruction of the cabin could have disclosed the presence of this ingenious device. Moreover, in the improbable event that prying eyes had been permitted to scrutinize these premises, it is highly doubtful that the mouth to the cave would have been discovered after the most minute and careful search. Because the entrance to this underground region was barely spacious enough to admit one man on his hands and knees.
Furthermore, this entrance would be wholly and snugly closed by a huge boulder several tons in weight, or more than twenty men could displace. This great rock had the innocent appearance of a hundred other rocks all about it, and was so trussed up and balanced that one man could knock the prop out with a single blow, thereby releasing it and allowing it to drop back with its concave side fitting over the mouth of the cave in a manner that defied detection. When this precaution was resorted to, it required the labor of thirty men and two steers to truss it up again.