"A year ago. You remember the time I went hunting and didn't get back for two weeks?"
"Yes, but tell us—"
"Well, that time I was captured by the moonshiners and held for a week as a spy. I didn't say anything about it at home except confidentially to Jack, for fear mother would worry when I went hunting again. But I tell you fellows you never dreamed of the sort of poverty that those men and their families live in. I don't know whether they are poor because they lead criminal lives, or whether they lead criminal lives because they are poor. But I do know that that fellow told the truth the other night when he said that they do not usually have enough to eat. You saw how starved he was. That's the chronic condition of all of them; and yet these mountains are full of game and any man of even half ordinary industry can feed himself well by killing it.
"The trouble is they are hopeless people. They have no ambition, no energy, no 'go' in them. They drink too much of their illicit whiskey for one thing, I suppose, but I don't think that's the bottom trouble. They seem to be people born without energy. They like to sit still in the sunshine, unless there is a revenue officer to hunt down and shoot. I suppose they are what somebody in the newspapers calls 'degenerates'—people that are run down even before they are born."
"But tell us, Tom," broke in Harry, "how did you get away from them?"
"Why, I watched my chance," answered Tom, "till one day I 'got the drap' on my jailer, to employ their own language. With a cocked gun at his breast, I made him promise not to follow me, and then I retreated 'in good order' as the soldiers say, down the mountain, with both barrels cocked. But really, fellows, you can have no idea of the abject poverty or the inconceivable indolence of these people. The little energy they have is expended in making illicit whiskey and sneaking it down the mountain without getting caught. Many of them have already served long terms in prison, but they regard that merely as a manifestation of the law's injustice, just as they do the hanging of one of their number now and then, when he is caught shooting an agent of the revenue. They don't understand. They are as ignorant as they are poor, and their poverty exceeds anything that it is possible for us to conceive."
By this time Tom's scant strength was exhausted, and after muttering: "That's anybody's wild hog," he turned himself over in bed and went to sleep.