The utmost of caution was still required, but the long flight was reaching a goal where substantial safety lay like a land of promise. It was a land of promise broken with ragged ranges and it was fiercely austere; the Cumberland mountains reared themselves like a colossal and inhospitable wall of isolation between the abundant richness of lowland Kentucky to the west, and Virginia’s slope seaward to the east.
But isolation spelled refuge and the taciturn silences of the men who dwelt there, asking few questions and answering fewer, gave promise of unmolested days.
These hills were a world in themselves; a world that had stood, marking time for a hundred and fifty years, while to east and west life had changed and developed and marched with the march of the years. Sequestered by broken steeps of granite and sand stone, the human life that had come to the coves and valleys in days when the pioneers pushed westward, had stagnated and remained unaltered.
Illiteracy and ignorance had sprung chokingly into weed-like prevalence. The blood-feud still survived among men who fiercely insisted upon being laws unto themselves. Speech fell in quaint uncouthness that belonged to another century, and the tides of progress that had risen on either hand, left untouched and uninfluenced the men and women of mountain blood, who called their lowland brethren “furriners” and who distrusted all that was “new-fangled” or “fotched-on.”
Habitations were widely separated cabins. Roads were creekbeds. Life was meager and stern, and in the labyrinths of honeycombed and forest-tangled wilds, men who were “hidin’ out” from sheriffs, from revenuers, from personal enemies, had a sentimental claim on the sympathy of the native-born.
This was the life from which the deserter had sprung. It was the life to which with eager impatience he was returning; a life of countless hiding places and of no undue disposition to goad a man with questioning.
Through the billowing richness of the Bluegrass lowlands, he had hurried with a homing throb in his pulses. As the foothills began to break out of the fallow meadows and the brush to tangle at the fringe of 55 the smoothness, his breath had come deeper and more satisfying. When the foothills rose in steepness until low, wet streamers of cloud trailed their slopes like shrapnel smoke, and the timber thickened and he saw an eagle on the wing, something like song broke into being in his heart.
He was home. Home in the wild mountains where air and the water had zest and life instead of the staleness that had made him sick in the flat world from which he came. He was home in the mountains where others were like him and he was not a barbarian any longer among contemptuous strangers.
He plodded along the shale-bottomed water course for a little way and halted. As his woodsman’s eye took bearings he muttered to himself: “Hit’s a right slavish way through them la’rel hills, but hit’s a cut-off,” and, suiting his course to his decision, he turned upward into the thickets and began to climb.