"No, indeed, Mrs. Carroll," they both replied, with suspicious promptness, and they sat up very straight, so that the backs of their coats presented an unbroken line.
John smiled at them.
"Are they often used?" he asked.
"Quite too often," answered Sydney, gravely. "As grandmother says, we do, indeed, live close to nature. If a man is angry with his neighbor, he calls him to his door on some moonless night and shoots him."
"In primitive society the primitive wants of man are satisfied in primitive ways," remarked Bob.
"Moses ought to have put the Ten Commandments on something stronger than stone if he meant them to be unbroken," added Patton.
Mrs. Carroll shook her head at him.
"I don't see how you can be so very primitive," insisted Katrina. "Now this——" She glanced expressively about the room, where old portraits surmounted the dark panelling and heavy rugs glowed warmly in the firelight.
"Oh, we are as composite in our mountains as are the people of any other part of these composite United States," said Sydney. "The mountaineers themselves are a mixture. There are men in coves distant from the railroad who are living on land to which their ancestors drove up their cattle from the low country three or four generations ago. These men are a law unto themselves. They have no opportunities for educating their children, and once in a while you hear of a family that never has heard the name of God."
"My great-grandfather came here in the early eighteen hundreds," said Bob, "and a queer lot he must have found. They say that there was a crop of younger sons of good English families which had been planted here as a good country for the culture of wild oats."