“Hit might be quare. Then again it mightn’t. Listen, Miss, hit’s like this.”
Then for fifteen minutes, in his inimitable mountain dialect and drawl, the old man poured into her eager ears a story of such bitter battling for life, such a tale of feud fighting, as she had never before dreamed of hearing from human lips.
There were tales of stalwart men shot down on their very doorsteps, of battles in the night, of men carried from their homes to be seen no more.
All this had happened somewhere in the mountains, back of Big Black Mountain, beyond Poor Fork, over Pine Mountain, then back and still back.
When there remained but a remnant of what had once been a powerful family, the old giant, having heard of this vacant land at the head of Laurel Branch, had at last persuaded his followers to come here to live. And that there might be no more battles and bloodshed, they had shut themselves completely out from other people of the mountains. Only by a secret passage had they come and gone, to trade and barter in the valley below.
How strange life is! Even as this old man was telling of their long search for peace and how at last they had found it, forty men and boys, grim, determined mountain folks with rifles in hand, were marching upon the stone gateway which had heretofore held them back. It was Ransom Turner’s clan.
“And what’s this I hearn tell about?” the old giant exclaimed in a rumbling tone of anger. “What about them sorry people at the mouth of the crick takin’ you up fer gun totin’?”
Florence started. So intense had been her interest in the story that she had quite forgotten her own troubles.
“They—they’re to try me to-morrow,” she faltered.
“Fer gun totin’?”