The Code of the Mountains. Charles Neville Buck
of men to settle their own quarrels after the method of the Scottish clans from whom they sprang, has been a thing which local courts have made only perfunctory efforts to deny—and which juries of the vicinage stubbornly refused to deny. Among their crude cabins one still hears phrases bequeathed by word of mouth from the England of Elizabeth and the Scotland of Mary Stuart. Immured behind their walls of sandstone, they have lived ignorantly—and fiercely.
Their peaks are heaped against the skies, and their fields are tilled with the hoe when mules and plows might fall down to destruction. With nature itself they pursue a constant and desperate quarrel for subsistence, and through generations of battle they have grown morose and sullen and vengeful and have lost all sense of life's humor.
But slowly the tide of outside influence is creeping in upon them and at the contact-points strangely anomalous conditions arise: the clash of incongruous centuries; the war between a stubborn old order and an inevitable new. In such a life there are here and there far-sighted men who, standing like great trees among stunted brethren, look out across a wider perspective with a surer vision.
The house of McAllister Falkins stands twenty miles from a railroad and is, for this crude environment, a mansion. It was built in the days when the first tide of pioneer life swept out of Virginia, and because it was, in that remote day, nearer kin to the culture of the Old Dominion than to the wilderness, it bore a strange blending of compromises between luxury and the exigency of the frontier.
The head of the house of Falkins, generation after generation, had clung to the old standards and old ideals. The children of this household had been reared like their cousins of Virginia and the bluegrass. Other branches of the family bearing the surname had gone to seed and lapsed into illiteracy. There were cousins who had to sign their names with cross-marks and who had been embroiled in savage animosities until the "Spooner-Falkins War" had become one of the sanguinary chapters of feudal history, but the head of the house had always stood apart and denounced the godless code of the vendetta.
And now the time was come when old McAllister Falkins could look ahead and begin to see the pale glow of a coming dawn. The railroads, whose surveyors and chain-bearers his neighbors had fought, were piercing and developing the hills. Here and there rose a circuit judge or a prosecuting attorney who dared to talk from an unterrified soul to grand and petit juries, and occasionally a panel harkened. District schools began to pass into the hands of teachers who could teach. In this place and that rose small colleges and the flickering blaze of enlightenment was struggling into a semblance of steadiness. McAllister Falkins had sent his son Henry away to school and college, and had had the satisfaction of seeing him return unspoiled.
The life of young Henry Falkins, therefore, had been cast both in and out of the Cumberlands, and he had reached the age of twenty-five with a minimum of enemies and a maximum of friends. His was the breadth of the lowlands and the unflinching strength of the hills. Then the lurking and inevitable shadow of that life had impalpably and suddenly fallen upon him.
When Bud Mortimer, a "marked man," riding home from Jackson, had slid from his horse and died in a creek-bed with a rifle-hole drilled through his chest, Falkins had been unlucky enough to have been squirrel-shooting near by and to have recognized one of three figures that left the open road and took cover in the laurel. By one of the strange chances of fate, Falkins, who was tramping the woods with no idea of concealment, had been unobserved, while the three assassins, crouching along with all their covert art of hiding out, had not quite escaped his eye. He had not heard the volley because the murder had taken place at a distance. He would not have suspected the men who passed casually below him with their rifles cradled in their elbows, had not a word or two, in the staccato voice of a youth who walked third in the single file, come to his ears. These words were profanely triumphant and boastful of marksmanship. The other two men, the squirrel-hunter did not recognize. Still, Henry Falkins might not have known that the bull's-eye alluded to had been a human breast, and he did not know it till later.
When the dead man's friends had carried the matter to the courts, with no better evidence perhaps than the bad blood which they knew existed, and when young Newt Spooner, aged eighteen, but precocious in crime, stood at the bar, charged with murder, Henry Falkins told the prosecutor what he had seen. The prosecutor instructed him to keep his secret until he was called as a witness. He knew the conditions and recognized that, should this evidence come prematurely to the ears of the Spooners, he should probably not only lose valuable evidence, but also be saddled with another prosecution for murder—and just now his homicide docket was burdensomely heavy.
When their cub was indicted, the Spooner pack laughed. When he was haled into court, despite his callow years, he came with insolent confidence, as one above the law. He might have escaped and hidden out, since the court had allowed him bond, but that would have hampered his future freedom of action, so he preferred to go through the farce of a trial, and afterward be free.
He testified, and his alibi corps testified as one man, that he had been at Hazard, forty miles away, when Mortimer fell. The defense closed in sanguine trustfulness. Then, in rebuttal, the prosecution sprung a surprise—a sensation—a bomb. The surprise was Henry Falkins, and when he took the stand, the hand-made alibi collapsed. Even then Newt Spooner had not been able to realize that the convincing story of one witness could destroy his carefully fabricated tissue of lies. But sundry unexpected things were happening in this dingy court-room. A new spirit reigned there. Vaguely the sullen lad, crouching back in the prisoner's chair, was aware of a hardening and petrifying resolve on the rugged faces in the jury-box. Heretofore the average venireman had thought there was no health in incurring the wrath of a family of terrorists like the Spooners. Heretofore Spooners had always "come cl'ar." Heretofore prosecutors had made only perfunctory attempts to convict them. Not so with the Honorable Cale Floyd. From opening statement to closing argument he leaped savagely at the throat of the defense. His cross-examination was a merciless hail of verbal rifle-fire. As he defied all the vicious animosities of the Spooner tribe, the court-room held its breath, and young Newt waited vainly for his kinsmen to rise en masse and silence his anathemas with a volley. Each night in his cell, young Newt Spooner wondered why he did not hear a sound outside the brick "jail-house," and see the doors go down before the wrath of his rescuers. It was incredible that the clan should stand by and permit him to be "penitentiaried." Yet it finally dawned upon him that precisely this thing was happening. The realization had dazed and embittered him. He knew that even among his own he was not accounted as of great importance, but he bore the name of Spooner, and in the old days that would have been enough. He was the first sacrifice to the changing order. He felt no resentment against the prosecutor in spite of his philippics. The prosecutor was paid to do it. He even rather admired the courage which gave strength to the attack, when every precedent told the lawyer that he was inviting death for his pains. But for the man who had volunteered to testify; who belonged to the family which his family had hated and fought; who had come back to the mountains with "fotched-on" ideas and attacked him with the despised weapon of the law; for that man he felt such hatred as can only come of festering and venomous brooding, which lasts while life lasts.
These thoughts Newt Spooner carried as companions as he tramped the first leg of his homeward journey. Until he had come to Frankfort, hand-cuffed to a deputy sheriff, he had never seen this land of "down below." Its softly billowing landscape was to him unfamiliar and unpleasing. The great columned mansions of time-stained brick set deep in park-like woodlands; the smoothness of velvet lawns; rippling acres of grain ripening into gold under the June sun; all these things wore on his nerves. He was accustomed to a country shut in and sequestered between eternal hills; of roads where footfalls were silenced; of ragged patches of cultivation pocketed in surrounding forests. In such places a man could step aside and be hidden. Here he felt exposed; his very thoughts seemed naked. That men should live in such great houses and drive such smooth roads seemed monstrous and incredible. He hated the "highfalutin" bearing of these "furriners," who carried their chins aloft like masters of creation. He hated the sight of the "niggers" who served them. He hated all the orderly smoothness and opulence of this level land where no ridges broke the sky. So he stalked along, his face set toward the far horizon, beyond which lay his mountains and his purpose.
It was a slow journey, for he was weak, but as he breathed the June air into his cramped lungs, his shoulders