th the Old World. They were Unionists
because of the Revolution, as they were Americans in the beginning
because of the spirit of the Covenanter. They live like the pioneers;
the axe and the rifle are still their weapons and they still have the
same fight with nature. This feud business is a matter of clan-loyalty
that goes back to Scotland. They argue this way: You are my friend or
my kinsman, your quarrel is my quarrel, and whoever hits you hits me.
If you are in trouble, I must not testify against you. If you are an
officer, you must not arrest me; you must send me a kindly request to
come into court. If I'm innocent and it's perfectly convenient--why,
maybe I'll come. Yes, we're the vanguard of civilization, all right, all
right--but I opine we're goin' to have a hell of a merry time."

Hale laughed, but he was to remember those words of the Hon. Samuel
Budd. Other members of that vanguard began to drift in now by twos and
threes from the bluegrass region of Kentucky and from the tide-water
country of Virginia and from New England--strong, bold young men with
the spirit of the pioneer and the birth, breeding and education of
gentlemen, and the war between civilization and a lawlessness that was
the result of isolation, and consequent ignorance and idleness started
in earnest.

"A remarkable array," murmured the Hon. Sam, when he took an inventory
one night with Hale, "I'm proud to be among 'em."

Many times Hale went over to Lonesome Cove and with every visit his
interest grew steadily in the little girl and in the curious people
over there, until he actually began to believe in the Hon. Sam Budd's
anthropological theories. In the cabin on Lonesome Cove was a crane
swinging in the big stone fireplace, and he saw the old step-mother and
June putting the spinning wheel and the loom to actual use. Sometimes
he found a cabin of unhewn logs with a puncheon floor, clapboards for
shingles and wooden pin and auger holes for nails; a batten wooden
shutter, the logs filled with mud and stones and holes in the roof for
the wind and the rain. Over a pair of buck antlers sometimes lay the
long heavy home-made rifle of the backwoodsman--sometimes even with a
flintlock and called by some pet feminine name. Once he saw the hominy
block that the mountaineers had borrowed from the Indians, and once a
handmill like the one from which the one woman was taken and the
other left in biblical days. He struck communities where the medium