e would bring in gingercakes
made of cane-molasses, bread homemade of Burr flour and moonshine and
apple-jack which the candidates would buy and distribute through the
crowd. And always during the afternoon there were men who would try to
prove themselves the best Democrats in the State of Virginia by resort
to tooth, fist and eye-gouging thumb. Then to these elections sometimes
would come the Kentuckians from over the border to stir up the hostility
between state and state, which makes that border bristle with enmity to
this day. For half a century, then, all wild oats from elsewhere usually
sprouted at the Gap. And thus the Gap had been the shrine of personal
freedom--the place where any one individual had the right to do his
pleasure with bottle and cards and politics and any other the right to
prove him wrong if he were strong enough. Very soon, as the Hon. Sam
Budd predicted, they had the hostility of Lee concentrated on them as
siding with the county of Wise, and they would gain, in addition
now, the general hostility of the Kentuckians, because as a crowd of
meddlesome "furriners" they would be siding with the Virginians in the
general enmity already alive. Moreover, now that the feud threatened
activity over in Kentucky, more trouble must come, too, from that
source, as the talk that came through the Gap, after young Dave
Tolliver's arrest, plainly indicated.

Town ordinances had been passed. The wild centaurs were no longer
allowed to ride up and down the plank walks of Saturdays with their
reins in their teeth and firing a pistol into the ground with either
hand; they could punctuate the hotel sign no more; they could not ride
at a fast gallop through the streets of the town, and, Lost Spirit of
American Liberty!--they could not even yell. But the lawlessness of the
town itself and its close environment was naturally the first objective
point, and the first problem involved was moonshine and its faithful
ally "the blind tiger." The "tiger" is a little shanty with an ever-open
mouth--a hole in the door like a post-office window. You place your
money on the sill and, at the ring of the coin, a mysterious arm emerges
from the hole, sweeps the money away and leaves a bottle of white
whiskey. Thus you see nobody's face; the owner of the beast is safe, and
so are you--which you might not be, if you saw and told. In every little
hollow about the Gap a tiger had his lair, and these were all bearded at
once by a petiti