eat
Gap beyond Black Mountain but on the cannel-coal lands of Devil Judd
Tolliver as well. He was riding across from the Bluegrass to meet this
man at the railroad in Virginia, nearly two hundred miles away; he had
stopped to examine some titles at the county seat and he meant to go
on that day by way of Lonesome Cove. Opposite was the brick Court
House--every window lacking at least one pane, the steps yellow with
dirt and tobacco juice, the doorway and the bricks about the upper
windows bullet-dented and eloquent with memories of the feud which had
long embroiled the whole county. Not that everybody took part in it but,
on the matter, everybody, as an old woman told him, "had feelin's."
It had begun, so he learned, just after the war. Two boys were playing
marbles in the road along the Cumberland River, and one had a patch on
the seat of his trousers. The other boy made fun of it and the boy with
the patch went home and told his father. As a result there had already
been thirty years of local war. In the last race for legislature,
political issues were submerged and the feud was the sole issue. And a
Tolliver had carried that boy's trouser-patch like a flag to victory and
was sitting in the lower House at that time helping to make laws for the
rest of the State. Now Bad Rufe Tolliver was in the hills again and
the end was not yet. Already people were pouring in, men, women and
children--the men slouch-hatted and stalking through the mud in the
rain, or filing in on horseback--riding double sometimes--two men or two
women, or a man with his wife or daughter behind him, or a woman with a
baby in her lap and two more children behind--all dressed in homespun
or store-clothes, and the paint from artificial flowers on her hat
streaking the face of every girl who had unwisely scanned the heavens
that morning. Soon the square was filled with hitched horses, and an
auctioneer was bidding off cattle, sheep, hogs and horses to the crowd
of mountaineers about him, while the women sold eggs and butter and
bought things for use at home. Now and then, an open feudsman with a
Winchester passed and many a man was belted with cartridges for the big
pistol dangling at his hip. When court opened, the rain ceased, the sun
came out and Hale made his way through the crowd to the battered temple
of justice. On one corner of the square he could see the chief store of
the town marked "Buck Falin--General Merchandise," and the big man in
the doo