, climbs, climbs. Hour after hour the men climb. Then they
begin to descend.

They have crossed the divide, a mile above sea-level, and are in another
State. Hour after hour they "climb down," as they would say. They visit
farmers' homes at dead of night. Each man shoulders two bushels of
shelled corn and starts back again over the highest mountain range in
eastern America. It is twenty miles to the little mill. They carry the
corn thither on their own backs. They sprout it, grind it, distill it.
Two of them then carry the whiskey twenty miles in the opposite
direction, and, at the risk of capture and imprisonment, or of death if
they resist, peddle it out by dodging, secret methods.

This is no fancy sketch; it is literal truth. It is no story of the
olden time, but of our own day. Do you wonder that one of these men
should say, with a sigh--should say this? "Blockadin' is the hardest
work a man ever done. And hit's wearin' on a feller's narves. Fust
chance I git, I'm a-goin' ter quit!"

And it is a fact that nine out of ten of those who try the moonshining
game do quit before long, of their own accord.

* * * * *

One day there came a ripple of excitement in our settlement. A blockader
had shot at Jack Coburn, and a posse had arrested the would-be
assassin--so flew the rumor, and it proved to be true.

Coburn was a northern man who, years ago, opened a little store on the
edge of the wilderness, bought timber land, and finally rose to
affluence. With ready wit he adapted himself to the ways of the
mountaineers and gained ascendancy among them. Once in a while an
emergency would arise in which it was necessary either to fight or to
back down, and in these contests a certain art that Jack had acquired in
Michigan lumber camps proved the undoing of more than one mountain
tough, at the same time winning the respect of the spectators. He was
what a mountaineer described to me as "a practiced knocker." This
phrase, far from meaning what it would on the Bowery, was interpreted to
me as denoting "a master hand in a knock-fight." Pugilism, as
distinguished from shooting or stabbing, was an unknown art in the
mountains until Jack introduced it.

Coburn had several tenants, among whom was a character whom we will call
Edwards. In leasing a farm to Edwards, Jack had expressly stipulated
that there was to be no moonshining on the premises. But, by and by,
there was reason to suspect that Edwa