red show of battle. He fired two or three shots with his
Winchester (wisely over the posse's heads) and then took to the tall
timber. Dodging from tree to tree he led the impromptu officers such a
dance up the mountainside that by the time they had corralled him they
were "plumb overhet."

They set that impetuous young man on a sharp-spined little jackass,
strapped his feet under the animal's belly, and their chief (my hunting
partner, he was) drove him, that same night, twenty-five miles over a
horrible mountain trail, and lodged him in the county jail, on a charge
more serious than that of moonshining.

In due time, a United States deputy arrived in our midst, bearing a
funny-looking hatchet with a pick at one end, which he called a "devil."
With the pick end of this instrument he punched numerous holes through
the offending copper vessel, until the still looked somewhat like a
gigantic horseradish-grater turned inside out. Then he straightened out
the worm by ramming a long stick through it, and triumphantly carried
away with him the copper-sheathed staff, as legal proof, trophy, and
burgeon of office.

The sorry old still itself reposes to this day in old Brooks's backyard,
where it is regarded by passersby as an emblem, not so much of Federal
omnipotence, as of local efficiency in administering the law with
promptitude, and without a pennyworth of cost to anybody, save to the
offender.

CHAPTER VII

A LEAF FROM THE PAST

In the United States, moonshining is seldom practiced outside the
mountains and foothills of the southern Appalachians, and those parts of
the southwest (namely, in southern Missouri, Arkansas and Texas), into
which the mountaineers have immigrated in considerable numbers.

Here, then, is a conundrum: How does it happen that moonshining is
distinctly a foible of the southern mountaineer?

To get to the truth, we must hark back into that eighteenth century
wherein, as I have already remarked, our mountain people are lingering
to this day. We must leave the South; going, first, to Ireland of 150 or
175 years ago, and then to western Pennsylvania shortly after the
Revolution.

The people of Great Britain, irrespective of race, have always been
ardent haters of excise laws. As Blackstone has curtly said, "From its
original to the present time, the very name of excise has been odious
to the people of England." Dr. Johnson, in his dictionary, defined
excise as "A hateful tax levied up