percentage of tax collections. How this works, in securing witnesses,
may be shown by an anecdote.--

I looked up from my work, one day, to see a neighbor striding swiftly
along the trail that passed my cabin.

"You seem in a hurry, John. Woods afire?"

"No: I'm dodgin' the sheriff."

"Whose pig was it?"

"Aw! He wants me as witness in a concealed weepon case."

"One of your boys?"

"Huk-uh: nobody as I'm keerin' fer."

"Then why don't you go?"

"I cain't afford to. I'd haffter walk nineteen miles out to the
railroad, pay seventy cents the round-trip to the county-site, pay my
board thar fer mebbe a week, and then a witness don't git no fee at all
onless they convict."

"What does the sheriff get for coming away up here?"

"Thirty cents for each witness he cotches. He won't git me, Mister Man;
not if I know these woods since yistiddy."

Verily the law of Swain is hard on the solicitor, hard on the sheriff,
and hard on the witness, too!

Mountaineers place a low valuation on human life. I need not go outside
my own habitat for illustrations. In our judicial district, which
comprises the westernmost seven counties of North Carolina, the present
yearly toll of homicides varies, according to counties, from about one
in 1,000 to one in 2,500 of the population. And ours is not a feud
district, nor are there any negroes to speak of. Compare these figures
with the rate of homicide in the United States at large, about one to
8,300 population; of Italy, one to 66,000; Great Britain, one to
111,000; Germany, one to 200,000.

And the worst of it is that no Black Hand conspirators or ward gun-men
or other professional criminals figure in these killings. Practically
all of them are committed by representative citizens, mostly farmers.
Take that fact home, and think what it means. Remember, too, that most
of these murderers either escape with light penal sentences or none at
all. The only capital sentence imposed in our district within the past
ten years was upon an Indian who had assaulted and murdered a white girl
(there was no red tape or procrastination about _that_ trial, the
court-house being filled with men who were ready to lynch him under the
judge's nose if the sentence were not satisfactory).

I said at the very outset of this book that "Our mountain folk still
live in the eighteenth century. The progress of mankind from that age to
this is no heritage of theirs.... And so, in order to be fair and just