wn, miserable
proposition, and plain, cold-blooded murderers, willin' to wait for
a sure thing, and without no compunctions whatever. The bad man
takes you unawares, when you're sleepin', or talkin', or drinkin',
or lookin' to see what for a day it's goin' to be, anyway. He don't
give you no show, and sooner or later he's goin' to get you in the
safest and easiest way for himself. There ain't no romance about
that.'"

And there is no romance about a real mountain feud. It is marked by
suave treachery, "double-teaming," "laywaying," "blind-shooting," and
general heartlessness and brutality. If one side refuses to assassinate
but seeks open, honorable combat, as has happened in several feuds, it
is sure to be beaten. Whoever appeals to the law is sure to be beaten.
In either case he is considered a fool or a coward by most of the
countryside. Our highlander, untouched by the culture of the world about
him, has never been taught the meaning of fair play. Magnanimity to a
fallen foe he would regard as sure proof of an addled brain. The motive
of one who forgives his enemy is utterly beyond his comprehension. As
for bushwhacking, "Hit's as fa'r for one as 'tis for t'other. You can't
fight a man fa'r and squar who'll shoot you in the back. A pore man
can't fight money in the courts." In this he is simply his ancient
Scotch or English ancestor born over again. Such was the code of
Jacobite Scotland and Tudor England. And _back there_ is where our
mountaineer belongs in the scale of human evolution.

The feud, as Miss Miles puts it, is an outbreak of _perverted_ family
affection. Its mainspring is an honorable clan loyalty. It is a direct
consequence of the clan organization that our mountaineers preserve as
it was handed down to them by their forefathers. The implacability of
their vengeance, the treacheries they practice, the murders from ambush,
are invariable features of clan warfare wherever and by whomsoever it is
waged. They are not vices or crimes peculiar to the Kentuckian or the
Corsican or the Sicilian or the Albanian or the Arab, but natural
results of clan government, which in turn is a result of isolation, of
physical environment, of geographical position unfavorable to free
intercourse and commerce with the world at large.

The most hideous feature of the feud is the shooting down of unarmed or
unwarned men. Assassination, in our modern eyes, is the last and lowest
infamy o