CHAPTER VI

T is related in the history of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, which burst out between neighbors over a

IT

stray pig, and claimed its toll of lives through a half century, that one of the Hatfield girls wrote on a white pillar at the front of her often bereaved house, "There is no place like home." The sequel tells that a cynical traveler passing that way, reflected on the annals of that house and added in postscript, "Leastways not this side of hell."

The story of the Hatfield-McCoy feud is in many ways that of other " wars " which have made of the roof-tree of the eastern divide a land beleaguered and unique.

To the crags and coves where he was born the mountain man adheres, and if by chance he is led to wander, even if he leaves his country for his country's good, the call of the highlands will inevitably draw him back to face the shot from the laurel and the vengeance of the enemy who has "bided his time."

Two hundred years ago a handful of Anglo-Saxons were stranded there where nature's defiance proved strong enough to halt their westward march.

It was not granted them, as it was their more favored brethren to colonize the rich land of promise beyond and upon them settled the bitter heritage of the derelict. Their great-grandchildren remain to-day pio

neers in bondage to the hills. They sing the songs once sung along the wild Scottish border and jealously hold to outgrown ideals. They fight to the death and turn away no shelterless stranger and forgive no enemy.

From such blood came Lincoln and from it will come other Lincolns.

To these men the ordered civilization of "Down be

low" means a foreign power which autocratically

crushes. It means Courts whose processes become a power in the hands of feudal enemies, used to smite and persecute.

In the war between the Haveys and the McBriars there was more than the forgotten episode of a stray razor-back, which was not surrendered to its lawful owners. They had for decades hated and killed each other with a fidelity of bitterness that made all their truces and intermarriages fail of permanent peace.

Between the territories where they had originally settled, stretched a barrier of hills broken by only one passable gap. The McBriars had made their first habitations east of that ridge and gap where the waters run toward the sea. The Haveys had set up their power to the west where the springs feed the rivers that go down to the Bluegrass and to Tennessee. Had the two clans been content to remain respectively on the sunrise and sunset slopes of the backbone, they might never have clashed, but there were bright-eyed women to the west and east. Feminine Havey eyes lured McBriar suitors and McBriar girls seemed to the Havey men worth any dare that Fate might set for their venturing. So it has been since young Montagus and Capulets ignored dead lines and long before. Smoke

went

up

from cabins on both sides that housed men and women of both clans. Hatred scattered and set up new points of infection all along Tribulation and beyond its headwaters.

The war of the States had rent them farther apart when McBriars fought for and Haveys against the Union. Since then each clan had wielded strong political power, and wielded it against each other, but far below flag and party went down the tap root of poisonous and personal hatred.

It was an unfortunate thing that Cal Douglas should, on a February afternoon, have shot to death his brother-in-law, Noah McKay, even if as Cal earnestly assured the Jury "he was jest obleeged an' beholden ter do hit." All the circumstances of the affair were inopportune for his kinsmen and the kinsmen of the man who died with a bullet through his vitals.

Cal bore a name for surly character and even in a land where grudge-bearing is a religion, he was deemed ultra fanatical in fanning the flame of hatred. Noah McKay, himself, was little loved by either the Haveys, into whose family he had married, or the McBriars from whom he sprang. Neighbors told of frequent and violent bickerings between the man and his shrewish wife who was the twin sister of Cal Douglas.

"Cal Douglas an' Noey McKay's woman air es much alike es two peas in a pod," went neighborhood pronouncement. "They air both soured on mankind an' they glories in human misery."

Had the fight on that winter evening ended in the death of both participants, McBriars and Haveys would alike have called it a gentle riddance and dropped the

matter where it stood. But since a Havey had slain a McBriar, and the Havey still lived it could not, in honor, be so dropped. It left an uneven score.

So the McBriars called that killing a murder while the Haveys styled it self-defense, and a new peg was driven upon which to hang clan bitterness.

Since the mountaineer has little to do in the winter and spring save gossip, the affair grew in importance with rehearsing and to each telling was added new features. It was assumed east of the ridge that Noah had incurred the displeasure of Bad Anse Havey by the suspicion of tale-bearing to old Milt McBriar. It was argued that that particular wife-beating might have passed as uneventfully as several similar episodes heretofore, had not the heads of the Haveys made it a pretext for eliminating a McBriar who dwelt in their midst. and carried news across the ridge to his own people.

For several years the feud had slept, not the complete sleep of death, but the fitful, simmering sleep of precarious animosity. Slowly the bitterness had become a fevered sore, so tense and strained that it needed only a spark to fire it into actual war. But neither clan felt so overwhelmingly strong as to court an issue just yet and realizing the desperate quality of any outbreak, both Milt McBriar" over yon" and Anse Havey over here had guarded the more belligerent kinsmen with jealous eye. They had until now held them checked and leashed, though growling.

For these reasons the trial had been awaited with a sense of crisis in the town of Peril where it might mean a pitched battle. So it had been awaited, too, up and down the creeks and branches that crept from the

ragged hills, where men were leading morbid lives of isolation and nursing grudges.

Yet nothing had happened, and though the streets were empty of peaceful folk and doors were barred, when the bell in the rickety cupola called men to attend "High-Court," the case had proceeded with a surprising apathy.

During the three days that the suspense of the trial continued, each recess of Court found the long-limbed frame of Milt McBriar tilted back in a split-bottomed chair on the flagstones at the front of the hotel. His dark face and piercing eyes gazed always thoughtfully, and very calmly off across the dusty town to the reposeful languor of the piled-up, purple skyline. Likewise each recess found seated at the other end of the same house-front the shorter, heavier figure of a fairhaired man with ruddy face and sandy mustache. Never did he appear there without two companions, who like his Lartius and Herminius remained at his right and left. Never did the dark giant speak to the florid man, yet never did either fail to keep a glance directed toward the other.

The man of the sandy hair was Breck Havey, next to Bad Anse, the most influential leader of the clan. His influence here in Peril made or unmade the officers of the law.

When these two men came together, as opposing witnesses in a homicide case, the air was fraught with elements of storm. "Thar's war a-brewin'," commented a native, glancing at the quietly seated figures one noon, 66 an' them fellers air in ther b'ilin'."