under those stars, toward the outer world.




IX


It was court day at the county seat across the Kentucky line. Hale
had risen early, as everyone must if he would get his breakfast in
the mountains, even in the hotels in the county seats, and he sat
with his feet on the railing of the hotel porch which fronted the
main street of the town. He had had his heart-breaking failures
since the autumn before, but he was in good cheer now, for his
feverish enthusiasm had at last clutched a man who would take up
not only his options on the great Gap beyond Black Mountain but on
the cannel-coal lands of Devil Judd Tolliver as well. He was
riding across from the Bluegrass to meet this man at the railroad
in Virginia, nearly two hundred miles away; he had stopped to
examine some titles at the county seat and he meant to go on that
day by way of Lonesome Cove. Opposite was the brick Court House--
every window lacking at least one pane, the steps yellow with dirt
and tobacco juice, the doorway and the bricks about the upper
windows bullet-dented and eloquent with memories of the feud which
had long embroiled the whole county. Not that everybody took part
in it but, on the matter, everybody, as an old woman told him,
"had feelin's." It had begun, so he learned, just after the war.
Two boys were playing marbles in the road along the Cumberland
River, and one had a patch on the seat of his trousers. The other
boy made fun of it and the boy with the patch went home and told