the end of another cigarette on Aunt Chloe's now clean-swept floor.
Marny spoke in crisp, detached sentences between the pats of his brush.
"Big, strong, whalebone-and-steel kind of fellows; rather fight than
eat. Quick as lightning with a gun; dead shots. Built just like our
border men. See that scout astride of his horse?"--and he pointed with
his mahl-stick to a sketch on the wall behind him--"looks like the real
thing, don't he? Well, I painted him from an up-country moonshiner.
Found him one morning across the river, leaning up against a telegraph
pole, dead broke. Been arrested on a false charge of making whiskey
without a license, and had just been discharged from the jail. Hadn't
money enough to cross the bridge, and was half-starved. So I braced him
up a little, and brought him here and painted him."

We all know with what heartiness Marny can "brace." It doubtless took
three cups of coffee, half a ham, and a loaf of bread to get him on his
feet, Marny watching him with the utmost satisfaction until the process
was complete.

"You ought to look these fellows over; they're worth it. Savage lot,
some of 'em. Remind me of the people who live about the foothills of the
Balkans. Mountaineers are the same the world over, anyway. But you don't
want to hunt for these Kentuckians in their own homes unless you send
word you are coming, or you may run up against the end of a rifle before
you know it. I don't blame them." Marny leaned back in his chair and
turned toward me. "The Government is always hunting them as if they were
wild beasts, instead of treating them as human beings. They can't
understand why they shouldn't get the best prices they can for their
corn. They work hard enough to get it to grow. Their theory is that the
Illinois farmer feeds the corn to his hogs and sells the product as
pork, while the mountaineer feeds it to his still and sells the product