Read Ebook: A Tar-Heel Baron by Smith Mabell S C Mabell Shippie Clarke Holloway Edward Stratton Illustrator

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Ebook has 1588 lines and 47084 words, and 32 pages

use as the people on the upper boundary of the Bronx are from Castle Garden; but in point of convenience, owing to the scarcity of trains and their poor arrangement, we are almost as near to Washington."

"Still, the railroad has opened the country and given the farmers new markets," asserted John.

"Undoubtedly; but that is not an unmixed good, in my opinion," said Mrs. Carroll, stoutly. "They sell more cabbages and apples, but they buy cheap fabrics and ready-made clothing in place of the stout homespun that the women used to weave."

"You'd be surprised," said Patton, "to know how little the country people use the railroad. There was an example of it day before yesterday. A man from McDowell's Creek, about six miles from Flora, took his first train-ride since the road was put through, fifteen years ago."

"How extraordinary that seems! It was the day of his life, I suppose." Katrina's eyes were large with amazement.

"In a way it was," said Bob, dryly, "for in Asheville he celebrated his adventures not wisely, but too well, and on the way out he fell from the platform and was killed."

"Bob, how can you be so flippant?" objected Sydney to the crestfallen young man. "It seems a terrible end."

"All sudden deaths seem terrible to us who are left behind," said Mrs. Carroll; "but even such an ending does not give us the shock that it would if we did not live in a community accustomed to the accidents consequent upon every man's carrying a revolver. It's a bad habit. I hope you boys don't do it."

"No, indeed, Mrs. Carroll," they both replied, with suspicious promptness, and they sat up very straight, so that the backs of their coats presented an unbroken line.

John smiled at them.

"Are they often used?" he asked.

"Quite too often," answered Sydney, gravely. "As grandmother says, we do, indeed, live close to nature. If a man is angry with his neighbor, he calls him to his door on some moonless night and shoots him."

"In primitive society the primitive wants of man are satisfied in primitive ways," remarked Bob.

"Moses ought to have put the Ten Commandments on something stronger than stone if he meant them to be unbroken," added Patton.

Mrs. Carroll shook her head at him.

"Oh, we are as composite in our mountains as are the people of any other part of these composite United States," said Sydney. "The mountaineers themselves are a mixture. There are men in coves distant from the railroad who are living on land to which their ancestors drove up their cattle from the low country three or four generations ago. These men are a law unto themselves. They have no opportunities for educating their children, and once in a while you hear of a family that never has heard the name of God."

"My great-grandfather came here in the early eighteen hundreds," said Bob, "and a queer lot he must have found. They say that there was a crop of younger sons of good English families which had been planted here as a good country for the culture of wild oats."

"I suppose that in the eighteenth century this was as remote a place as any to lose black sheep in, if losing was their desire," suggested John.

"It's quite true, quite true, what Bob says," Mrs. Carroll took up the explanation. "Mr. Carroll used to tell me that he knew it to be a fact that Bud Yarebrough's father--Bud is a ne'er-do-weel who lives in a cove not many miles from here, Katrina, my dear--was a great-grandson of one of the Dukes of Calverley."

"Then Melissa's baby is the Lady Sydney Melissa Something-or-other!" laughed Sydney.

"There's a legend of a penal colony, too," said Patton.

"That is disputed," replied Mrs. Carroll.

"If there was one, Pink Pressley is of its lineage, I am sure," said Sydney.

"If heredity counts for anything, I should think that a colony of black sheep whose diet had been wild oats would account for all the lawlessness of the community," offered John.

"For a great deal of it, undoubtedly, and their life of freedom from restraint for so many years would be responsible for more."

"But these people are not close about you here," exclaimed Katrina.

"Indeed, they are. They are our neighbors and our friends. Why, there's a tenant on our place who has been tried twice for murder."

"Bob and I found a deserted still in the woods over the creek the other day," said Sydney. "That suggests another of our friends' occupations."

"But your influence must be at work among them constantly."

"We hope it is, and that is why we lay stress upon the compositeness of our settlement," said Mrs. Carroll. "There are the country people we've been telling you about, and there's a group of what we call Neighborhood people, for distinction's sake. The Delaunays at the Cliff were originally from New Orleans, and the Hugers were from Charleston, and we came from Virginia. Before the war we used to come over the mountains every summer in carriages to take refuge from the heat of the lowlands, and after the war we were glad to live here permanently."

"It was post-bellum poverty that drove us here from the Scotch-Presbyterian settlements in the middle of the State," said Patton. "We're another element."

"And is there really fusion going on as there is in other parts of the country?" asked Katrina.

"My people have assimilated with the peasantry, as I suppose Mrs. Carroll calls them, ever since they came," said Bob.

"This settlement must be unique," said John.

"No. I know of two not very far from here, and I've heard of others. The more fortunate people consider themselves as closely allied to the country as do the mountaineers. We are integral parts, and we insist on being so considered."

"We aren't a wholly bad lot, we mountaineers," said Bob. "I speak as of the soil, you see. Too much whisky and tobacco and hog-meat have deprived us of physical beauty, and we are sadly lacking in moral strength, but the life of freedom and lawlessness developed good traits, too. We don't lie,--that is, about important things," he added, hastily, putting his hand under his coat; "and we don't steal, and we are loyal to our friends."

"Especially when the minions of the law are after them," grinned Patton.

"Ah, you've betrayed yourselves," cried Sydney. "I know it was you two boys who hid Pink Pressley when the revenue men were chasing him the last time."

"The last time?" John asked the question.

"Oh, Pink used to be a chronic moonshiner. He seems to be a reformed pirate now," said Patton. "He must be in love."

"Whisky is the curse of this country," said Mrs. Carroll, vehemently, while Bob gazed into the fire and Sydney played with the sugar-tongs. "You can't deny lying, Bob, when the moonshiners are lying to the revenue men every day, and their friends are lying in their behalf; and you can't say they don't steal, when they are defrauding the government with every quart of blockade they sell. The mountaineers may be loyal to their friends, but it is to conceal crime."

"Illicit stilling seems to be regarded like smuggling," said John. "The government is fair game."

"Whisky stunts the growth of children, and blunts the morals of youth, and makes murderers of men," went on the old lady, disregarding John's interruption, and sitting with expressive straightness. A silence fell upon the group that John and Katrina felt to be painful without understanding why. Patton and Sydney were burning with sympathy for Bob. It was Patton who broke the quiet.

"And they drink it from a dipper!"

The ensuing laughter snapped the strain of embarrassment.

"We have another class of people that we haven't described to Katrina," said Sidney. "The resident foreigners."

"Like Baron von Rittenheim," said Bob, absently, staring at the fire.

"Another title! How in the world did he come here?" asked Katrina.

"Oh, he's one of the footballs of Fate," said Patton.

"Usually they're English,--the footballs," said Bob. "They come here to mend either health or fortune, stay a few years, and go away."

"Mended?"

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