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They seemed abler bargainers than the men, and the play of expression on their dramatic and intensely feminine faces as they wheedled the price of a calf out of a fierce hillsman, or haggled over a heap of dates that a Jew with greasy ringlets was trying to secure for his secret distillery, showed that they knew their superiority and enjoyed it.
The sort of lawlessness that has given the Appalachian mountaineer his wild name is one that the outer world understands as little as the hillsman understands the outer world, and the appeal which the organization made was a warped and distorted sense of justice, none the less sincere.
By a little fire kindled in the road, the bodies of their foe beside them, they vowed to each other, mingling their blood from dagger pricks in the arm. Then they mounted again and rode towards the Neck of Baroob. In silence they rode awhile, and at last the hillsman said: "If fathers be brothers-in-blood, behold it is good that sons be also."
At first they were disposed to regard him with some distrust, as one apart; he was so unlike themselves. But when he had changed his dress for the rough garb of the hillsman, and, meeting them kindly upon their own ground, had entered so readily into their life, the people by common consent dropped the distinguishing title "Mister" for the more familiar one of the backwoods, "Dad."
For long they rode silently, and in that time Cumner's Son found new thoughts; and these thoughts made him love the brown hillsman as he had never loved any save his own father. "When there is peace in Mandakan," said he at last, "when Boonda Broke is snapped in two like a pencil, when Pango Dooni sits as Dakoon in the Palace of Mandakan "
A Cossack is inclined to hate less the dzhigit hillsman who maybe has killed his brother, than the soldier quartered on him to defend his village, but who has defiled his hut with tobacco-smoke. He respects his enemy the hillsman and despises the soldier, who is in his eyes an alien and an oppressor.
Now, with unprecedented courage and a strength that amazed everyone, he slew and subdued an innumerable host of hillsmen; now he was himself a hillsman and with them was maintaining their independence against the Russians. As soon as he pictured anything definite, familiar Moscow figures always appeared on the scene. Sashka B -fights with the Russians or the hillsmen against him.
"I come to hold the road against Pango Dooni, as the Dakoon bade me." Pango Dooni laughed. "Your words are large," said he. "What could you, one man, do against Pango Dooni and his hillsman?" "I could answer the Dakoon here or elsewhere, that I kept the road till the hill-wolves dragged me down." "We be the wolves from the hills," answered Pango Dooni.
The sorrel and the mare were fagged, the horses of their foes were fresh; and forty to one were odds that no man would care to take. It might be that some of Pango Dooni's men lay between them and the Bar of Balmud, but the chance was faint. "By the hand of Heaven," said the hillsman, "if we reach to the Bar of Balmud, these dogs shall eat their own heads for dinner!"
Lukashka pulled his cloak up higher and walked back alone, throwing swift glances now to the left at the wall of reeds, now to the Terek rushing by below the bank. 'I daresay he's watching or creeping along somewhere, thought he of a possible Chechen hillsman. Suddenly a loud rustling and a splash in the water made him start and seize his musket.
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