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In this thinly settled region probably five hundred men have been slain in feuds since our centennial year, and only three of the murderers, so far as I know, have been executed by law. The active feudists, as a rule, include only a small part of the community; but public sentiment, in feud districts, approves or at least tolerates the vendetta, just as it does in Corsica or the Balkans.
They were moon-shiners, feudists, hilly-billies, small farmers and basket-makers, men of lean and saturnine appearance, some of them horse thieves, pirates of the forest who cared little for the laws of God or man and fought as naturally as they breathed. These men came without flags, without officers, without uniforms. They crawled on their bellies and carried logs as shields.
The next day being Sunday, the entire party rode to the little mountain church, three miles from the Thompson cabin, and attended services. The devoutness of these queer mountain folk, moonshiners and feudists included, interested them deeply. Early the next morning, their equipment having already been packed, they bade good-bye to the Thompsons.
However, it is perhaps impossible to hope that society will adopt any different attitude than that which it has taken in the past toward these unbalanced souls. In fact, it seems that a savage lex talionis is wholly satisfying to the feudists on both sides. Neither the one nor the other seeks to understand the forces driving them both.
True to her type, Julie would not even expose an enemy. The Spurgeons and the Thompsons were feudists, and had time and again made war on each other for several generations, and it was their policy not to talk, but to let their rifles talk for them. "What you-all goin' t' do?" "We are going on, of course," announced Lieutenant Wingate. "You-all shore'll git lammed if ye do," warned Julie.
But the keen mountaineer's eye of Sam Folwell had picked him out. There was a sudden spring, a ripple in the stream of passers-by and the sound of Sam's voice crying: "Howdy, Cal! I'm durned glad to see ye." And in the angles of Broadway, Fifth Avenue and Twenty-third Street the Cumberland feudists shook hands. Ravenel Ravenel, the traveller, artist and poet, threw his magazine to the floor.
The panel was made up of business men of Pineville and Middlesboro, who resented being kept from their occupations at a busy season. They were new citizens who had moved into the mountains since the development of the coal fields and had little use or sympathy for pistol toters or feudists. There was one exception, Elhannon Howard, Saylor's neighbor.
The Village Feudists In a certain Connecticut fishing-town sometime since, where, besides lobstering, a shipyard and some sail-boat-building there existed the several shops and stores which catered to the wants of those who labored in those lines, there dwelt a groceryman by the name of Elihu Burridge, whose life and methods strongly point the moral and social successes and failures of the rural man.
There she instantaneously "acquires a family" of a dozen small boys and henceforth finds her life "crammed with human interest." The ludicrously funny and sometimes pathetic doings of the little, untamed feudists, moonshiners, and hero worshippers, form the subject-matter of the tale.
Indeed, that time, Hale believed, was not far away, for Election Day was at hand, and always on that day the feudists came to the Gap in a search for trouble. Meanwhile, not long afterward, there was a pitched battle between the factions at the county seat, and several of each would fight no more.
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