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Updated: May 31, 2025
The County Judge laughed. "Well, I reckon I can't attend to that right now." "Then, you refuse?" "Mebby you might call it that." Samson leaned on the Judge's table, and rapped sharply with his knuckles. His handful of men stood close, and Callomb caught his breath, in the heavy air of storm-freighted suspense. The Hollman partisans filled the room, and others were crowding to the doors.
It was said that these exclusive sessions were attended by Judge Hollman, Sheriff Purvy and certain other gentlemen selected by reason of their marksmanship. When one of these victims fell, John South had just returned from a law school "down below," wearing "fotched-on" clothing and thinking "fotched-on" thoughts.
A man supposedly close to the Hollmans, but in reality an informer for the Souths, had seen him led into the jail-yard by a posse of a half-dozen men, and had seen the iron-barred doors close on him. That was all, except that the Hollman forces were gathering in Hixon, and, if the Souths went there en masse, a pitched battle must be the inevitable result.
While Spicer South and his cousins had been sustaining themselves or building up competences by tilling their soil, the leaders of the other faction were basing larger fortunes on the profits of merchandise and trade. So, although Spicer South could neither read nor write, his chief enemy, Micah Hollman, was to outward seeming an urbane and fairly equipped man of affairs.
After the fierce outburst of bloodshed, quiet had settled, and it was tacitly understood that, unless the Hollman forces had some coup in mind which they were secreting, this peace would last until the soldiers were withdrawn. "When the world's a-lookin'," commented Judge Hollman, "hit's a right good idea to crawl under a log an' lay still." Purvy had been too famous a feudist to pass unsung.
But Hollman and Purvy, hypocritically clamoring for the sanctity of the law, made no effort to come and "git him." They knew that Spicer South's house was now a fortress, prepared for siege. They knew that every trail thither was picketed. Also, they knew a better way. This time, they had the color of the law on their side. The Circuit Judge, through the Sheriff, asked for troops, and troops came.
He did not explain that the venire he had drawn from the jury drum had borne a singularly solid Hollman compaction. "Until the Grand Jury acts, I don't see that we can take any steps." "And," stormed Captain Callomb, "the Grand Jury will, like former Grand Juries, lie down in terror and inactivity.
Old Jake Hollman fell near the door, and his grandson, rushing out, picked up his fallen rifle, and sent farewell defiance from it, as he, too, threw up both arms and dropped. Then, a white flag wavered at a window, and, as the newly arrived troops halted in the street, the noise died suddenly to quiet. Samson went out to meet a man who opened the door, and said shortly: "We lays down."
He had been born and brought up in Amberley; he had left it at the age of twenty-five to make his fortune. But Amberley was Amberley still. Jedediah found it hard to believe that it or himself was fifteen years older. "There's the Stanton place," he said. "Charlie has painted the house yellow it used to be white; and Bob Hollman has cut the trees down behind the blacksmith forge.
Not only the Hollmans from the town and immediate neighborhood were there, but their shaggier, fiercer brethren from remote creeks and coves, who came only at urgent call, and did not come without intent of vindicating their presence. Old Jake Hollman, from "over yon" on the headwaters of Dryhole Creek, brought his son and fourteen-year-old grandson, and all of them carried Winchesters.
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