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I saw he was tryin' to speak, an' I put my ear close to his lips, thinkin' he might have some message he wanted to give. But, tryin' to look in the direction where Howkle had gone, he whispered, 'Don't blame the Union. He was thinkin' more o' the credit o' his side than of his own sufferin's." "That was grit," said Hamilton approvingly. "Did he die, Uncle Eli?" "Not a bit of it.
We got him back into our lines an' he was exchanged, I believe. Anyway, I know he was livin' after the war, fo' I saw his name once on a list o' veterans. But most o' the boys were like that mostly young, too an' men o' the stripe of Isaac Howkle were very few." "But you got him in the end, didn't you?" The old mountaineer looked intently at the boy's excited face.
"When you were giving drink to a wounded soldier!" cried Hamilton indignantly. "What a cowardly trick!" "It was ol' Isaac Howkle," nodded his uncle, "an' I s'pose he reckoned this was a chance to get even on the ol' grudge. But I rolled over on the grass jes' out o' reach o' his stroke, an' he missed.
"I didn't," he said, "an' I don' rightly know that it's good for yo' to be hearin' all these things. Yo' might hold it against Jake Howkle." "That I wouldn't," protested Hamilton. "Jake isn't to blame for his father's meanness." "That's the right way to talk," the old soldier agreed.
However, in a skirmish near Cumberland Gap, I saw that he was jes' achin' to get me, an' the way he tried was jes' about the meanes' thing I ever heard o' any one doin' on the Ridge." "How was it, do tell me?" pleaded Hamilton, his eyes shining with interest. "Howkle was with Wolford's cavalry, an' I was under 'Fightin'' Zollicoffer, as they called him," the old man began.
"Wa'al, yes, he did," the mountaineer admitted "Yo' never knew the one. He was my brother-in-law, Ab's younges' sister's first husband. He had been married jes' two months, an' was only a hundred yards from this house when Isaac shot him." "How did you know for sure that it was Howkle who had done the shooting?" asked Hamilton. "We didn't know for sure, at first.
When the war was all over an' I got back hyeh, I remembered what had happened, an' I sent word to Isaac Howkle that I didn' trust him, an' after what he had done I was reckonin' that he was waitin' his chance to get me, an' that he'd better keep his own side o' the mountain." "But, Uncle Eli," said the boy, "that didn't make a feud surely; that was only a warning."
I'd sort o' be lost without it now, after all these years. Thar's no one to worry about, anyway, savin' Jake Howkle, an' I don' believe he's hankerin' for blood-lettin'." "Jake? Oh, never," Hamilton replied with assurance; "why, he's only about my age." "That's only partly why," the old man said, "not only because he's your age, but because he's b'n at school.
"I wasn't reckonin' to start a feud at all," said the old man thoughtfully, "an' it really never was one. It was jes' a personal difference between Isaac Howkle an' me. Thar was lots o' times that I could have picked off either o' his two brothers, but I was jes' guardin' myself against Isaac." "But you said he got there first!" said the boy. "Did he shoot some one in your family?"
A week or two after, a boy from the Wilshes' place come up with a message sayin' that Isaac Howkle had tol' him to say that he'd get the ol' man nex' time." "I shouldn't have thought a boy would have had the nerve to bring such a message," said Hamilton thoughtfully. "Wouldn't bringing word like that look like taking sides, and wouldn't it bring his own family into the trouble!"
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