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He has wanted to help me for a long time, and he got the chance to-night. He knows the one great sorrow of my life. Mr. Mostyn, my father is a moonshiner. I don't mean that he is a regular member of a gang, but he helps a certain set of them, and to-day Tobe accidentally heard of a plan of the Government officers to surround the still where my father happens to be to-night.
The naming of God in that connection reminds me of a remark I heard from a moonshiner as the distillers of illicit whiskey in the mountain regions of the South are called who had lately arrived at the penitentiary. He said, "I allus thought this here Jesus Christ was a cuss-word; but these folks say he was some religious guy!"
In describing the process of making whiskey in the mountain stills, I shall confine myself to the operations of the little moonshiner, because they illustrate the surprising shiftiness of our backwoodsmen. Every man in the big woods is a jack-of-all-trades. His skill in extemporizing utensils, and even crude machines, out of the trees that grow around him, is of no mean order.
Swiftly crossing the bridge, Woodward seized Teague and greeted him with a cordiality that amounted to enthusiasm. "Well, of all the world, old man, you are the one I most wanted to see." Teague's thoughts ran with grim directness to a reward that had been offered for a certain grey old Moonshiner who had made his headquarters on Hog Mountain. "How are all at home?"
"Folks says he is," Webb smiled. "An' fellers that like good corn mountain-dew ought to know who makes it. I reckon Gid is about the only moonshiner that has escaped jail up to date. Somehow he knows how to cover his tracks an' let his men git caught an' take the punishment." Dolly held her pencil to her lips, and, still frowning, looked at the blank manuscript paper.
Instantly Long Tom caught the dwarf around the arms to hold those members, for he well knew their power. But in a moment Turner, like a snake, twisted his right arm loose, and reaching under his short coat, drew out a sharp hunting knife, and hissing the words, "Traitor! Dat's my holt," between his clenched teeth, drove it into the back of the reformed moonshiner.
As a matter of fact, I happened to know that Judith Taylor, daughter of the notorious Ozark moonshiner, Jap Taylor, was just past twenty the year she went to live with Auntie Sue. Looking obliquely at the old gentlewoman, with a curious expression of mingled defiance, suspicion, and affection on her almost vicious face, Judy drawled, "Was you-all a-yellin' for me?"
Cheerfully he might "waive the quantum o' the sin," but he is quite alive to "the hazard o' concealin'." So, while the stuff is yet warm from the still, it is taken by confederates and quickly disposed of. There is no exaggeration in the answer a moonshiner once made to me when I asked him how old the best blockade liquor ever got to be: "If it 'd git to be a month old, it 'd fool me!"
Kneeling by his side, he took his knotted and powerful hand in one of his and rubbed it gently with the other. Tears came to his eyes as he saw this rough but reclaimed moonshiner in his last agony. The sufferer spoke, and his naturally slow speech was slower still; "Good-by, cumrades, I'm goin' home. Long Tom has lived a wicked life; but God is merciful, an' he has put away all my sins.
He struck out down the trail whistling merrily. Now that he was on the right road again, and with a clear night before him, he felt far more cheerful than before. He found the old field without difficulty, and not far beyond he struck the Hendersonville pike as the moonshiner had intimated. Here the country was more open. Large fields, interspersed with patches of woodland, were on either hand.
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