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Updated: June 12, 2025
His voice rose clear, steady, commanding: "The law has come here and it has come to stay." "The Falins are here to get revenge on you Tollivers, if you attack us. I know that. But" he wheeled on the Falins "understand! We don't want your help!
Hale pulled out his watch. "Keep those men there," he said, pointing to the Falins, and he turned to the bewildered Tollivers. "Come on, Judd," he said kindly "all of you."
Rufe had told the jailer, his one friend through whom he had kept in constant communication with the Tollivers, how on the night after the shooting of Mockaby, when he lay down to sleep high on the mountain side and under some rhododendron bushes, a flock of little birds flew in on him like a gust of rain and perched over and around him, twittering at him until he had to get up and pace the woods, and how, throughout the next day, when he sat in the sun planning his escape, those birds would sweep chattering over his head and sweep chattering back again, and in that mood of despair he had said once, and only once: "Somehow I knowed this time my name was Dennis" a phrase of evil prophecy he had picked up outside the hills.
The two sat on the porch. Below it the dimpled river shone through the rhododendrons and with his eyes fixed on it, the Hon. Sam slowly approached the thought of each. "The old cabin in Lonesome Cove is just as the Tollivers left it." "None of them ever come back?" Budd shook his head. "No, but one's comin' Dave." "Dave!" "Yes, an' you know what for." "I suppose so," said Hale carelessly.
And then Hale quietly learned that long ago the Tollivers bitterly opposed the Red Fox's marriage to a Tolliver-that Rufe, when a boy, was always teasing the Red Fox and had once made him dance in his moccasins to the tune of bullets spitting about his feet, and that the Red Fox had been heard to say that old Dave had cheated his wife out of her just inheritance of wild land; but all that was long, long ago, and apparently had been mutually forgiven and forgotten.
Every Falin made a nervous reach for his pistol, the line of gun-muzzles covering them wavered slightly, but the Tollivers stood still and unsurprised, and when Hale dashed from the door again, there was a grim smile of triumph on old Judd's face. He had kept his promise that Rufe should never hang. "Steady there," said Hale quietly.
His fondness for Josie was well known; and to him Jim attributed that young lady's lack of enthusiasm over our schemes for city-building. His presence at this gathering was somewhat of a surprise to me. Antonia and Cecil Barr-Smith, the Tollivers, Mr. Hinckley and Alice, myself, Mr. Giddings, and Miss Addison sat across the table from the host. Mrs.
His lips kept closed and his bright black eyes were studying the situation; the little squad of youngsters, back to back, with their repeating shot-guns, the line of Falins along the wall toward whom protruded six shining barrels, the huddled crowd of Tollivers toward whom protruded six more old Judd towering in front with young Dave on one side, tense as a leopard about to spring, and on the other Bub, with tears streaming down his face.
The Tollivers, following the Red Fox's advice to make no attempt at rescue just then, had waited, expecting the old immunity from the law and getting instead the swift sentence that Rufe Tolliver should be hanged by the neck until he was dead. Astounding and convincing though the news was, no mountaineer believed he would ever hang, and Rufe himself faced the sentence defiant.
He was anxious to get away from the face of the hill, not knowing how near the enemy might be. They were nearer than he fancied, for a sudden shout rang out, then a chorus of them. A piece of rock, hurled down from the crest of the hill, struck his wrist, nearly numbing it. Glancing up, Bart saw the two Tollivers and Lem Wacker getting ready to descend.
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