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Updated: June 11, 2025
"D'ye mean to say you'd throw that boy into jail and then fight them Falins to pertect him?" the old man asked slowly and incredulously. Hale pointed to a two-store building through his window. "If you get in the back part of that store at a window, you can see whether I will or not. I can summon you to help, and if a fight comes up you can do your share from the window."
There were no lights lit, and nobody stood long even in the light of the fire where he could be seen through a window; and doors were opened and passed through quickly. The Falins had opened the feud that day, for the boy's foster-uncle, Bad Rufe Tolliver, contrary to the terms of the last truce, had come home from the West, and one of his kinsmen had been wounded.
"Well," said old Judd shortly, "ef we stay here by his favour, we won't stay long." There was silence for a while. Then Dave spoke again for the listening ears outside maliciously: "I went over to the Gap to see if I couldn't git the place myself from the company. I believe the Falins ain't goin' to bother us an' I ain't hankerin' to go West.
So long he lay that he got tired and out of patience, and he was about to creep around the boulder, when the clink of a horseshoe against a stone told him they were coming, and he flattened to the earth and closed his eyes that his ears might be more keen. The Falins were riding silently, but as the first two passed under him, one said: "I'd like to know who the hell warned 'em!"
So that, as the summer came on, matters between the Falins and the Tollivers were worse than they had been for years and everybody knew that, with old Judd at the head of his clan again, the fight would be fought to the finish. At the Gap, one institution only had suffered in spirit not at all and that was the Volunteer Police Guard.
Some of the Falins had been seen hanging around Lonesome Cove for the purpose, Judd believed, of getting a shot at the man who had kept young Dave from falling into their hands, and Hale saw that by that act he had, as Budd said, arrayed himself with the Tollivers in the feud. In other words, he was a Tolliver himself now, and as such the Falins meant to treat him.
As the minutes passed, Hale was beginning to wonder whether, after all, old Judd had come to believe that the odds against him were too great, and had told the truth when he set afoot the rumour that the law should have its way; and it was just when his load of anxiety was beginning to lighten that there was a little commotion at the edge of the Court House and a great red-headed figure pushed through the crowd, followed by another of like build, and as the people rapidly gave way and fell back, a line of Falins slipped along the wall and stood under the port-holes-quiet, watchful, and determined.
And the Falins climbed, too, farther along the mountains, and at the same hour were waiting in the woods a mile to the south. Back in Lonesome Cove June Tolliver sat alone her soul shaken and terror-stricken to the depths and the misery that matched hers was in the heart of Hale as he paced to and fro at the county seat, on guard and forging out his plans for that day under the morning stars.
"A gang of those Falins are here," Macfarlan said, "and they're after young Dave Tolliver about a dozen of 'em. Young Buck is with them, and the sheriff. They say he shot a man over the mountains yesterday." Hale sprang for his clothes here was a quandary. "If we turn him over to them they'll kill him." Macfarlan nodded.
Hale had told him to wait there, and it was almost noon before the boy with the cap came to tell him that the Falins had all left town. The old man looked at him kindly. "Air you the little feller whut fit fer June?" "Not yet," said Bob; "but it's coming." "Well, you'll whoop him." "I'll do my best." "Whar is she?" "She's waiting for you over at the boarding-house."
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