I
THE CONSCIENCE OF THE CUMBERLANDS
On the face of it one might have questioned the wisdom of selecting fora task so difficult a man who knew absolutely nothing about it. When thework in hand was the apprehension of a band of violators of the law whohad for years defied and intimidated the whole countryside, this courseseemed even more unusual. But the wonder would have still furthermultiplied itself if the casual observer could have given Billy Gard theonce over as he sat nervously on the edge of the cane seat of the daycoach as the accommodation train pulled into the hill country.
For this special agent of the Department of Justice, mind you, was totake up a piece of work upon which local constables and sheriffs,United States marshals and revenue agents had failed. There was murderat one end of the road he was to travel and the gallows at the other.And Gard was a nondescript youngster who looked less than thirty,neither light nor dark, large nor small--inconspicuous, easily lost in acrowd. The careful observer might have noticed the breadth of brow andthe wrinkles that come to the man who thinks, or the tenseness of hisslim form that indicated physical fitness. For to be sure, these federalsleuths of the new school are mostly college men, lawyers, expertaccountants, as was Gard; but youngsters in whom is to be found the loveof a bit of adventure and the steel of a set determination.
And now this slip of a lad was going back into the Cumberlands where thewhisky still whispers its secret to the mountaineer; where the revenueagent penetrates at his peril and the Long Tom speaks from the thickets;where the clansman sets what he considers his rights above the law ofthe land and stands ready to lay his life or that of any who oppose himon the altar he has built. Gard was after a community of moonshiners whohad defied all local authority and thrown down the gauntlet to theFederal Government itself. He came alone with a little wicker grip.
"I am looking for a place to board," the special agent told Todd, thelivery stable man at Wheeler, the mountain town at which he had stoppedoff. "I have been clerking in a store in Atlanta and got pretty well rundown. The doctor said I ought to stay in the mountains for a month ortwo."
"How much can you pay?" asked Todd.
"I would like to get it as cheap as five dollars a week," said Gard.
"You can buy a farm up here for five dollars a week," said Todd.
"Well, I want good board where I can get lots of milk to drink and eggsand where I can tramp around and shoot squirrels. Do you know such aplace?"
The liveryman was accustomed to driving summer boarders out to the fewplaces where they might stay in the Cumberlands. He sketched thesepossibilities and told of the location of each. Gard already had the mapof the country well in mind and selected the farm near Sam Lunsford's,he being the mountaineer whom the agent most wanted to cultivate.
Todd reviewed the situation as between the mountaineers and theGovernment as he drove his customer out to the Tenney farm where he wasto ask to be put up.
"You see," he said, "they have always made moonshine whisky around hereand they just won't stop for nobody. They ain't many ideas gits into thehead of a man who lives in the mountains, and when one gits set there,you can't get it out. They think they got a right to make whisky andwhisky they are goin' to make or bust.
"Then along comes Tom Reynolds and Sam Lunsford and me and some more ofus. We see that it ain't right to fight the Government and that whiskyis no good anyhow, so whenever we find out where there is a still, wetell the revenue agents about it. Well, we git warnin's that we betternot do it no more, but them fellers can't skeer us so we go right ahead.
"Then one night, Tom Reynolds starts home from Wheeler late in theevenin' but he don't never get there. Next mornin' we find his wagonstandin' off to the side of the road and Tom is down in front of theseat dead with a load of buckshot in his head.
"Sam Lunsford has still got the idea, though, that the boys ought not tomake moonshine so he goes right ahead reportin' every still he finds. Sothings goes on for two months. Then, one night, Sam was up late with oneof his babies that had the colic. He was settin' before the fire arockin' the baby when, bang! somebody shoots him through the winder.
"Well, that shot didn't quite get Sam. Did you ever try to shoot thehead off of a chicken as it walked across the yard? Its head moves for'dand back and it is mighty hard to hit it. That's the way with Samrockin' the baby, I reckon. Anyway, the buckshot just got Sam in theback part of his head and didn't kill him. Next day his old woman pickedthe buckshot out with a pocket knife because the doctor was afraid togo. Now Sam is as well as he ever was and he ain't changed his mindabout the stills. Him and me reported two of them last week."
This story was about in accordance with the information Gard receivedfrom Washington. The revenue agents were too well known to workeffectually in the Cumberlands any more, so the Department of Justicehad taken over the case. The murderers and those who attempted murdershould be apprehended.
As the wagon wound along the country road Todd called the specialagent's attention to the report of a rifle from a hillside to the right.Soon another gun was discharged further ahead and a third still furtheron. This, the liveryman said, was a system of signals that told of theirpresence.
A little farther along the road wound into a hollow down which flowed abrook. Out of the brush in this hollow stepped the form of a mountaineerwith a rifle across his arm. Todd drew up his team.
"What have you got there?" asked the man in the road.
"Summer boarder," said Todd.
"Where's he goin'?" was the query.
"To Tenney's," answered Todd.
The mountaineer walked around to the back of the wagon where Gard'slittle wicker grip was carried. Without a word he opened the grip andcarefully examined everything in it. Seemingly satisfied, he wavedpermission for them to proceed.
"Young feller," he said to Gard in parting, "you are in durn badcompany. You can't never tell whether you will git back when you startout with that skunk."
To which Todd grinned as he drove on.
"They ain't never made the bullet that'll kill me," he said.
It was three days later that Billy Gard, squirrel rifle on his shoulder,walked into the clearing about the house of Sam Lunsford, the man whohad survived the charge of buckshot in the back of his head. TheLunsford house consisted of one log room with a lean-to addition at theback. There was a clearing of some thirty acres where grew a mostindifferent sprinkling of corn and cotton. There was a crib for thecorn, a ramshackle wagon, a flea-bitten gray horse and some hogs runningwild in the woods. Such was the Lunsford estate, presided over by thishuge mountaineer and to which his eleven children were heir. Seldom didan echo of the outside world reach this home in the woods. Not a memberof the family was able to read. Every Sunday Sam Lunsford drove theflea-bitten gray or walked seven miles to a little mountain church wherewas preached a gospel of hellfire and brimstone. He was hated by hisneighbors and constantly in the shadow of death. Yet he wentunswervingly on the way of his duty in accordance with his lights.
Gard already had the measure of his man. No sooner had he presentedhimself than he put his business up to the mountaineer, "cold turkey,"as the agents say when they lay all the cards on the table. WouldLunsford help the government in getting the facts that would bring themurderers of Tom Reynolds and the men who shot him to justice? Lunsfordwould do all he could.
"Whom do you suspect?" the agent asked.
"There are so many of them agin me," said Lunsford, "that it is hard totell which ones done it."
"Will you show me just how you were sitting when you were shot?"
The mountaineer placed the rocking chair in front of the fire directlybetween a hole in the window and a spot in the opposite wall where thebuckshot had lodged themselves, peppering up a surface two feet square.Thus was it easy to trace the flight of the shot through the room. Thespecial agent examined both window pane and wall.
"Could you tell where the man stood when he fired?" he asked.
"Yes," said Lunsford. "I l
ooked for tracks next day. Let me show you."
He led the way into the yard and there pointed out a stout peg which hadbeen driven into the ground not a dozen feet from the window.
"The tracks came up to there and stopped," he said.
"Did you measure the tracks?" asked the special agent.
The mountaineer had done so and had cut a stick just the length of thetrack. This stick had been carefully preserved.
"Did you find any of the gun wadding?" asked the agent.
Even this precaution was taken by Lunsford. These men of the mountainsmostly load their own shells and the wads in this case had been made bycutting pieces out of a pasteboard box. So there were a number of cluesat hand.
Special Agent Billy Gard stood on the spot from which the shot had beenfired. From this point to that at which the buckshot had entered thewall of the cabin was not more than thirty feet.
"An ordinary shotgun at thirty feet," he reflected, remembering hissquirrel hunting days, "shoots almost like a rifle. The shot at thatdistance are all in a bunch not bigger than your fist. Yet the shot inthe cabin wall were scattered. The man with the gun must have beenfurther away."
Gard stated this view of the matter to the mountaineer, but thatindividual showed how it would have been impossible for the shot to havebeen fired from a greater distance because there was a depression thatwould have placed the man with the gun too low down to see in at thewindow. The shot could have been fired from but the one spot. The windowpane through which the shot had passed was about half way between thepeg and the wall where the charge had lodged. The hole in the window wasnot more than half as large as the wall surface peppered by the shot.This scatter of shot at such short range was significant.
"The shot must have been fired from a sawed-off shotgun," said thespecial agent. "Only a short-barreled gun would have scattered so muchat this short range."
He meditated a moment and then asked:
"Who is there around here who has a sawed-off shotgun?"
"Ty Jones has got one," said Sam.
"Is he friendly to you?" asked Gard.
"No," was the reply. "The revenue agents chopped up his still after Ireported it."
"Did he ever threaten you?"
"He said onst at the crossroads that he knew a bear with a sore headthat would soon be feelin' almighty comf'table 'cause it was goin' tolose that head."
Here was a probable case of Ty Jones being the man guilty of the attempton the life of Lunsford. There was a possibility, as Gard saw it, ofgetting this suspicion confirmed. Despite the animosity that existedbetween the heads of the families, the Jones youngsters and the Lunsfordyoungsters were playmates; so does the sociability of youth break downthe bars set up by maturity. Lunsford had a boy of ten who was wise withthe cunning of the woods and trustworthy in lending a hand in the feudsto which he was born. This boy, in playing about the Jones household,was instructed to pick up every piece of pasteboard box he could findand bring those pieces home. Likewise was he to measure the shoes of theJones household, when an opportunity offered, and tie knots in a stringto indicate their length.
It was a week before this task had been completed by the boy, but theresults indicated that the foot of a certain pair of shoes in the Joneshome was like unto that of the man of the sawed-off shotgun. Scraps ofcut-up shoe boxes had been found, white on one side and brown on theother, and from these had evidently been made wads for reloading shells.
Thus far was Special Agent Gard able to carry his case toward asolution. There were twenty men in the neighborhood who might have beenimplicated with Jones, if he were guilty, in this attempt and in thekilling of Tom Reynolds. There were twenty and more makers of moonshinewho had been reported or stood in danger. It was hard to determine whichof the twenty were actually guilty. The suspicions against Jones werenot evidence. After a month on the case Gard decided that a completesolution of the mystery was possible only through working in with themoonshiners themselves and gaining their confidence.
So the summer boarder left the Tenney farm, stating that his health wasgreatly improved but that he would come back two months later foranother stay.
A week after this there was nailed up at every post office and courthouse within a hundred miles of Wheeler a notice of reward for anescaped convict. A short, stout, curly-headed young outlaw had brokenjail in South Carolina and when last heard of was bearing in thisdirection. Fifty dollars reward would be paid for his capture. Hispicture appeared with the notice.
After still another week the Jones children were playing in the woodsback of their house when a strange man called them from a distance. Theyoungsters approached cautiously. The man was no less cautious. He was ashort curly-headed young fellow with a stubby beard, with his clothingin shreds and very dirty. He looked as though he had slept in the woodsfor a month. There were stripes across an under garment that showedthrough his open shirt.
"Do you suppose," said the man of rags, "that your maw could stake ahungry man to six or seven dollars' worth of bread and bacon and waitfor remuneration until the executors of his estate act?"
"Yuh don't mean yuh want somethin' to eat, do yuh?" said young LemJones.
"Son," said the curly-headed one, "your instincts are clairvoyant. Youhave demonstrated a hypothesis, confirmed a rumor, hit upon a greattruth, sleuthed a primal fact to its lair. The plain truth is that Ihaven't had anything to eat in so long that I have forgotten my lastmeal. I am the hungriest man in the world. I could eat tacks with aspoon."
"Come on," said Lem, a bit dizzy with the unusual words, but anxious toplease.
He led the way to the house where Mrs. Jones met the hungry man at thedoor.
"Madam," said the hungry one most courteously, "I am needing a littlesomething to eat. I have been lost in the woods and without food."
"What are they after you for, young feller?" inquired Mrs. Jonesincisively, she who had spent a life in those mountains where thesympathy was all with the man whose hand was turned against authorityand where many fugitives from the law had found refuge.
"Have you found me out so soon?" grinned the fugitive. "Well, if I musttell I will say that I just knocked a hole in a jail down South Carolinaway, cracked the heads of a couple of armed guards together, robbed thecity marshal of his horse, outran the sheriff's posse, swam the Elbriver where ford there was none, and lived on a diet of blackberries forseven days. Back of that there was the little matter of cracking a safe.Other than that I assure you my conduct has been of the best."
So engaging was the manner of this young man of the rags from the greatworld beyond the mountains that Mrs. Jones immediately liked him. He wasa perfect cataract of words and talked incessantly. She was not able tounderstand half he said but was pleased with all of it. He ran on gliblybut always stopped short of being smart in the sense that would callforth dislike. All the time he was eating corn bread and bacon with therelish of one who has long omitted the formality of dining.
Such was the introduction of Special Agent A. Spaulding Dowling intothe Cumberlands, he who played the cadet in white slave cases, the wildyoung man about town in the bucket shop investigations, and made love toa bank cashier's daughter to learn where the loot was hidden. For allthese situations Dowling had a stream of talk that never failed to amuseand disarm. Billy Gard had asked the department for his help on themoonshiners' case and Dowling had fallen into the plan with all theenthusiasm of adventurous youth.
The features of the jail breaker for whom the reward was offered werethose of Dowling. So had preparation been made for his coming. Gard hadlaid his plans with an understanding of the habits of the mountaineer tohide the fugitive. He had figured that such a fugitive might get intothe confidence of those iron men of few words and filch from them theirsecrets. With the right culprits behind the bars the backbone of thisdefiance of the law might be broken.
Dowling's stream of talk won the friendship of Ty Jones and his sons asit had won his wife. The fugitive was tucked away in the hills and fedby the moun
taineers. He came to know the intimates of the Jones familyand his stream of talk entertained them for days and weeks. Hehibernated with others of his kind for he found the hills full of men inhiding. He became a visitor at many a cabin and eventually struck therock that responded to his confidence.
A young mountaineer named Ed Hill maintained an active still high up inthe mountains--a virgin still that had never known the desecration of araid. Hill was high spirited and companionable, unlike most of hisneighbors. His was the soul of a poet, a lover of the wilds, a patriotof the mountains. The flame of adventure, the love of danger, the beliefin the individual rights of the mountaineer, made him a moving spiritamong the men who battled the government.
Ed Hill told the fugitive the whole story of the killing of Tom Reynoldsand the shooting of Sam Lunsford. He told of the determination to ridthe mountains of Todd, the livery stable man, and to preserve for themen of the Cumberlands the right to do as they chose in their ownretreats.
It seemed that of all the men of the mountains who made moonshinewhisky, there were but four who were willing to go the limit ofspilling the blood of their fellows in resisting the law. Hill was oneof these and saw his acts as those of the man who fights for hiscountry. Ty Jones, contrary to the suspicions of Sam Lunsford, alwaysadvised against violence. But Jones had a boy of eighteen, aheavy-faced, dull-witted lad, who was possessed of the desire to kill,to be known among his fellows as a bad man. This younger Jones it waswho had aimed his father's sawed-off shotgun at Sam Lunsford as thathulking figure of a man swayed back and forth as he rocked the baby thatsuffered from colic. The patriot Hill, Will Jones the born murderer, afather and son by the name of Hinton, had been the murderers of TomReynolds. There were no others who would go so far as to kill to avengetheir fancied grievances.
The summer was dragging to its close as the conversational special agentgot his information together. The yellow was stealing into the trees ofthe hillsides when Billy Gard, he whose health had been broken behindthe ribbon counter, came back to Tenney's for another few weeks in theopen. He wandered into the woods and met the fugitive from the SouthCarolina jail. The jail bird and the ribbon counter clerk talked longtogether and when they parted the plans were laid for the nipping off ofthe men who would murder for their stills.
It was a week later and the quiet of after-midnight rested upon thelittle mountain town of Wheeler. In such towns there are no all-nightindustries, no street cars to drone through deserted thoroughfares, noteven an arc light to sputter at street crossings. There is but theoccasional stamping of a horse in its stall or the baying of a watch dogin answer to the howl of a wolf on the hillside. But murder was plannedto take place that night in Wheeler and A. Spaulding Dowling knew allabout it.
As the town slept four stealthy figures crept down the trail that cutsacross the point of the Hunchback. Soft-footedly, rifles in hand, theypassed down a side street beneath the dense shade of giant sycamores. Itwas but three blocks from the woods to Main street. Reaching this arteryof the town, two of the men crouched in the shadow while two otherscrossed the street and went a block further, turning to the left. Eachgroup then shifted itself a hundred feet to the left and paused again.
So stationed the four men found themselves in front and back of Todd'slivery stable. The building itself sat back a little from the street. Onthe ground floor were the stalls for the horses and the sheds where thewagons were stored. Overhead were bins of corn and hay and a living roomwhere Todd slept that he might always be near his teams. About the wholewas a roomy barnyard enclosed by a high board fence. The gates to theouter enclosure were locked, but once past this wall a man would havethe run of the whole place.
The mountaineers, two in front and two in the rear of the building,swung themselves to the top of the fence and leaped to the groundinside. Rifles at hip they started to close in on the building. Eachparty entered at opposite ends of the corridor down the middle throughwhich a wagon might drive. Nothing interfered with their progress and nosound was heard except a sleeping horse occasionally changing feet onthe board floor of his stall. Stealthily the four figures gathered in acluster and turned up the steep stairway that led to the sleeping roomof Todd. With every rifle ready for action they pushed open the door.The moon coming in at a window disclosed what seemed to be a sleepingform in the bed. Deliberately the four rifles came to bear upon it.There was a pause and then from the leader came the order:
"Fire!"
Every finger pressed the trigger of its rifle. Every hammer came down onits cap. But no report followed. Not a gun had been discharged.
"Come on out in the open, you sneakin' cowards," came a clamorous voicefrom the barnyard that was recognized as being that of Todd. "Come outin the lot and I'll larrup you all."
The men in the room looked puzzled, one at the other, and then at theform on the bed. They approached the latter and found it to be but adummy to represent Todd. They had been trapped. They would fight theirway out.
The mountaineers charged down the stairway. As they came into themoonlight at the opening of the barn they faced the tall form of a manthey knew well, the United States marshal of the district. With no gunin his hands the marshal raised his hands on high.
"Listen, men," he commanded. "A parley. You are trapped. There arearmed men at every corner of this building and every man who runs out ofit will be shot dead. Your powder has been wet and none of you can firea shot. You can't fight armed men. There is but one thing for you to doand that is to surrender."
In the parley that followed the marshal asked each man to try his gun tosee if it could be fired. None would respond. The mountaineers foundthemselves caught in the very act of attempting to kill Todd, whom theyhad often threatened. They had been duped and trapped.
So had these young detectives of the new school worked out a mostdifficult case and one which later proved, in the courts, to beeffective, for every man arrested is now serving a long term in prisonand the backbone of the defiance of law in this region is broken.
"Mr. Summer Boarder," said the curly-haired Dowling, "it is back to theribbon counter for you. Your little vacation is over. But I will saythat you have shown remarkable intelligence in this matter. You calledme in to help you. Little drops of water put in just the right placesaved all your lives. These mountaineers would have eaten you up if Ihadn't fixed their ammunition. Please thank me--"
"Easy, Windy One, easy," interjected Gard. "Kiss the hand of the man wholent you the brains to do it with."