Daltons--men equally strong in their vindictive fealty to the code of
the vendetta.

By mountain standards, old Spicer South was rich. His lands had been
claimed when tracts could be had for the taking, and, though he had to
make his cross mark when there was a contract to be signed, his
instinctive mind was shrewd and far seeing. The tinkle of his cow-bells
was heard for a long distance along the creek bottoms. His hillside
fields were the richest and his coves the most fertile in that country.
His house had several rooms, and, except for those who hated him and
whom he hated, he commanded the respect of his fellows. Some day, when
a railroad should burrow through his section, bringing the development
of coal and timber at the head of the rails, a sleeping fortune would
yawn and awake to enrich him. There were black outcrop-pings along the
cliffs, which he knew ran deep in veins of bituminous wealth. But to
that time he looked with foreboding, for he had been raised to the
standards of his forefathers, and saw in the coming of a new regime a
curtailment of personal liberty. For new-fangled ideas he held only the
aversion of deep-rooted prejudice. He hoped that he might live out his
days, and pass before the foreigner held his land, and the Law became a
power stronger than the individual or the clan. The Law was his enemy,
because it said to him, "Thou shalt not," when he sought to take the
yellow corn which bruising labor had coaxed from scattered rock-strewn
fields to his own mash-vat and still. It meant, also, a tyrannous power
usually seized and administered by enemies, which undertook to forbid
the personal settlement of personal quarrels. But his eyes, which could
not read print, could read the signs of the times He foresaw the
inevitable coming of that day. Already, he had given up the worm and
mash-vat, and no longer sought to make or sell illicit liquor. That was
a concession to the Federal power, which could no longer be