The Red Debt

No imagery can adequately picture the profound grandeur and wide wild beauty of these Kentucky highlands. At the age when its purity was whitest, a great moon hung midway between Southpaw peak and Moon mountain. Its divine splendor, unalloyed with any tithe of partisanship, laved with a mystic luster these two primeval ranges that had scowled impenitently at each other, behind their mask of flowers and tinseled verdure, across the lethal gulch separating them, for fifty blood-touched, feudal years.

This wondrous effulgence purged every exposed crevice, naked rock and open cove with its chastity. On the ground underneath the patch-quilt of virgin petals and emerald leafage, it peopled a theatre of animated pictures. And the coppice pooled the shadows, creating a hippodrome of transitory caricatures, fanciful, grotesque and fearful. Each sullen moss-hooded boulder flung its distorted, exaggerated image down and fixed a creeping mummy hard by.

Still another white beacon leaned over the hills where, like a stellar flambeau, the lead-star trembled and sputtered, kindled just on the apex of Henhawk's knob. The chasm that furrowed between and, topographically, held these two warring communities apart, sunk its rock-lined bed sheer two hundred feet below. Through this sinuous adamantine artery the head waters of Hellsfork dashed in rampant flight, beating themselves into a madness against a troup of gigantic, orange-tinctured boulders polished glassy by the torrents Nature had unloosed at the beginning of time.

The onrushing wavelets leaped like furious creatures at these menacing things which evermore preyed upon their foaming, impotent wrath; shaping crystal goblets that bubbled over and burst, and flung showers of magical frothy flowers aloft. From across the silvery expanse of spectral mist that overhung the mountains, near and afar, a hundred voices of the wilderness night were calling.

That this barnacle of blood-lust should leech itself upon the fair face of a modern civilization; that in this nineteen hundred and twelve epoch of obeisant civism, hedged about with emollient Christian culture-such a vast stratum of malignant strife should coil here, hidden amidst a congress of Nature's sublime artistry, is an irony at once awesome and hopelessly insoluble. Nevertheless, immured upon natural ramifications on the shoulder of Moon mountain, old Cap Lutts, a strategist and mountain despot of kingly renown, dominated as the head of an implacable dynasty that boded ill to inimical invaders; be it agents of the government or spies of the shaggy Southpaw clan where Sap McGill, who had stepped into his father's war shoes at the end of their last fatal encounter with Cap Lutts, now marshalled his horde of bush-whackers, bent upon the speedy annihilation of the Lutts folk, kith and kin.

Supported on a platform-like plot projecting from the hip of Moon mountain, the domicile of old Lutts stood out in the moonlight, traced in silver brocade against a somber ribbon of scrub timber that girded the waist of the mountain.

From the Lutts abode the eye traveled for miles along the gorge to the right. To the left the chasm cut deeper into the hills, until it ended in the valley where Boon Creek and Hellsfork intersected; where the paw-paws and the ferns, the weeping willows and the familiar, unnamed flowers were luxuriant.

Straight ahead, traversing the dry bed of a blind gulch, a train of pigmy peaks, left dun and naked by a river dead a thousand years, rose up and bared their serried spurs like hound's teeth.

On the opposite side of Hellsfork, lifted the stupendous Southpaw range-the stronghold of the enemy-rearing its savage peaks higher and higher, piling upward and onward until they pierced the myriad stars; then tumbled downward into the russet realms of lilac mist.

Beyond the Lutts cabin and towering above it, a single monster boulder jutted outward from the perpendicular wall of granite and hung perilously over sheer space. This freakish rock, known as Eagle Crown, looked like a ragged punctuation pause in a folk-lore story; a relic tossed on high by some legendary, boastful giant.

The wonder was how Cap Lutts gained its forbidding lofty platform, for surely there was no visible means of ascent. Howbeit, Eagle Crown had been the old man's retreat for sixty-odd years. This imperishable shelf of granite offered him sanctuary when travail and sorrow, that weighted his life, pressed hard upon him. There he had spent his moody hours since boyhood. There his father and his great-grandfather had gone to be alone. And there to-night, high up and alone, his majestic form was silhouetted plainly against the sky.

A mighty man, this Lutts. At seventy-six he stood six feet seven inches-straight as an arrow; a seasoned ball-bearing pyramid of big bones, mounted with iron-fibered muscles; and a drop of chilled steel for a fighting heart. In the premises of peace, this same heart swelled up to proportions of compassion and generosity that named him father of all the community north of Hellsfork-a man who never failed his people; one to whom they hurried with their woes when they needed material help, succor, sympathy and protection.

From this height, the old man fondly turned his eyes downward toward the clearing that now held his sacred treasure-a log church. There, high up toward heaven, in the profundity of his loneness, only God knew this somber, silent man's thoughts-this feud-hunted, law-hounded man whose soul brimmed with his own religion; whose being was wrapped about with that which he took for the right; whose heart spurned all that he thought wrong.

His so-called bandit-spirit was insulated with the convictions of his own peculiar faith. His every utterance and deed were tempered with the tenets of a unique creed handed down by his mountain fore-fathers. In his heart there murmured a runic cadence, the language of which was only interpreted by the omnipotent, all-merciful Over-soul.

Why the menacing hand of an outer world was lifted against him was a problem he had long since despaired of solving. Fondly now he gazed down toward the spot where the new cedar clapboards of the meeting-house shimmered like a disk of true gold beneath the moon's whiteness; beckoning to him with an insistence that stirred his stoic heart to its depths.

A tender look softened the old man's opaque mask-like features, as fumbling in his shirt-pocket and bringing forth a worn tintype picture of a woman, swathed in buckskin, he held it to the moon's rays and for a full minute peered tenderly at the kindly pictured eyes and smiling lips. Then, clasping the tintype reverently between his two mighty hands, he leaned against the natural buttress at his back, and his great head, crowned with its hoary white mane, was bowed down.

"To-morry-to-morry," he whispered, and he knew that the picture smiled forgivingly and happily back to him.

With the proceeds of moonshine whiskey, backed by the brawn of heredity and a righteous purpose, old Cap Lutts had at last realized the dream of two lives-his own and that of his dead wife, Maw Lutts. Although grievously late, he had now moulded this double dream into a tangible reality; for now before him, in the center of the clearing at the frowsy, feudal base of Moon mountain, and just where the rabid waters of Hellsfork leaped like live, wild things in their down-grade race across forty-odd rugged miles of Kentucky, this grizzled hillman viewed in sober, pious exultation, the product of his log church, all but finished.

A church is an acquisition strangely alien to this mountain-piled country, where the strategy of family wars and illicit distilling is religiously pursued. Nevertheless, he and Maw Lutts had dreamed in unison for years and had longed for the culmination of this extravagant, divine purpose.

Formerly, it had appeared to him that the propitious hour in their furtive existence had not arrived, although daily he had clearly foreseen it in the rising sun of the morrow. Always with the firm intention to do, he had added postponement to delay, and another broken promise on the creased brow of Maw Lutts and another prayer in her sorrowing heart.

However, the belated church was finally upon the perilous premises. Then with the poignant achings that many desirable citizens had felt before him, the old man had gone to the orchard like a penitent truce-breaker, where on his knees in supplicant whispers he had unfolded his tardy atonement and laid it like a tarnished sceptre at the woman's mute, unseeing grave-side.

Since the majority of native adults were babies, the magic name of Cap Lutts was mouthed in every cabin on the border range. He held the novel status where popularity was abreast with notoriety. Long since the populace had heard of his intention to build a church. Looking across the epitome of delay, they told themselves that this was the first pledge the old man had ever made, which he had not kept, so now the redeeming news of Cap Lutts' finished meeting-house and the day of dedication had penetrated the remotest habitants of the mountains. This intelligence had gone hither to friend and enemy, pious and wicked alike, with the same mysterious agency and puzzling rapidity that characterizes winged warnings of the on-coming revenuer.

Every man and woman in the district, big enough to pull a trigger, knew that he held a certain latent stock in this meeting-house. It came like an unknown heritage suddenly delivered. While some would, surreptitiously, have exchanged their interest for a mustard plaster, they knew that it was not negotiable. They lied aloud, but in their hearts they knew that sooner or later they would follow that magnetic spark Luttsward. They knew that they would either cross the hypnotic threshold of that sanctuary into the halo of sacred enlightenment, or halt without in the darkness of superstition and feudal malice and spend their ammunition to help crush it.

There was no intermediate platform. There was no neutral grand-stand wherein the indifferent could take refuge. The populace stood either for or against. Even the lethargic, voteless clay-eaters sat up and took notice like a nest of snakes in the sunshine. The relatives and friendly factions representing the prospective congregation, did homage to Cap Lutts and clamored to make the church a success. The enemy over in Southpaw had already advanced the prophecy that they would take the meeting-house. But the flapping of feudal wings did not perturb this veteran hawk of the hills. His one apprehension was of the common enemy, the "revenuer."

There was now but one day between the new church and its dedication. In secret service circles, down in Frankfort, it had long been mooted that the pet aim of Peter H. Burton was to capture old Cap Lutts.

Burton had, during his service, previously captured many members of the Lutts faction. The commissioners were ready enough to bind them over, but trials never carried a conviction. Burton had even juggled cases, alternately, on venue writs, between the six Federal Courts in the Eastern District, but the Lutts blood invariably cropped up, stealthful and rich in sympathy, in the precincts of the petit jury room. Acquittal followed acquittal.

But now Burton, feeling himself close upon the heels of the King of Moonshiners, altered his procedure and, armed with a premature change of venue to Frankfort, he hunted Lutts with a renewed zeal, keen and pleasurable.

Indeed, the younger attachés of the office regarded Cap Lutts as an historic myth. In jest, knowing Burton's affinity for wildcat skins, they hinted that the Lutts in question was merely a wraith-pilot pointing toward new skins-a favorite platitude upon which to stage another hunting vacation. But to Chief Burton, the subject of this jest was far removed from joking premises; mainly for the adequate reason that he himself, like many of his predecessors, had eyed old Cap Lutts more than once. His corporeal being had felt Lutts' lead.

Although the astute Burton had toiled a part of each season for eleven consecutive years on the border trail of this subtle law-breaker, Lutts had as yet never seen the county calaboose, or the barriers of a blue-grass jail. Burton had surprised him time and again, but inventory of these encounters always told the same trite story-the moonshiner had simply melted into absence.

After the smoke of some of these sorties, Burton had either limped or loped away with hopes mounting over a trail of blood. But these red splotches never led to the man. This feud leader and distilling chieftain of the range still reigned and the stereotyped report to headquarters was simply dated and signed with open blanks, a form to apprise headquarters that the officer was still alive.

Under pressure the county authorities periodically sought old Lutts. The times when they did find him, they merely flirted mutually with the faction and subsided harmlessly.

With the completion of the meeting-house, Cap Lutts had attained his goal; nor had he suffered the neighboring denizens of the foothills to raise an axe, or donate a single clapboard toward the erection of this infantile sanctuary. It was an enshrined monument to Maw Lutts. It was a mural hanging against Moon mountain, the place of her birth and the scene of her death. It was her own cherished endowment to the rifle-toting, tobacco-swallowing, snuff-chewing community. It was Maw Lutts's and his individual, holy triumph. All Cap Lutts expected of the people was, he told them:

"T' cum when th' ridin' pahson rid up t' ded'cate th' gawspel-house; an' tote thar sins t' th' altar, an' donate 'em at th' cross t' be wyshed 'way with th' blood uv Calv'ry-an' keep on a comin' thet they mought be clean an' onspotted an'-Gawd an' my gun'll damn ary hillbilly what darst lift a han' to hender."

The church represented months of hard toil, interrupted only when Cap Lutts fled up to the rock-ribbed pockets of the mountain or down into some untrodden ravine to escape Burton, the revenuer. Even in such intervals, the old man had sallied out into the night like the crag-panther, when the moon had turned white; and climbed high, with rifle ready and the hollow-flanked hound at his heels, to visit the clearing and gloat in solitude beneath the trembling stars over the progress of his sacred enterprise.

The church itself stood on "squatted" soil. Crowned with rhododendrons and laurel blossoms, it reared its exotic head in defiant challenge to Satan, like a single star upon the horizon of feudal gloom.

The level space had cost Lutts nothing but labor. The logs had cost him nothing but work. With his own hands and crude appliances of the back forests he had split, shaped and trimmed eleven thousand cedar clapboards; but when it came to interior finish he was extravagant and fastidious.

The white-pine tongue-and-grooved boards that he used to make the platform and the altar, the window and door plates; and the wide, smooth planks turned into benches, all represented cash-and cash was a rarity in the sterile Moon mountain district. And, too, the new gold-hued bell, which now nestled in its cotlike belfry, about to utter its virgin exhortation across those Godless hills, cost money.

Cap Lutts had paid this money ungrudgingly, for it was his own. Had he not, together with his son Lem, and Slab, the negro, and the two red steers, plowed the slanting plot that hung on the hip of the mountain and sown the grain, and tilled it, and reaped it, and carried it to the hidden still, where he had brewed it into money?

It was Lutts's own scant, hard-earned dollars that had bought the boards, the nails, and the bell.

True, it was not a regular church bell; but it was the largest farm bell he could procure and it had taken the steers five hot days to go to Flat Gap Junction and haul back the bell, and the nails, and the polished boards and glass.

* * *