The Code of the Mountains

The town of Winchester, like all the county seats of central Kentucky, breaks from its drowsy somnolence into a brief activity on court-day. On one Monday in each month the roads fill with an unaccustomed caravan of trade. Then under the hammer of the street auctioneer farm gear and live stock change hands; saloons and eating-houses do a banner business; politicians often harangue in the court-house square; friends renew old acquaintanceships and sometimes enemies renew old quarrels. But Winchester differs in one respect from its sister towns. The savor of a soil rich in chivalric traditions hangs here as it does over neighboring counties, and yet there is a difference. For Winchester is the nearest town of consequence to that foothilled borderland where the opulent bluegrass ends and the illiterate Cumberlands pile their grim ramparts. Here come the farther-wandering traders from the mountains; gaunt men with steady-gazing eyes and lean sinews and noiseless tread, to mingle with the louder-spoken and fuller-nourished brothers of the lowlands. It is on court-day that they come in greatest numbers. Here, too, live some of their own kin whom the menace of feudal reprisal has driven from their native slopes and "coves." With the mountaineer's strong yearning to remain as near as possible to his birthplace, these refugees have made new homes and new lives at the edge of the bluegrass where on occasion they can again see familiar faces. From Frankfort to Winchester is a matter of almost fifty miles, and Newt Spooner, who had taken up his homeward journey on a Saturday morning, saw its court-house cupola and church spires pierce the screen of foliage on the forenoon of Monday, which chanced to be the Monday allotted to Clark County for its court.

Newt was very tired and very hungry. His rebuff at the farmhouse had festered and rankled in his mind, and he had refused to ask hospitality again or to speak to any man, save for the curt asking of necessary directions. In Lexington he had bought himself a "snack," but because he was penuriously hoarding his small capital, he spent with a stinting hand and pushed onward unsatisfied.

Now, as he trudged wearily, he saw a figure by the roadside at his front. The figure was that of a negro, who sat on a rock pile in the sun, hammering limestone chunks into road metal. As the boy came nearer, he saw another detail. The black man, though unguarded, was a prisoner and he sat safe against the chance of escape by reason of the huge iron ball fastened to one ankle by a padlocked chain. The white man, himself so lately released from the penitentiary, halted. He had the mountaineer's chronic aversion to "niggers," but here was someone whom he could question and who was in no position to insult him.

"How fur mout hit be ter Winchester?" he demanded.

The negro, welcoming interruption and conversation, turned with his granite-headed hammer poised over a piece of limestone.

"It's a right-smart piece, if a man's leg-weary. It's about a mile, boss," he said.

A mile to the hills-man is nothing; a mere "whoop and a holler," yet now it seemed to the ex-convict as his informant said, "a right-smart piece." The glow which spotted his pallid face at the cheekbones told of a temperature. Through his limbs went a dull ache. From time to time he coughed. Finally the negro laid aside his rock-hammer, and gazed long and inquiringly at his silent visitor. He, too, recognized the state-bestowed clothing and its meaning.

"'Scuse me, boss," he suggested, "but yer done come from Frankfort, ain't yer?"

Newt Spooner nodded, but his eyes narrowed, discouraging interrogation.

"Was yer – was yer in de pen'tenshery, boss?"

The man chained to his rock pile doubted the wisdom of his question, but African inquisitiveness had mastered his better judgment.

Instantly he recognized his mistake. The boy from Troublesome was at once on his feet and his sallow face was distorted with anger. From his lips came profane volleys of abuse. Transported by rage, he took a step forward with clenched fists. The negro clambered to his feet, and, since he was anchored against flight, backed away defensively, waving his rock hammer.

Newt Spooner selected a huge fragment of the scaly limestone, and withdrew just beyond the range of hammer and chain; but as the negro, in a paroxysm of terror, fell pleadingly to his knees, he dropped the missile at his side.

"I hain't a-goin' ter bust in yore damned black head," he said in slow wrath, "because I got another job ter do. Thet's ther only reason why I hain't a-goin' ter kill ye." Then he turned into the road and took up his journey again.

Back there in the fastnesses of the hills, toward which he was making his way, the leaven of change was beginning to work, yeast-like. When he reached his destination he was to learn with surprise that he could not take up without interruption the story of his life: the story out of which pages standing for two years had been torn. Births and deaths and the giving in marriage were not the only things that had happened. Quietly a new agent had entered in; the agent of a patient spirit of education. This spirit came burning in the hearts of men and women from below, who realized that they must breast stubborn opposition and that they must adapt their methods to the life they sought to change. They must plant and nourish the new idea in the younger minds and they must not seek to alter in a twinkling a régime that had long been immutable.

But buried deep in the forestry of the tangled hills, far back from a railroad stood a group of buildings that seemed miracle-reared. They were stanch buildings of square-hewn logs, which in contrast to the ramshackle huts about them appeared to have been lifted from another world and transported on the winds of some benevolent cyclone. It was difficult to think of these houses as having been raised from solid foundation to level ridgepole so far from the facilities of transportation. Yet here in the wilderness stood the "college."

It was no vaunting boastfulness that had inspired the almost fanatical men and women who stood as sponsors for the enterprise to give so high-sounding a name to the institution which taught kindergarten and primary classes. Some day, they hoped, it might grow up to its title, and meanwhile there were gray-beards and wrinkled women who sought to study primer and multiplication-table, but whose pride would bar them from advantages undignified by the name of college.

On the spring morning when Newt Spooner was trudging homeward, Doctor Murray, who had slowly and courageously turned his dream into a reality, sat in the study of the college. There was a smile on his lips, and the square-jawed face, which escaped all trace of the pedagogic, was contented. The sun streamed in through his windows and lighted a room finished in wainscoting of oak and maple – sawed at the mill, which was part of the institution and which he could see from his window, when he looked down.

Above, when he cast his eyes in that direction through another window, nestled the small hospital, where barbaric methods of local surgery were being altered. But, best of all, there came to his ears laughter and shouts from the trim campus where boys and girls were at play: boys and girls who until they had come here, had known little about laughter and much about drudgery. And every peal of mirth was a challenge to the old order of hatred and the ancient thraldom of sullenness.

A girl came into the room and laid some papers on his desk, and the doctor nodded at her with a smile.

"Minerva," he said, "I'm afraid you are working too hard. One doesn't have to learn everything at once, you know."

The pupil flushed and stood for a moment silent. She was straight and lithe, and under the blue calico dress that was turned down at her neck, her throat was brown with a tan through which a petal-like color glowed. Her brown hair glistened with the glint of polished mahogany, and her eyes struck the doctor as eyes meant for mirth, though they had hardly learned to laugh. The deadly seriousness of the hills and the Calvinistic seriousness that makes martyrs, seemed to hold in bondage a spirit that nature had intended to radiate gaiety. Her fingers drew themselves together into fists, and after a moment she spoke slowly, and her speech was a strange blending of the illiterate argot of the hills and a conscious effort to speak in the phrases dictated by the education which she coveted.

"I reckon ye don't hardly know how much I've got to learn," she said. "I reckon ye don't realize how plumb ign'rant I am."

Suddenly her voice became passionate.

"Maybe ye don't know how I hate it all – how I want to get away from ign'rance an' dirt an' wickedness. I've been wonderin' if I didn't err in comin' here. It's just makin' me hate that cabin over yon – I mean over there – on Troublesome. Sometimes I think it can't hardly do nothin' – do anything – but make me dissatisfied."

The head of the school looked up, and his face grew grave.

"There are times," he said, "when that thought comes to me, too. I don't mean as to you, Minerva, alone, but as to all those we take here and teach. At first it was all a dream of bringing a light to a place that was dark. That was the only phase I saw. But later I saw more. One can't make a dream a reality without struggle. Dissatisfaction is the price we must pay for regeneration – and people like you and myself must be among the first to pay it."

"Over there," she went on, as though talking to herself, "they only hates me for it. They says I'm stuck on myself an' that what's been good enough for my folks for all time ain't good enough for me no more – I mean any more."

"It takes time," the man reassured her. "In the place of ignorance, we offer education. In the place of lawlessness, we offer law. In the place of squalor, we offer thrift. Are those things not worth what they cost?"

The girl stood silent for a moment, then nodded her head.

"I reckon so," she answered simply, and turned to leave the library. After she had gone, the teacher sat for a time with his book open before him, but his eyes were contemplative, and it was from memory and not from the printed page that he was reading.

He was thinking back and seeing over again a day shortly after his school had opened. In those times there had been fewer buildings, and of the many pupils who came, hungry to learn, only a few could be taken in. Among the first had been Minerva.

She had come exhausted and tired because she had come on foot, and her mean calico dress had been briar-torn, and her feet, which were bare, had been bruised. But in her eyes was gleaming a passion of hunger and resolve for the food which the school offered the mind. She had presented herself, a ragged little mendicant asking the alms of education, carrying what belongings she had in such a bundle as tramps carry.

Back in her unlighted and windowless cabin, she had heard of this "new-fangled" institution where was to be dispensed the pabulum of "larnin'" – and she had made her pilgrimage. Now Doctor Murray was recalling that day. He had been down by the stile which gave entrance from the creek-bed road, when he had seen the slight figure trudging along, and the girl had stopped and eyed him shyly.

"Air ye the feller frum down below what aims ter give folks larnin'?" she had demanded, as her large eyes held his with a tense directness, untinged by any humor.

"To give folks learning is a large contract," he had answered with a quizzical smile; "but we hope to give to as many as we can, at least its rudiments."

"What's them?"

"The start. Have you ever been to school at all?"

"I've done been ter the blab-school. I kin read an' write an' figger."

Dr. Murray had stood there looking at her, and it had come to him that she made a very pathetic picture, with the yearning in her eyes and the dust of travel on her calico, so he denied her with a heavy heart.

"Just now," he said regretfully, "we can only take in a few pupils and we are already over-crowded. I'm afraid we can't make room for you." Suddenly he added, "How far have you come?"

"The rise of twenty mile, sence sun-up," she informed him simply, then tears welled rebelliously into her eyes. Her voice broke from her lips with a fierce passionateness.

"Ye've got ter take me," she cried out. "Ye've jest simply got ter take me. I've done been prayin' ter God Almighty ter give me a chanst. I've done heerd that ye war a preacher of ther Gospel, an' I reckon God hain't a-goin' ter suffer ye ter turn me away."

Doctor Murray had then been new to the hills. The storm-like intensity of the mountain character was bringing him its revelations. He stood there by the road, watching the ox-teams that were bringing logs in to his saw-mill and made rapid calculations and as he did so he heard the new candidate for matriculation rushing on:

"Ther Scripters says thet God's servant won't turn away sich as comes to him seeking light – an' I've done come."

"At all events," he answered gently, "come up and have something to eat, and I'll talk it over with my wife."

Mrs. Murray had spent a half-hour with the girl, and then had come back to her husband.

"She is as wild as a squirrel," was her announcement, "but I have never seen such a starving heart or brain. I don't know what we shall do with her, but we must let her stay." And so Minerva had stayed.

Now she went out of the library, and made her way to a favorite spot up on the hillside. It was a study hour, and she carried a book with her. The time she had spent here had wrought a transformation. The brain had unfolded and the heart had become unplaced. The terms of this school adapted themselves to the needs of the environment. They did not conflict with the nearer demands of farm work, but accommodated themselves to necessity. When the frequent vacations came, Minerva went back to the cabin which she called her home. Each of these visits she dreaded.

Mountain reserve is hard to break. Even in her tempestuous appeal to the head of the school, she had not told her full story. Now she was thinking of it.

Mountain women grow old while they are yet young, but her mother had seemed to her different. Mountain women are grave with a gravity which is more than half sullen, but she remembered a mother who had laughed and whose voice had been often raised in song. Then when she was still very small, she remembered one of those rude mountain funerals where those who come raise their voices in a weird incantation of "mourning," which they leave off for gossip as soon as the period set aside for the clamor comes to its end. After that she had been motherless and had kept house for a shiftless and surly father. That house-keeping had been simple enough in the shack of one room, but it had been unrelieved drudgery, and because she was one of those human beings who are less near of kinship to the members of the family with whom they live than with some far-off ancestor whose nature is strangely duplicated, Minerva had always had longings for things which were to her undefined dreams. Her nature had always been in insurrection against the squalid facts of her life. Her inclinations and thoughts struck back, by one of Nature's practical jokes, to some woman who had been a lady in the courtly life of Virginia a century, or maybe two centuries, ago, before her ancestors became stranded pioneers and lapsed into illiteracy, degeneracy and venal sloth here in the hard hills. What this all meant she had not known, but she knew that one memory alone was sweet to her thoughts, and that that was the memory of her mother. She knew, too, that even before they had taught her at the college how perverted it all was, this whole scheme of mountain feudalism and black ignorance and bitterness had seemed to her wrong and repugnant. Something had told her that somewhere there must be something different and that somehow she must find it and weave it into the pattern of her life. Of these things she had thought as she sat in the summer evenings on the slab bench before the cabin door. In summer there was a great pine, which, just after twilight had faded into velvet blackness in the sky, pointed an index upward beyond the valley; and over it, before the other stars came out there always appeared a tiny point of light, which she chose to call her star. Somehow, it seemed that in some vague future day that star would lead her.

She was often alone, for her father would leave her there and go his own ways, but a day came when he returned and began throwing his few possessions into a bundle.

"M'nervy," he said with a sullen sort of embarrassment, "I reckon thar's times when ye gits right-smart lonesome way up hyar, hain't thar?"

A catch had come into her voice as she said:

"Right often, Pappy."

He nodded, then added abruptly:

"Waal, we're ergwine ter nail up thet door ternight an' quit this-hyar place."

"Whar air we a-goin' ter?"

"I done got myarried terday," he announced. "I reckon we'll go down an' dwell with my wife's folks."

The sun was nearing the western peaks and the afternoon was well spent. The girl had had no intimation in advance of this contemplated change of order. She stood there stunned. Life had been empty enough, but here at least she had been in a fashion mistress of the wretched house, and here she had had her pine tree and her star, which were the emblems of her dreams.

A long, low moan escaped her, and her father's face reddened in anger. He turned away and left her, going into the house, and she fled precipitately to the heights above and sobbed out her misery at the roots of the pine to which she was bidding farewell.

Then they had moved, and life had meant fitting herself into a new family, no member of which liked her, and submitting to the shrewish heckling of a step-mother, who seemed to her a hideous libel upon the memory of the woman who had been lucky enough to die young.

Now, as she sat with her book in her lap, because in a few days she must go back to that cabin, the past was parading in review before her eyes, and though she was very hungry for "larnin'" she was neglecting her books.