Up on Eagle Crown, dim crest of his benighted world, Buddy Lutts' small shape made a vague shadow, fusing with the dawn-mists that dipped and lifted and swathed the peaks like a nun's veil. The boy crawled far out on this majestic point that divided night from day. On one side the sun had poised its jewelled lance against the east. On the other, the vanquished morning moon was hiding his pallid face amidst the naked peaks.

Buddy crawled farther along the dew-chilled brink of the ledge like a young, lean catamount whelp. Here he sprawled at full length upon his stomach with his thin face propped up between his hands. Here, alone on the sanctum-rock of Eagle Crown, he lay, his moody eyes gazing beneath and across the limitless expanse of purple fog.

There was a great ache in his heart, and he was lonelier than any boy could well be and live. By and by he discerned the top of the church belfry floating on the sea of fog like a buoy, and the mere sight of this replenished the fires of vengeance that had reduced his puerile being to a hard cinder of hate.

No human foot had ventured across the door block of that death place since that serene Sabbath morning, more than a year since, when they had lifted the dead body of his father off the virgin altar and laid him on the pyramid of flowers built up in the clearing by the hundreds who had come to witness the dedication of the church. Although this deed stood foremost and fresh and even more vivid now in his memory, still, the calendar day of its enactment, seemingly, held a grim unforgettable spot on the apex of a grievous avalanche of immeasurable vengeance.

The boy wearily withdrew his truculent gaze and his eyes softened with an unutterable sadness as he fixed them on the tops of the apple trees, behind the log barn, grouped about the two sodden graves of his father and mother—both dead at the hands of the despised law. His heart was dead to all else save one hope—to avenge the death of his parents and his brother Lem, whom he now believed to have been murdered by Sap McGill. He would not count his young life amiss with all its hardships and heart-aches, if only he could see the dawn of this triumphant day for which he lived. He was hoping and waiting and watching—waiting evermore.

It seemed that the torturous days, weeks and months that he wandered through the hills furtively and alone, waiting and watching since his father's killing and since Lem and Belle-Ann had slipped away and out of his life, was time enough to make a decrepit, aged man. An insufferable loneliness had wrapped its tentacles around his being, and had, like a cruel tourniquet, crushed all the joy out of his soul. At times in retrospective indulgence he felt that his soul could not endure. Tears might have alleviated the misery within him, but Buddy's grievous repining and loneliness was of a tearless brand.

Buddy Lutts was a boy in size and in years only, for it was with an adult stoicism that he valiantly fought this creeping madness. In his weaker moments this brooding would seize him and drag him back to the brink of utter hopelessness and despair; but always his purpose would fly to his rescue and beckon a renewed promise, and he would awake out of these lethargies armed with a buoyant sense of patience and inspired with a mighty will to wait and watch.

In these periodical relapses it was his wont to humor his fevered fancy with lurid and extravagant sequences to his protracted term of espionage. Among these vagaries was a pet dream representing the revenuer and Sap McGill creeping upon him in single file; whereupon, he fired and his single ball tore both their hearts out and made him dance and clap his hands with sheer joy, and he was merrier than any orphan had ever been before him. His conscience acquitted him blithely, and his spirits soared skyward.

Deprived of these monopolistic creations of reprisal to alleviate the tension of his hate, the bonds of his perverse reason would have burst asunder and left him bereft.

But now again, there arose a cheering prophecy in the advent of spring. Since Lem Lutts had dropped out of the mountain so mysteriously, the bitter nights and days had rolled into weary months. And the brooding months had waxed into riotous winter tempests and had dragged in endless, eternal deluges of ice and snow, adding cold agony to Buddy's already misanthropic heart. But finally the crows rode up on the soft winds out of the South, and a benign sun broke the grip of these frost-bound hills, and gradually emptied their pockets of snow. The ridges and coves, and the emerald hulks of the mountains smiled gratefully back. And through this expanse of tangled scenic splendor, the rhododendrons and laurels wove a banner of multicolored tones. The sassafras and poplar and dogwood bloomed and the cascade sang a new ode. The calling of the lark came up from the lowland, mingled with the blatant scream of jay-birds in the orchard. And the warble of the blue-birds filled the odoriferous somnolent air.

Buddy lay motionless out on the crag with his thoughts, and watched the sun unveil the spurs below him. Then he divided his gaze between the distant splash of water that marked Boon's Ford, shining back like the glint of a sun-perch, and the yellow length of trail across Hellsfork that marked the path to Sap McGill's stronghold. Then he twisted his head around unconsciously, and his eyes caressed the rifle that rested behind him—his father's rifle. And an inarticulate muttering answered the reiterated avowal in his heart, inspired each time he looked at this, his father's rifle—a sacred relic bequeathed to him and vested with a stupendous responsibility. He reasoned that now as he was the last of the Luttses, he was rightfully the Captain of the faction. In view of this heritage he argued that he should at least have a voice in the counsel of the clan.

But Johnse Hatfield had a smooth, persuasive mien with him, and while he and all the men facetiously recognized young Buddy as their "Captain," they had, through Johnse, kept Buddy artfully in the background. The disgruntled boy did not relish this lack of due recognition and these periods of inaction. He did not favor postponements. Time and again he had appealed to Johnse Hatfield to issue a call and muster every man and boy in the Moon mountains range, and cross Hellsfork and storm the McGills, win or lose. Ultimately, Johnse always twisted this sanguine project away from him, through flattery and cajolery; making amendments bit by bit, until Buddy's pet scheme had petered down to another postponement to which he readily acquiesced at the time. But always his truant acumen told him later that Johnse Hatfield did not consider him "fitten."

This morning Buddy crawfished backward away from the brink of the overhanging rock. He threw the rifle-strap over his shoulder, and as he made the dangerous descent, there was etched on his grim little face the outlines of some new, inexorable resolution.

The type of man who now stood as dictator and leader by proxy, of the Lutts' faction in the Moon mountain range, was an individual possessing a peculiarly complex and many-sided nature. In stature Johnse Hatfield was of medium height. He was deep-chested and thick of neck, but his legs were straight and incongruously slender in comparison with his shoulders. His face was a mask of black, close-cropped hair, save the complete exposure of the mouth.

The hair growth halted below the lower lip and, from constant biting or use of the shears, the hair on his upper lip held aloof; hence, the mouth, thick-lipped and wide and tilted upward at the corners, bore the aspect of one perpetual smile. But, oddly enough, the eyes were a total and surprising antonym of this smiling mouth. They were markedly small, close set, and of a singular amber hue, glinting like needle points and carrying the fire of direct and instant demand. Thus, these closely coupled, unwinking eyes contradicted and specifically denied the smiling, placatory, diplomatic mouth so prominent across his black visage.

It was said of Johnse Hatfield that at the moment marking his advent into the world he had interrupted his mother who was working a pump-gun from behind a grind-stone, in her will to help the men-folks repulse an attack upon their home cabin. She claimed that she "sho' wud a fetched thet 'onery Tod McCoy," whose head she was angling for behind a turnip mound, "ef little Johnsie hed a waited an' hadn't bin so all-fired anxious t' git hisse'f into th' rumpus."

As a lad Johnse had carried arms with his notorious father and brothers against the McCoys. Then he had drifted up Hazard way and had, through blood relationship, become entangled in the French-Eversole war. Eight years since he had come up to Moon mountain to visit "Maw" Lutts, who was a blood cousin, and he never went back.

While his life had been practically one prolonged fight, there was, nevertheless, a commiserating, gentle side to his nature. This incorruptible fealty and trustworthiness was an element that had attracted old Cap Lutts, and in time Johnse Hatfield had become the old man's first lieutenant. He had since served gallantly through many fierce sorties with the McGills and the revenuers.

Johnse's friends pretended that he was a source of deep anxiety to them when near the water, because if he unfortunately fell in, there was enough lead in him to take him to the very bottom and keep him there.

Hatfield had a smattering of education, and was reputed as upstanding as a mountain fighter could well be. Certainly, Johnse did not stand up and invite hot pellets of lead. He did not scorn a rock or a tree any more than did his opposing belligerents. But throughout his life the value of his given word was equal to a fulfillment. Those who bargained for this man's word felt that on the spot where Johnse defaulted they would find his dead body.

When Lem Lutts had disappeared so inexplicably from the mountains, Hatfield had, after a hasty search, hied himself out and visited every calaboose and county jail in the surrounding country. He knew the cunning of Burton, the revenuer, well enough, but little did he anticipate such a flagrant irregularity as the transfer of a "moonshiner" to the capital of the State, with a dozen counties separating the place of offense. Such a procedure was depriving a defendant of all constitutional rights, and an effrontery to county jurisprudence, the enormity of which Hatfield could not ascribe to the power of even the wily, murderous revenuer.