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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Way Out," Emerson Hough crafts a compelling narrative that delves into the tumultuous journey of self-discovery amid the backdrop of American wilderness. Combining vivid descriptions with a lyrical prose style, Hough captures the struggle of his protagonists against external and internal conflicts, mirroring the broader themes of exploration and redemption prevalent in early 20th-century American literature. This novel reflects Hough's keen understanding of the natural world, as well as the complexities of human nature, positioning it within the literary context of his time, where the expansion into uncharted territories provoked existential inquiries about identity and purpose. Emerson Hough, an author and advocate for conservation, drew upon his experiences as a homesteader and his appreciation for the American landscape. His background in journalism and his travels throughout the American West infused his writing with a profound sense of place and authenticity. Hough's commitment to social issues, particularly concerning land use and indigenous rights, resonates throughout "The Way Out," making it both a personal and political exploration. This book is essential reading for those interested in the intersections of nature, identity, and self-redemption. Hough's eloquent prose and thought-provoking themes invite readers to reflect on their own paths and the broader implications of their choices, making "The Way Out" a timeless piece of literature that continues to inspire. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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The Way Out
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its heart, The Way Out explores how people seek an honest escape from the tangles of circumstance, duty, and desire without losing themselves.
Emerson Hough, an American author active in the early twentieth century, is best known for popular fiction and socially engaged writing that spoke to readers across a rapidly changing nation. The Way Out belongs to that period, when public debate about reform, responsibility, and personal conduct was especially lively in American culture. While specific publication particulars need not detain us here, the book can be approached as a product of the Progressive Era’s ferment, shaped by Hough’s instinct for accessible storytelling and his interest in the pressures exerted by law, custom, and community.
For new readers, the premise can be safely framed as a portrait of individuals confronted with limits they can neither ignore nor easily break, compelled to choose a path that promises relief at a cost. Hough presents this material in a straightforward, unadorned voice that favors clear incident and moral texture over ornament. The mood is earnest and probing, yet grounded in lived detail. It is a reading experience that moves with purpose, inviting reflection without halting momentum, and encouraging the reader to weigh the human stakes behind every decision rather than treating them as abstractions.
The Way Out turns on enduring themes: the balance between personal liberty and social obligation, the strain between private conscience and public expectation, and the question of what one owes to others when seeking change. It is also attentive to the ethics of consequence—how even justified exits can leave traces—and to the quiet courage required to accept responsibility. Without revealing developments, it is enough to say that the book illuminates how choices harden into character, and how the pursuit of freedom invariably encounters the claims of loyalty, law, and love.
These concerns keep the book resonant for contemporary readers. We still navigate institutions that can feel impersonal, and we still look for relief that does not simply shift burdens to someone else. The Way Out asks readers to consider agency, accountability, and compassion together, resisting easy answers. It encourages a habit of mind that values pragmatic integrity: the willingness to act, to reassess, and to accept limits while still seeking better arrangements for oneself and others. In this way, it offers not only a story but an ethical framework for thinking about change.
Stylistically, Hough’s strengths lie in clarity, pacing, and an eye for social dynamics. He writes with the assurance of a popular storyteller who respects common experience, letting situations and choices carry the argument rather than imposing it. Scenes are built to show pressure points—moments when characters must decide what they can live with—and the prose keeps those moments legible. Whether one approaches the book for its narrative drive or its reflective undercurrent, the craft serves both aims, making complex questions accessible without diminishing their weight.
Approached today, The Way Out can be read as a window onto its time and as a study in dilemmas that recur whenever people seek release from structures that no longer fit them. It invites readers to test their sympathies, to imagine consequences, and to consider how a path forward might honor both self and society. Without depending on prior knowledge of Hough’s work, it offers a clear entry point to his broader concerns. The result is an engaging, thoughtful journey that balances tension with insight and leaves space for the reader’s own conclusions.
Synopsis
Emerson Hough’s The Way Out is a contemporary novel of its time, set in early twentieth-century America and centered on the social and legal problem of marriage and divorce. It follows the rise of a conscientious attorney drawn into a case that tests his views of law, equity, and personal duty. The story moves from bustling courts and editorial rooms in the Midwest to a Western setting known for its permissive divorce statutes. Hough frames the narrative as an exploration of conflicting public morals and private suffering, using the legal process as a lens to examine community standards, individual rights, and the search for a lawful means of escape.
The tale begins with the attorney’s encounter with a woman trapped in an unhappy union and facing a tangle of inconsistent statutes. Her situation, at once ordinary and emblematic, becomes the catalyst that brings the protagonist into a larger debate about what the law can and should do. He is neither reform crusader nor cynic, but a professional compelled by facts. Early chapters map the opposing positions: religious guardians of tradition, practical reformers seeking relief, and a public fascinated by scandal. The attorney’s measured temperament and insistence on procedure set the tone for a narrative grounded in testimony, documents, and due process.
As the case gains notice, newspapers amplify every motion and rumor, turning private misfortune into a civic spectacle. Hough depicts the workings of the courthouse—filings, continuances, and the choreography of counsel—while showing how public opinion exerts pressure on all involved. The protagonist studies divergent state laws, weighing residency requirements, grounds for dissolution, and the gaps between principle and practice. He consults judges and clerks, gathers affidavits, and confronts the ethical edge of advocacy. The woman’s calm resolve, though often tested, anchors the proceedings. The atmosphere grows charged, with reputations at stake and the law’s inconsistencies laid open for scrutiny.
A change of venue shifts the story westward to a community known for lenient decrees and transient colonies of petitioners. Hough contrasts the stark, open landscapes with the compact moral world of drawing rooms and city offices. The West offers procedural clarity but also raises questions about motive and domicile. The attorney observes the divorce colony’s routines—boardinghouses, riders, quiet days marked by appearances before the court—while acquainting himself with local custom and the temperament of the bench. Scenes of outdoor travel and frontier camaraderie broaden the story, suggesting both escape and exposure, and casting the question of relief against a larger canvas of American mobility.
Complications mount as the opposing party resists, enlisting counsel and influence to contest jurisdiction, credibility, and cause. Private investigators appear, witnesses are coached or discredited, and gossip acquires legal weight. Hough portrays the strain on all parties: the woman’s social isolation, the attorney’s professional risk, and the judge’s concern for precedent. Political calculations surface in editorials and club discussions, where reform and scandal mingle. The legal path is narrow—complete enough to be fair, strict enough to prevent fraud—and every step must be documented. As the hearing approaches, minor setbacks and small victories accumulate, sharpening the conflict without tipping the eventual result.
Mid-narrative, an inquiry into procedural abuses widens the field. The attorney uncovers irregularities in how certain cases have been steered or stalled, and he grapples with whether exposing them will aid his client or upend her cause. Hough uses interviews, letters, and depositions to trace a web of convenience and discretion that has grown around the business of divorce. Allies emerge unexpectedly—a cautious editor, a candid clerk—while old acquaintances warn of retaliation. The evidence invites broader conclusions about inconsistency in the law, yet the protagonist maintains focus on the immediate file, seeking a course that satisfies both the statute and his own sense of professional integrity.
The courtroom sequence serves as the narrative’s hinge. Testimony proceeds under watchful public eyes, with objections, rulings, and a careful record. The attorney’s argument stresses the law’s purpose: to provide an orderly remedy where private arrangements have failed, balancing social stability with humane relief. Opposing counsel challenges domicile, motive, and sufficiency of proof. Hough keeps the outcome uncertain, emphasizing process over verdict. The woman’s poised appearance, the judge’s measured questions, and the plain language of the pleadings carry the drama. The question remains whether the law, as written and applied, can furnish a legitimate way out without inviting abuse or undermining marriage itself.
After the hearing, consequences ripple outward. Relationships are reassessed, reputations recalibrated, and the newspapers move on to fresh controversies. The attorney returns to prior clients and ongoing work, reflecting on the gap between legal remedy and moral consensus. The woman contemplates what a decision—whatever it may be—will mean for her future under the gaze of family and community. In legislative circles, draft bills and committee notes hint at possible reforms, while critics warn against haste. Hough draws the threads together without sensational revelation, leaving the results to the record, and keeping the focus on how people live with the processes that define their obligations and freedoms.
The Way Out presents a restrained portrait of a society negotiating change. Its central message is practical rather than polemical: in complex human affairs, the law must offer a clear, honest path that minimizes harm while preserving order. By juxtaposing city and frontier, custom and statute, publicity and privacy, Hough illustrates how Americans sought relief within institutions rather than outside them. The novel’s events highlight turning points—venue shifts, evidentiary tests, and arguments from principle—without reducing them to spectacle. Readers are left with a sense of measured possibility: that a lawful way out exists, but it demands candor, patience, and respect for the rules that make relief legitimate.
Historical Context
Emerson Hough situates The Way Out in the lived texture of early twentieth-century American cities, most recognizably the Midwestern metropolis typified by Chicago. The period is one of accelerated industrialization, dense immigrant neighborhoods, and rapidly expanding streetcar suburbs. Commercial entertainment districts, from vaudeville houses to saloons and cabarets, flourish alongside reform crusades that press City Halls to close vice resorts and regulate morality. The setting evokes a civic geography of wards, police precincts, and courthouse corridors where private life meets public power. The book’s urban milieu mirrors the volatile years around the 1910s, when municipal reform, wartime mobilization, and social hygiene campaigns converged to redefine respectability, family life, and citizenship.
The anti-vice crusade and its legal architecture form the era’s most decisive backdrop. Between 1909 and 1913, a nationwide panic over “white slavery” spurred investigations and sweeping reforms. In Chicago, the 1911 report The Social Evil in Chicago—produced by a mayoral Vice Commission—documented the Levee district’s brothels and the protective web linking proprietors, police captains, and First Ward politicians. Notorious establishments such as the Everleigh Club were shuttered in 1911 under mayoral pressure and prosecutorial efforts associated with figures like Assistant State’s Attorney Clifford Roe. Federally, Congress enacted the Mann Act (June 25, 1910), criminalizing the interstate transport of women for “immoral purposes”; landmark cases, including United States v. Holte (1915), clarified its scope. Parallel drives occurred elsewhere: New York’s Committee of Fourteen (founded 1905) targeted “Raines Law” hotels; New Orleans’ Storyville was closed by Navy order in 1917. Municipalities appointed morals squads, created vice courts, and experimented with social hygiene clinics backed by Progressive physicians. The crusade blended evangelical moralism, feminist abolitionism of prostitution, and middle-class professionalism (sociology, public health) into a governance model that policed sexuality as a civic problem. The Way Out echoes this climate by depicting the entanglement of private desire with public regulation—suggesting that personal redemption requires structural change, honest policing, and the dismantling of petty graft. Characters’ movements through dance halls, courtrooms, and reform agencies track the city’s attempt to provide a “way out” of exploitation through law, charity, and surveillance, while also exposing the ambiguities and collateral harms of moral regulation.
Temperance and the road to national Prohibition are central to the book’s moral atmosphere. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (founded 1874, led by Frances Willard) and the Anti-Saloon League (founded 1893, led by Wayne B. Wheeler) built a formidable coalition that linked alcohol to poverty, domestic violence, and political corruption. Wartime conservation policies and anti-German sentiment accelerated the cause, culminating in the Eighteenth Amendment’s ratification on January 16, 1919, and the Volstead Act (October 28, 1919). Urban saloons, often party clubhouses, symbolized machine politics and vice. Hough’s narrative reflects this nexus, presenting drinking dens as portals to exploitation and signaling sobriety, civic virtue, and household stability as the practical “way out.”
Shifting gender roles and family law debates frame the social stakes. The long suffrage campaign culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment (August 18, 1920), while World War I expanded women’s wage labor and public presence. Simultaneously, American jurisdictions wrestled with marriage and divorce: states varied widely in grounds and residency, with Reno, Nevada, developing a “divorce colony” by 1906, while uniform-law advocates (the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws) proposed model acts on marriage and desertion circa 1910–1911. Clergy, judges, and social workers argued over protecting children versus enabling escape from abuse. The novel engages these controversies by tracing how definitions of respectability, consent, and obligation are reworked in courts and homes, testing whether legal reform can repair intimate life.
Mass immigration and Americanization campaigns shape the book’s urban tapestry. Between 1907 and 1914, the United States admitted over a million newcomers annually, largely from southern and eastern Europe, crowding industrial wards in cities such as Chicago, New York, and Cleveland. Reformers at settlement houses—exemplified by Jane Addams’s Hull-House (founded 1889)—promoted civics classes, English instruction, and labor advocacy, while nativist politics pressed for restriction, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1917 (literacy test) and later quota laws (1921, 1924). The Way Out mirrors these pressures by positioning characters across ethnic lines, showing how poverty, language barriers, and prejudice interface with policing and charity, and how “Americanization” could both uplift and discipline.
Urban political machines, patronage, and police corruption provide the institutional context for moral reform. In Chicago’s First Ward, aldermen Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and John “Bathhouse” Coughlin notoriously presided over protected vice until reform waves crested in the 1910s; their lavish First Ward Ball (ca. 1896–1908) symbolized the nexus of politics and license. Investigations, civil-service reforms, and specialized courts (the Chicago Municipal Court, 1906) attempted to professionalize justice. Civic groups such as the Chicago Crime Commission (1919) soon documented organized vice and rackets. Hough’s storyworld relies on this machinery, depicting payoffs, selective raids, and courtroom bargaining to argue that meaningful exit from exploitation demands dismantling the everyday economies of graft.
World War I reshaped civic morality and surveillance. With U.S. entry in April 1917, the Selective Service Act mobilized millions; the Committee on Public Information orchestrated propaganda, while the Espionage Act (1917) and Sedition Act (1918) narrowed dissent. The Commission on Training Camp Activities (1917) closed red-light districts near bases and promoted social hygiene, linking national security to sexual regulation. Concurrently, the Great Migration (1916–1919) brought tens of thousands of Black southerners to cities like Chicago, straining housing and labor markets and foreshadowing the 1919 Chicago Race Riot. The novel registers wartime urgency—the insistence on order, health, and productivity—using patriotic discipline and public health rhetoric to intensify its call for personal and civic reform.
By fusing courtroom realism, municipal intrigue, and intimate crises, The Way Out serves as a pointed social critique of Progressive Era governance. It exposes how class and gender inequalities are reproduced when moral law is enforced through informal payoffs and discretionary policing, and it questions whether reform can transcend spectacle raids to deliver steady justice. The book indicts the saloon–machine nexus, the commodification of women’s labor and bodies, and the uneven burdens placed on immigrants and the poor. At the same time, it reveals the limits of punitive solutions, suggesting that the genuine “way out” requires coordinated public health, honest administration, and legal reforms that protect families without coercing them.
The Way Out
CHAPTER I
THE LAW AND THE GOSPEL
“HUSH! Stop it, Davy. He’s a-comin’!”
The old woman who spoke—a wrinkled dame she was, bowed down by years and infirmity, her face creased by a thousand grimed-in, wrinkled lines—moved with an odd sprightliness as she stepped across the floor. She placed a hand upon the shoulder of the young man whom she accosted, standing between him and the door of the little cabin of which they were the only occupants.
The young man turned toward her, smiling half dreamily. He was a tall man, as his outstretched legs, one crossed over the other, would attest; a man well developed, muscular and powerful. His gray eyes seemed now half a-dream, his wide mouth fixed itself in pleasant lines, so that he seemed far away, somewhere in the lands to which music offers access. For now he had been engaged in the production of what perhaps might have been called music. It was an old ballad tune he had been playing on his violin, and but now his grandam had joined in high and cracking treble on the old air of “Barbara Allen[2],” known time out of mind in these hills. It was the keener ear of the old woman which first had caught warning of approaching danger.
“Take keer, I say!” she repeated, and shook him impatiently. “I tell ye I heerd him come in at the lower gate. He’ll be here direckly. Git shet of that fiddle, boy!”
She bent on him a pair of deep-set hazel eyes, sharp as those of some wild creature. Her voice had in it a half-masculine dominance. Every movement of her stooped and broken body bespoke a creature full of resolution, fearless, fierce.
“Gawd knows why he’s back so soon,” she went on, “but he’s here. Give him time to turn old Molly loose and git a few years of corn, an’ he’ll be right in. Onct he hears that fiddle he’ll raise trouble, that’s what he’ll do. I reckon I know a preacher, an’ most of all yore daddy. For him thar hain’t nothin’ sinfuller’n a fiddle; he’s pizen on ’em—all preachers is—him wust of all. What does he know about music? Now, if he was French an’ Irish, like me, it mought be different. But then——”
“I kain’t hep it, Granny,” said the young man, still slowly, still unchanged, his fingers still trailing across the strings. “‘Barbara Allen’—do ye call that wicked, even on a Sunday? Besides, this is the fust time I’ve ever strung this fiddle up full. I couldn’t git the strings till jest now. Melissa says——”
“Never mind what Meliss’ says neither—she’s a triflin’ sort, even if she is yore own wife. For all that, ye’d orter be home this minute, like enough.”
“As if ye understood!” said the young man, sighing now and dropping the instrument to his knee. For the first time a shade of sadness crossed his face, giving to his features a certain sternness and masculine vigor.
“Why shouldn’t I understand, Davy? Listen—ye hain’t for these hills. Ye’re a throw-back somehow, ye don’t belong here. I say that, though yore daddy is my own son. Don’t I know him—he’d skin us alive if he found us two here fiddlin’ on Sunday atternoon. He certainly would shake us out over hell fire, boy! When he gits started to exhortin’ and damnin’ around here, he certainly is servigerous. Ye know that. Hist, now!”
The young man himself now heard the sound of heavy footsteps slopping on the sodden earth, the slam of the slat gate’s wooden latch as someone entered. There followed the stamp of heavy feet on the broken gallery, where evidently someone was stopping for an instant to kick off the mud.
Before the newcomer could enter the young man arose, and with one stride gained the opening that led up to the loose-floored loft of the single-storied log house. He reached up a long arm and laid the offending fiddle back out of sight upon the floor.
Just as he turned there entered the person against whose advent he had been warned—a tall man, large of frame, bushy and gray-white of hair and as to a beard whose strong, close-set growth gave him a look of singular fierceness. As he stood he might have seemed fifty years old. In reality he was past seventy. The young man who faced him now—his son—was twenty-eight. A stalwart breed this, housed here in this cabin in a cove of the ancient Cumberlands. The old dame who stood now, her eyes turning from one to the other, would never see her ninetieth birthday again.
Andrew Joslin, commonly known through these half-dozen mountain communities where he rode circuit as “Preacher Joslin[1],” stood now in the door of his own home and looked about him with his accustomed sternness—a sternness always more intense upon the Lord’s Day. A somber, dour nature, that of this mountain minister, whose main mission in life was to proclaim the wrath of God. A man of yea, yea, and nay, nay, one must have said who saw him standing now, his gray eyes looking out fiercely, searchingly, beneath his bushy brows.
“What ye been doin’?” he asked suspiciously now, indifferently of the old woman, his mother, and the stalwart young man, his own son. “What ye doin’ here, David? Why hain’t ye home? Why hain’t ye at church to-day, like ye’d orter be?”
“Thar’s no sarvices nowhars near here, an’ ye know it, Andrew,” said the old woman somewhat querulously.
“Thar kin be sarvices anywhar whar a few is gethered together in the name of the Lord. Ye two right here could hold sarvices for the glory of God, if so as ye wanted to.”
Neither made answer to him, and he went on:
“David, have ye read all of that thar book I give ye? Ye’d orter git some good outen Calvin’s Institutes. Ye’ll maybe be a preacher some time like yore daddy.”
“Well, daddy, I done tried to read her. I set up all one night with Preacher Cuthbertson from over in Owsley, an’ we both read sever’l chapters in them Institutes. Hit was nigh about midnight when we both went to sleep, an’ atter I’d went to sleep he done shuk me by the shoulder an’ woke me up, an’ he says to me, ‘David, David, I’ve been thinkin’ over them Institutes so hard.... I believe they’ve injured my mind’!”
The young man broke into a wide-mouthed smile as he made this recountal. But it was a thundercloud of wrath upon the face of his father which greeted such levity.
“Ye wasn’t reverent!” he blazed. “Ye was impyous, both of ye. Injure his mind—why, that feller Cuthbertson never had no mind fer to injure. That’s what ails him. The book of John Calvin is one of the greatest books in the world. What’ll folks like ye and Preacher Cuthbertson be up an’ sayin’ next? An’ I’d set ye apart for the ministry, too, allowin’ I could git ye some schoolin’ atter a while, somewhars.”
He turned from them both, and stood a little apart, his brows drawn down into a scowling frown.
“How come ye come home so soon, Andrew?” asked his mother now. “We wasn’t expectin’ ye back—ye told me ye was a-goin’ over to Leslie to preach a couple days on the head of Hell-fer-Sartin. But ye only left yisterday.”
“Hit’s none yore business how I got back so soon,” replied the old man savagely. “I don’t have to account to no one what I do.”
He turned about now moodily. In his great hand he still clutched the heavy umbrella which he carried, its whalebone ribs and cotton cover dripping rivulets. A step or two brought him to the opening in the loft floor, where he reached up to place the wet umbrella out of the way. As he did so his hand struck some other object hidden there. He grasped it and drew it down—and stood, his face fairly contorted with surprise and anger.
It was his son’s violin which now he clutched in his gnarled and bony hand. As he regarded it the emotion on his face was as much that of horror as aught else. A violin, an instrument of hell, here in his house—his house—a chosen minister of God!
“What’s this?” he demanded at length. “Tell me—how come this thing here—in my house!”
With one stride now—tearing away all the strings of the instrument with one grasp of his hand as he did so—he flung the offending violin full upon the flames in the fireplace, sweeping from him with an outward thrust of his great arm the tall figure of his son, who impulsively stepped forward to save his cherished instrument. As for the wrinkled old woman, she stood arrested in an attitude as near approaching fear as any she ever had evinced. She knew the fierce temper of both these men.
But the young man, the equal in height of his parent, his superior in strength, stayed his own impulse and lowered the clenched hand he had raised. Filial obedience, after all, was strong in his heart
“That’s whar it belongs!” exclaimed the older man, his eyes flashing. “In hell fire is whar all them things belongs, an’ the critters that fosters ‘em. My own flesh an’ blood! O Lord God, lay not up this against thy sarvent!”
“Ye have sinned against the Lord[1q],” he began, excited now in something of the religious fervor which had had no expenditure of late. He thrust a long, bony finger towards his son. “Ye an’ yore granny both have sinned. To Adam was give the grace of perseverin’ in good if he choosed. Adam had the power if he had the will, but not the will that he mought have the power. It was give to all of us subserquents to have both the will an’ the power fer to obstain from sin. But have ye two obstained? Look at that thing a-quoilin’ up in hell. That’s what comes to them that fosters evil when they have both the will an’ the power, an’ don’t use neither.”
They stood looking at him silently, and he went on, still more excited.
“Ye have-ah—tempted of the Lord,” he intoned. “Ye have forgot the holy commandments of the Lord-ah! Ye have sinned in the sight of God on the holy Sabbath day-ah! Ye have kivered up yore sin from me, the sarvent of the Lord-ah! Ye have plotted agin me. Ye have no grace, fer grace is not offered by the Lord to be either received or rejected—it is grace that perjuces both the will an’ the choice in the heart of man. But whar air the subserquent good works of grace? Ye don’t show them. Ye nuvver had no grace, neither one of ye! The both of ye will quoil in hell like that thing thar.”
“Tell me”—he turned now to the old dame—“was he a-fiddlin’ here in my house on the Lord’s day?”
“Yes, he war, an’ it hain’t the first time!” exclaimed the old woman. “I don’t keer who knows it. He war a-playin’ ‘Barbara Allen’ here, an’ I war a-singin’ to it. Now ye know it, an’ what air ye goin’ to do about it?”
For a moment the three stood in tableau, strong, yet sad enough. Then the fierce soul of the old man flamed yet more.
“Disgrace me—in my own house! Out of my house, ye, an’ never darken its doors agin! Yore wife and children need ye plenty ‘thout ye comin’ up here, fiddlin’ in a preacher’s house on Sunday.”
“Do ye mean that, daddy?” asked the young man quietly. “Do ye reelly mean that? Maybe ye’d better think it over.”
“I don’t have to think it over,” retorted the other. “Begone! Don’t nuvver come here again.”
“I reckon I’ll go too,” said the grandam, reaching out a skinny arm for the sunbonnet on its peg at the door.
“Ye’ll do nothin’ of the sort,” replied her son savagely. “Ye belong here. Let him go. I sont his mother outen the same door onct.”
“I know ye did, Andrew,” she replied, her fierce eyes untamed as she faced him. “An’ as good a womern as ever was in the world when she started, ontel ye cowed her an’ abused her, an’ sont her down the river—ye know whar, an’ ye know into what. Ye kin preach till ye’re daid, and shake me over hell fire all ye like, but ye kain’t change me, and ye kain’t scare me, an’ ye know it almighty well. I’ll stay here, an’ I’ll go when I git ready, an’ ye know that.”
“Go on, Davy.” She turned to the young man who stood, gray and silent, his hand upon the half-opened door. “Take him at his word, an’ don’t ye nuvver come back here agin. If ye hain’t happy in yore own home, git outen these mountings—git somewhars else. No matter what ye do, ye kain’t do worsen what ye’re doin’ here. Ye know that yore maw nuvver flickered afore him—nor yore granny neither—an’ don’t ye.”
The gray old man stood silent, at bay, in the center of the squalid little room—a room cluttered up with heavy, homemade chairs, a pair of corded bedsteads, a low board table; an interior lighted now in the approaching gloom of evening by nothing better than the log fire on the deep-worn hearth. It was an old, old room in an old, old house. The threshold of the door, renewed no man might say how often, was worn yet again to the bottom. Its hinges of wood were again worn half in two. The floor, made of puncheons once five inches thick, hewn by a hand-adze two generations ago from some giant poplar tree, now worn almost as smooth as glass by the polishing of bare feet—puncheons more than a yard wide each as they lay here on the ancient floor beams. A pair of windows, once owning glass, partially lighted the room, and there were two doors, one standing ajar at the farther end of the room making upon a covered passageway which led to a second cabin. In this usually went forward, it might be supposed, the cooking operations of the place, such as they were.
At length the old woman stepped to the side of the fireplace and kicked together the ends of the logs. A faint flame arose, now lighting up the interior of this half-savage abode. It showed all the better the tall form of the young man at the door. He spoke no more. With one last glance straight at the face of his father, he turned and passed out into the dusk.
The old man, suddenly trembling, now cast himself into a chair before the fire and sat staring into the flickering flames.
“Whar’s my supper?” he demanded hoarsely after a time.
“Thar hain’t none ready, an’ ye know it,” said his mother. “If I’d a-knowed ye war a-comin’ back I mought have got something ready. What made ye?”
“Hit war the Lord’s will,” he rejoined. “I’ve met causes sufficient. The Lord brung me back to find out what was a-goin’ on here, I reckon. The Sabbath, too!”
“Hit’s no worse one day than another,” said his mother. “Ye’ve druv yore own son outen yore own house. He’s got no house of his own to go to, to speak of—God knows thar’s little enough to keep him thar, that’s shore. Thar’s little enough to keep any of us here, come to that.”
Her attitude certainly was not that of shrinking or fear. Granny Joslin was known far and wide through these mountains as the fightingest of the fighting Joslins; and that was saying much.
“Womern, womern!” The old preacher raised a hand in protest. There was a sort of weakening in his face and his attitude, a sort of quavering in his voice.
She turned and looked at him—looked at the floor where his chair sat before the fireplace. Beside the drip of the old umbrella there was another stain spreading on the floor now—darker than that which first had marked it; a stain which seemed to have darkened his garments and to have caked on his heavy, homemade shoes.
“What’s that, Andy?” she asked imperiously, but knowing well enough what it was. “Who done that?”
He made no answer for a time, but at length remarked with small concern, “Why, old Absalom done that, that’s who. He knifed me in the back when I was lookin’ the other way atter his two boys.”
“Ye taken the old hill trail, then?”
“Yes, it wasn’t so slippy as the creek road up to Hell-fer-Sartin. Oh, I know I was warned outen thar, but I couldn’t show the white feather, could I?”
“No, ye couldn’t, not even if ye war a preacher.” By this time she was busying herself caring for his wound.
“Well, that’s how it come,” went on Andrew Joslin. “I taken the hill trail turnin’ off yander from the creek, like ye know. I met them up in the hills. The Lord led me to ‘em, maybe. The Lord fotched me back here, too, to find what I have found. How have I sinned!”
“If ye didn’t kill old Absalom Gannt ye shore have sinned,” remarked his fierce dam casually. “Was it some fight they made?”
“Well, yes. Thar wasn’t but me along, exceptin’ Chan Bullock from over on the head of the Buffalo—we met up jest as I got up into the hills. When we turned down the head of Rattlesnake we run acrosst them people settin’ under a tree, dry, an’ playin’ a game of keerds, right on the Lord’s day. I rid up with my pistol in my hand, an’ I says to them I didn’t think they war a-doin’ right to play keerds thar. I seen old Absalom thar, an’ two of his boys and two of his cousins. Before I could say much to them, one of the boys he up and fired fust. He hit old Molly in the neck. She pitched some then, an’ afore I could git her whar I could do anything, the feller that fired at me, he slipped over down the big bank back of him, an’ got away in the bush. They had their horses thar, an’ a couple of ‘em jumped on horseback an’ begun firin’ at me, an’ all the time old Molly was a-jumpin’ so nobody could hit nobody offen her. Then come Chan Bullock ridin’ up closeter to me. He had along his old fifty-caliber Winchester—never could bear them big guns; they shoot too high. Well, he fired couple of times, an’ missed, an’ by that time all of Absalom an’ his folks was on the run, either horseback er afoot.
“I seen the boy that done shot at me a-runnin’ down the creek bed more’n a hundred and fifty yard away. I grabbed the gun away from Chan, an’ I says, ‘If I couldn’t shoot no better’n ye kin I’d be ashamed o’ myself.’ So I taken a keerful aim—ye see, I helt a leetle ahead of him—an’ when I pulls the trigger he rolls over about four times atter he hit the ground. I swear that big rifle must be a hard-hittin’ gun—hit war a good two-hundred yard when I shot!
“Chan didn’t have no pistol along, an’ mine had fell on the ground. While all this war a-happenin’, Absalom he had snuck back behint the tree whar they was a-settin’ an’ a-playin’ keerds. Now, when my back was turned, he run out an’ he cut me two er three times right here in the back, afore I could hep myself. Then he run off, too.”
“An’ ye didn’t git ‘im?”
“How could I? He run down the creek bed road towarge whar that other feller was. I covered him fair with Chan’s gun—but she snapped on me. He hadn’t had but a couple of hulls, an’ I’d shot the last shot at Pete when I got him. So Absalom, he got away.”
“Well, you see how come me to come home,” he added presently, having faithfully told his kin the full story of the latest combat. “I didn’t know as I could git acrosst the mountings into Hell-fer-Sartin an’ preach fer a couple days. Somehow it seemed to me I had orter come back home. I did—an’, well you see what I’ve done found here. I didn’t git Absalom. I’ve lost my son, David. Hit ’pears to me like I’m forsaken of the Lord this day!”
His mother made no comment, but stepped up to the mantel-piece and reached down a bottle of white liquid, from which she poured half a pint into a gourd which she found alongside the bottle.
“Drink this,” said she. “We’ll git Absalom some other time.”
CHAPTER II
A NEW CREED
THE young man who had been dismissed from his father’s house walked unmindful of the rain still falling in the evening gloom, nor looked back to the door now closed behind him. His face, strong and deeply lined, now had settled into a sternness which belied the half-humorous expression it but now had borne. He was wide of chest, broad of shoulder, straight of limb as he walked now, hands in pockets, straightforward, not slouching down, his back flat. There was little of apathy or weakness about him, one would have said. Well-clad, such a man as he would attract many a backward gaze from men—or women—on any city street.
He stepped straight down the little bank beyond the fence marking the delimitations of the scant yard and the little cornfield of Preacher Joslin’s cabin, and at once was in the road, or all the road that ever had been known there. It was no better than the rocky bed of the shallow creek which flowed directly in front of the cabin. Here, in the logging days, iron-shod wheels had worn deep grooves into the sand rock. The longer erosion of the years also had cut sharp the faces of some of the clay banks. It might have been seen in a stronger light than this of twilight, that these banks had great seams of black running parallel through them—croppings of the heavy coal seams known throughout the region.
From time to time the young man sprang from rock to rock as he made his way down the bed of the little branch now running full from the heavy rain, but he walked on carelessly, for the road was well known to him by day or night. It had been the path of himself, his family, his ancestors, for well nigh a hundred years.
As he advanced, David Joslin cast an eye now and again upon the mountain sides. They were beautiful, even in the dull of evening, clad in gorgeous autumnal glories of chlorophyll afire under the combined alchemies of the rain, the frost, and the sun. There were reds more brilliant than may be seen even among the maples of the far north when the frost comes, yellows for which a new color name must be invented, browns of unspeakable velvety softness, a thousand ocherous and saffron hues such as no palette carries. They lay now softened and dulled, but very beautiful.
Young Joslin knew every hill, every ravine, every mountain cove which lay about him here,—all the country for fifty miles. Presently he reached the end of this little side trail down from the mountains, and emerged into a wider valley where passed the considerable volume of a fork of the Kentucky River, itself now running yellow from the rains. Had he cared he might have noted, now passing on the flood, scattered logs and parts of rafts, flotsam and jetsam of the old wasteful occupants of the land, who cut and dragged priceless timber to the grudging stream, and lost the more the more they labored.
He turned to the right, followed down the muddy river bank, and within a quarter of a mile turned yet again to the right at a decrepit gate serving in part to stop the way as adjutant of a broken rail fence which marked a scanty field.
Before him now lay a cleared space of some twenty acres or more, occupied at one corner by spare, gnarled apple trees, no man might say how old, appurtenances of acres which David Joslin had “heired” from the husband of the same grandam, whom but now he had left. Behind the apple trees rose a low roof, the broken cover of a scant gallery, a chimney, ragged-topped, at each end of the cabin. Here and there stood a China tree, yonder grew a vine, softening somewhat and beautifying even in the beauty of decay those rude surroundings. Back of the house were other small log buildings, cribs scantily filled with corn. In the barnyard stood two tall poles, behind which, running up into the darkness of the mountain side, stretched the long rusted wires which in the harvesting of the autumn sometimes carried down from the side of the mountains, too steep for the use of horse or mule, the sacks of corn perilously gathered above and sent down in the easiest way to the farmyard.
Apparently the harvest that fall had been but scant. The place had an air of poverty, or meagerness—rather perhaps should one use the latter than the former word. It was not the home of a drunkard, or a ne’er-do-well, or a poverty-smitten man, which David Joslin now approached—his own home, one like to many others all about him in these hills. It was an old, old, out-worn land, a decrepit land, which lay all about him. He was like his neighbors, his home like theirs.
David Joslin walked past the China tree and up to his own door. He stood for a moment scraping the mud from his feet at the end of the broken board on the little gallery before he pushed open the door. A woman rose to meet him.
She was a woman yet young, but seemed no longer young. Perhaps she was twenty-two, perhaps twenty-five years of age. She was tall and strong, after the fashion of the mountain woman, angular, spare. The thin dark hair, swept smoothly back from her bony forehead, seemed to come from a scalp tight-grown upon the skull. She appeared to carry about her the look of a certain raw, rugged strength, though there was little of the soft and feminine about her figure, about her attitude, about her voice as she now spoke to him.
“Why didn’t ye come home long ago?” she demanded with no preliminary.
Joslin made no answer, but sat down sullenly in a chair which he pushed up to the fireplace. The flames were dying down into a mass of coals which likewise seemed sullen. He reached out to the scant pile of firewood at the corner of the hearth, and cast on a stick or so.
“Ye’re always away,” she went on grumbling. “Folks’ll think ye don’t care nothin’ fer yore own fam’ly. Every whip-stitch ye’re off up into the hills, visitin’ somewhars or other, I don’t know whar. What’s it comin’ to?”
Still he made no answer, and she went on upbraiding.
“We been married four years, an’ ye act as free as if we’d nuvver been married at all. Don’t yore fam’ly need nothin’ now an’ agin? Is this all a womern’s got to live fer, I want to know? Look what kind of place we got.”
“Hit’s all ye come from,” he said at length. “Hit’s all yore people ever knowed, er mine. Why should ary of us expect more[2q]?”
An even, dull, accepted despair was in his tone. As for her, she cared not so much for philosophy as for the heckling she had held in reserve for him.
“Hit’s a lot to offer ary womern, hain’t it?” said she.
“Had ye much to offer in exchange?” said he, quietly and bitterly. “We traded fair, the best we knowed, the same sort of trade that’s common. We got married—thar was our children. What more is thar fer ye er em er ary of us in these hills, I’d like to know! Such as I’ve had, ye’ve had.”
There was something so stern, so bitter, in his sudden unkind remark that she took another tack.
“Hain’t ye tired?” she began, wheedling. She stooped over and pulled back the coverlet, a gaudy, patchwork quilt upon the single bed of the apartment. “Don’t ye want to lay down an’ rest a while?”
“No. I’m a-thinkin’.”
“What was ye thinkin’ about—me?”
“No, I was thinkin’ about the new doctor[4], an’ what he said to me last week.”
She was silent now. The name of the new doctor seemed to be something she had heard before.
“Ye talk too much with that new doctor. He puts too many fool ideas in yore haid. We’re married, an’ we got to live like that. How do ye figger any different, I’d like to know? Ye brung me here yore own self—ye knowed what ye wanted when ye come up thar courtin’ me at my daddy’s at the haid of Bull Skin. I come right down here to yore house when I was married. I stood right on this floor here, an’ yore daddy, he married us. Ye know that.”
“Yes, I do.” The young man’s face was extremely grave and gray as he spoke.
“—An’ yore daddy was a regular ordained preacher.”
“What’s the matter with ye, anyways?” she went on querulously. “Ye been a-quarlin’ with yore own people well as me?”
“My own daddy jest now ordered me outen his house. I’m nuvver goin’ thar no more.”
“Huh! I reckon yore own free-thinkin’ ways druv it on ye.”
“He burned my fiddle!” said David Joslin, with sudden resentment.
“Ye mought have expected it—goin’ up thar to play a fiddle in a preacher’s house!”
“I jest had her strung up for the fust time,” rejoined her husband. “I was a-playin’ ‘Barbara Allen.’ My daddy accused me of bein’ sinful. We’ve got it hard enough livin’ in these hills without being damned when we die.”
“Hush, Dave! Be keerful of what ye say.”
“I’m a-bein’ keerful. I’m castin’ up accounts this very day. I been castin’ up accounts fer some time. I’m thinkin’ of what that new doctor said to me. That was preachin’ sich as I nuvver heern tell of afore in these hills. I wish’t he’d come here an’ stay right along.”
She made no answer now, but pulled out the rude board table at the side of the fire, and placed upon it a yellowed plate or so, holding a piece of cold cornpone, a handful of parched corn.
“Eat,” said she. “Hit’s all we got. I borrowed some meal from the Taggarts. They’ve got no more to lend.”
“Don’t ask nothin’ of no one, womern. I’ll not be beholden to ary man. I tell ye, I’m castin’ up accounts.”
“What do ye mean—what ye talkin’ about, Dave?” She was half-frightened now.
“I hardly know. I kain’t see very much light jest yit.”
“Hain’t ye goin’ to eat?” she said. “Hain’t ye goin’ to sleep? Hain’t ye goin’ to lay down on the bed?”
“No!” said he. “No! Our children laid thar onct—them two. They died. It was best they died. They’re our last ones.”
“What do ye mean, Dave?” she again demanded, wide-eyed. “What do ye mean—ye hain’t a-goin’ to sleep here with me agin—nuvver?”
“No, I told ye. I said I was a-castin’ up accounts. Meliss’, I’ve got to go away.”
“Ye hain’t a-goin’ to quit me?”
“I don’t like that word. I nuvver quit nobody nor nothin’ that I owed a duty to. But I’ve got to go away. Hit hain’t right fer ye an’ me to live together no more. Children—why, my God!”
“Dave! Air ye crazy? Hain’t I been a good and faithful womern to ye? Tell me!”
He did not answer her.
“Tell me, Dave—have ye——”
“No! I’ve been as faithful as ye. We made our mistake when we was married—we mustn’t make it no more an’ no wuss.”
“The new doctor!” She blazed out now with scorn, contempt, indignation, all in her voice.
“Yes!” he replied suddenly. “The new doctor—ary doctor—ary man with sense could have told us what he told me. I know now a heap of things I nuvver knowed—what my pap an’ mammy nuvver knowed.”
“Ye’re a-goin’ to quit me like a coward!”
“I quit nobody like a coward. I hain’t a coward, Meliss’, an’ you know it. I’m a-goin’ to quit ye because I’m a brave man. I’ve got to be as brave as ary man ever was in the Cumberlands to do what I’ve got to do. Do ye think it’s easy fer me? Don’t ye think I hear my own children cryin’ still—mine as much as yours? An’ this was all I have to give them. Thank God they died! They’d nuvver orter of been borned.”
