The Call of the Cumberlands

While Spicer South and his cousins had been sustaining themselves or

building up competences by tilling their soil, the leaders of the other

faction were basing larger fortunes on the profits of merchandise and

trade. So, although Spicer South could neither read nor write, his

chief enemy, Micah Hollman, was to outward seeming an urbane and fairly

equipped man of affairs. Judged by their heads, the clansmen were

rougher and more illiterate on Misery, and in closer touch with

civilization on Crippleshin. A deeper scrutiny showed this seeming to

be one of the strange anomalies of the mountains.

Micah Hollman had established himself at Hixon, that shack town which

had passed of late years from feudal county seat to the section's one

point of contact with the outside world; a town where the ancient and

modern orders brushed shoulders; where the new was tolerated, but dared

not become aggressive. Directly across the street from the court-house

stood an ample frame building, on whose side wall was emblazoned the

legend: "Hollman's Mammoth Department Store." That was the secret

stronghold of Hollman power.

He had always spoken deploringly of that

spirit of lawlessness which had given the mountains a bad name. He

himself, he declared, believed that the best assets of any community

were tenets of peace and brotherhood. Any mountain man or foreigner who

came to town was sure of a welcome from Judge Micah Hollman, who added

to his title of storekeeper that of magistrate.

As the years went on, the proprietor of the "Mammoth Department Store"

found that he had money to lend and, as a natural sequence, mortgages

stored away in his strong box. To the cry of distress, he turned a

sympathetic ear. His infectious smile and suave manner won him fame as

"the best-hearted man in the mountains." Steadily and unostentatiously,

his fortune fattened.

When the railroad came to Hixon, it found in Judge Hollman a "public-

spirited citizen." Incidentally, the timber that it hauled and the coal

that its flat cars carried down to the Bluegrass went largely to his

consignees. He had so astutely anticipated coming events that, when the

first scouts of capital sought options, they found themselves

constantly referred to Judge Hollman. No wheel, it seemed, could turn

without his nod. It was natural that the genial storekeeper should

become the big man of the community and inevitable that the one big man

should become the dictator. His inherited place as leader of the

Hollmans in the feud he had seemingly passed on as an obsolete

prerogative.

Yet, in business matters, he was found to drive a hard bargain, and

men came to regard it the part of good policy to meet rather than

combat his requirements. It was essential to his purposes that the

officers of the law in his county should be in sympathy with him.

Sympathy soon became abject subservience. When a South had opposed

Jesse Purvy in the primary as candidate for High Sheriff, he was found

one day lying on his face with a bullet-riddled body. It may have been

a coincidence which pointed to Jim Asberry, the judge's nephew, as the

assassin. At all events, the judge's nephew was a poor boy, and a

charitable Grand Jury declined to indict him.