True--he had helped his father work the "still" that his great-grandfather had worked with a free conscience. That was all--the "still" that the despised law had never yet unearthed. The aspect of the law conformed with the teachings of his father. It fitted unto the sights that his own eyes had beheld. Where was its equity? He had seen his own relation shot down in cold, cruel blood. This law had never come forward to punish the wrong and champion the right. This law only hovered like a python above its prey, and struck when it had advantage.
The law was a mangy, fanged reptile--a monster that bit the honest rights of the people out of their hearts; then clawed and rolled and mauled their bodies. He had heard that God inspired the wise men who made the law. Surely, the Almighty had not lent His seal to this curse. The God that Maw Lutts had told him about--He, who would some day make all things right in Kentucky--was not a party to this law that had finally taken the lives of his parents and had taken him. It was all the evil, godless work of men. It was the plot of a city faction. He was in the hands of a gang. In the last days of his jail life, the boy's philosophy had reduced the blame to a unit, until it fixed the whole responsibility upon a single man--"Big Pete" Burton--leader of the gang.
The boy, who had never in his life before been outside the limits of the Cumberland, had gone to jail, on that eventful day, innocent. He came out guilty. The mountain tinge had long since deserted his cheek and left it jail-hued. The simple-souled eyes now shone with the flinty stare, the designing needle-glints, the relentless play from eye to eye that traverses the orbs of the jail-man. He came out guilty, not of that which he had knowingly already done, but guilty of the added thing now stored away in the core of his being that he meant to do.
The heart-breaking midnight loneliness and the nerve-stabbing "third degree" had not sucked the fire from his feudal veins. His religion now measured by his capacity for revenge, Lem Lutts came out of prison, his young heart and soul and strength obsessed by a sacred quest. His suspicions ratified in jail, he came out tarnished and arrayed against the world. In the centre of this flaming theatre of vengeance there ever stalked one leading figure, one solitary actor--a huge animal-headed man flaunting a frayed precept, called law--the monster law-man reaching for the rights and the blood of the people--he of the shadow-built body and the charmed life--that fearless ghost-spawn who never backed away from the mouth of a gun--he who always plunged toward the flame and the smoke and fought in the open--he whose skin was tattooed by the Winchester stencil of the mountaineer; but who still lived, and pursued, and fought on--the man who forged always onward with uncanny precision, ever stalking the hillman, ever reaching for his sanctum with merciless, untiring law-biting fury.
