“I'm afeerd he will,” she said, and Hale smiled.
“Well, I'll try to persuade him to let you stay, if he does come.”
June was quite right. She had seen the matter the night before just as it was. For just at that hour young Dave, sobered, but still on the verge of tears from anger and humiliation, was telling the story of the day in her father's cabin. The old man's brows drew together and his eyes grew fierce and sullen, both at the insult to a Tolliver and at the thought of a certain moonshine still up a ravine not far away and the indirect danger to it in any finicky growth of law and order. Still he had a keen sense of justice, and he knew that Dave had not told all the story, and from him Dave, to his wonder, got scant comfort--for another reason as well: with a deal pending for the sale of his lands, the shrewd old man would not risk giving offence to Hale--not until that matter was settled, anyway. And so June was safer from interference just then than she knew. But Dave carried the story far and wide, and it spread as a story can only in the hills. So that the two people most talked about among the Tollivers and, through Loretta, among the Falins as well, were June and Hale, and at the Gap similar talk would come. Already Hale's name was on every tongue in the town, and there, because of his recent purchases of town-site land, he was already, aside from his personal influence, a man of mysterious power.
Meanwhile, the prescient shadow of the coming “boom” had stolen over the hills and the work of the Guard had grown rapidly.
Every Saturday there had been local lawlessness to deal with. The spirit of personal liberty that characterized the spot was traditional. Here for half a century the people of Wise County and of Lee, whose border was but a few miles down the river, came to get their wool carded, their grist ground and farming utensils mended. Here, too, elections were held viva voce under the beeches, at the foot of the wooded spur now known as Imboden Hill. Here were the muster-days of wartime. Here on Saturdays the people had come together during half a century for sport and horse-trading and to talk politics. Here they drank apple-jack and hard cider, chaffed and quarrelled and fought fist and skull. Here the bullies of the two counties would come together to decide who was the “best man.” Here was naturally engendered the hostility between the hill-dwellers of Wise and the valley people of Lee, and here was fought a famous battle between a famous bully of Wise and a famous bully of Lee. On election days the country people would bring in gingercakes made of cane-molasses, bread homemade of Burr flour and moonshine and apple-jack which the candidates would buy and distribute through the crowd. And always during the afternoon there were men who would try to prove themselves the best Democrats in the State of Virginia by resort to tooth, fist and eye-gouging thumb. Then to these elections sometimes would come the Kentuckians from over the border to stir up the hostility between state and state, which makes that border bristle with enmity to this day. For half a century, then, all wild oats from elsewhere usually sprouted at the Gap. And thus the Gap had been the shrine of personal freedom--the place where any one individual had the right to do his pleasure with bottle and cards and politics and any other the right to prove him wrong if he were strong enough. Very soon, as the Hon. Sam Budd predicted, they had the hostility of Lee concentrated on them as siding with the county of Wise, and they would gain, in addition now, the general hostility of the Kentuckians, because as a crowd of meddlesome “furriners” they would be siding with the Virginians in the general enmity already alive. Moreover, now that the feud threatened activity over in Kentucky, more trouble must come, too, from that source, as the talk that came through the Gap, after young Dave Tolliver's arrest, plainly indicated.