Still the sheriff was all right. When he looked out of his dreamy blue eyes through his rimless nose glasses at a negro miner who had used his razor as an adjunct to an argument, and mildly requested the negro to accompany him to the confines of the county jail, it was as certain as the advent of death that the negro would obey, and obey without comment. And when the sheriff mounted his "murky dun" horse and passed up into the mountains for the purpose of inducing a moonshiner to come down to civilization and submit his rights to the decision of a judicial tribunal, it was a matter of familiar history that the moonshiner always came.
To the inquiring stranger, no man seemed a native of McDowell.
This impression arose from the fact that the stranger adhered to the railroad and the coal towns which sprang up in its wake, and in these every man came from somewhere. The railroad had brought in the coal companies, and the coal companies had brought in the negroes, and thus towns sprang into existence, and the usual rough, expeditious methods of civilization began. Then came the politician and the adventurer, and mixed in merrily, and from that time forth the county of McDowell was industrial and Republican, and everything "went." But a few years back, before the section hands on the Norfolk and Western Railroad cut through from the county of Mercer, there was a population in McDowell that was not Republican, and that did not "go." They were long-limbed, indolent, and "handy men" in a fight. They made corn whiskey when they pleased, and voted the Democratic ticket when they saw fit, and accounted to no one. The revenue officer came, and looked up at the great mountains covered with the giant oaks of a century, concluded that the laws were not being violated, and so reported to the Government. It was vastly more comfortable than going up into these same mountains not to come down at all, or maybe to come down with a squirrel bullet under the ribs. In his day and generation the revenue officer was a wise man.
Here the citizen was born as it happened, lived as he could, and died as the necessity arose, and the outside world neither knew nor cared nor concerned itself with it. These were not bad people. Morally they were as good as the sun warmed. Their life bred no shams. If they loved each other, they lived together and were happy, and if they hated each other, they fought it out The feud has been usually overdrawn. It existed in truth, but it rarely resulted in anything more than a "fist fight" at a grist mill, but when it grew serious, it grew very serious indeed. The mountaineer always shot to kill. He was no man of half measures; it was a free, open, breezy war, and perhaps it was as healthy fighting as any. At his worst, the native moonshiner was a better man than the imported miner at his best. Up in the fog of the mountains men were killed; down in the smoke of the coke ovens they were murdered; and between the two words there is a distinction as big as the honor of a people.