It is about these two, Garland and Walter, that this greatest of American social tragedies revolves. Without them and their leanings for the professions, there would be no story. But without the shibboleth of Big Floyd Allen, they wouldn’t have been driven into the story. It was a proud cry, and the giant patriarch, with his booming voice and his blazing eyes, never neglected to shout it when he felt the Allens were about to be forgotten, the battle cry of:
“The Allens is all fighters!”
Most of the Allens were farmers. They raised cotton and corn and tended the forests for pine and other woods. But they had another trade. It was a common trade among the rich and poor alike. To the Allens it meant money — ultimately death. But that’s another story.
They were moonshiners. They operated on a big scale. They had giant stills, hidden in the mountain fastnesses. Many men tended them. They produced white mule one year, buried it and dug it up ten years later, mellow and potent and marketable. They sold the finest moonshine in Virginia. Thousands of satisfied customers carried on a direct business with them. Allen moonshine was unexcelled and they prospered.
Floyd Allen owned the greatest house in Carroll County, or all that part of Virginia. Sidna owned the next finest house. Jasper’s home was beautiful. Even Garland Allen’s house was clean and well appointed and large and his church was a showplace among rural churches. All these things tended to add to the omnipotent legend of the Allens. People thought they respected them. Actually they feared them.
Then came the break. The beginning of the succession of events, that followed each other with staggering swiftness, until they fetched up against a blood red wall of tragedy and catastrophe. Until they spilled blood over one of the most peaceful of all American rural communities, spilled it from Hillsville to Richmond and splashed it over a dozen homes.
The yoke of the Allens had, somehow, become onerous to certain men of the town. They regarded the Allens as a menace to law and order. They distrusted their domination of the mountain people. Yet, because the Allens were charitable and kindly to the helpless, they had no means of fighting them, their wealth being what it was. Until some one devised a means, rattled the sword of political warfare and touched off the bombshell.
The Allens were Democrats. Their enemies in Hillsville announced that there would be a Republican ticket in the county elections of 1911. They announced that William Foster, a fiery non-Allenite of Hillsville would run for district attorney. That was the office the patriarch of the Allens had selected for Walter Allen, newly out of the university.
The patriarch and his clan gave scant attention to Foster. They electioneered in their own way. They passed out the best moonshine, instructed the hill men on what to do and waited for election day.
To their amazement, William Foster was elected prosecutor and his entire slate, including Thornton Massie as county judge and Louis Webb as sheriff, was swept in with him.
The patriarch raged and thundered. He charged misconduct at the polls. He sent the Allens out to canvass the county. They went directly to the voters, asked them point blank if they had voted Republican or Democratic.
The statistics thus compiled might have been valuable had they been compiled in the regular way. But the Allen canvassers carried shotguns or revolvers with them and fingered them suggestively as they asked about the ballots. The voters, with a nervous eye on the ordnance, declared for a straight Democratic ticket.
That convinced Floyd Allen that he had been bilked. He announced that he would not recognize the law at Hillsville and that those who swore allegiance to the Allens would be governed from his palatial home, eight miles out of Hillsville.
Foster saw the handwriting on the wall. He saw the portent of disaster, red and menacing, in the actions of the Allens. He heard the ominous rumblings of rebellion, sensed the hatred of the clan. He knew his position was untenable, but he was a fighter, too. A little reckless, perhaps, a little too determined to break the Allen grip on the county.
Almost immediately after taking office, he arrested Sidna Allen on a charge of illegally making liquor and selling it.
This was an unheard of usurpation of power. While the Virginia law does not countenance moonshining, the Virginia law machinery did. Only the Federal revenue men sought to stamp it out and they were foolish men who were regarded as the poorest insurance risks, barring aviators and human flies, of the time.
To make a very bad matter worse, Judge Massie upheld Foster and sentenced Sidna Allen to jail.
Sidna Allen didn’t remain long in jail. But he didn’t like it as long as he remained. He emerged embittered and filled with the lust for revenge, and found Floyd Allen grimly planning the extinction of his baiters.
“The Allens is all fighters,” the giant bellowed, again and again. “The Allens won’t stand for this highhanded domineering. The Allens won’t stand for political spitework.”
Suddenly, in the midst of these disturbances, a new blow fell upon the patriarch. Garland Allen announced from his pulpit that the law, having been duly constituted, must be obeyed. He charged his flock with obeying it. If moonshine was to be outlawed, it must be outlawed.
He even closed his own still as an example to the righteous.
II
On the following Sunday, as the Rev. Mr. Allen arose from his knees following the invocation, he looked squarely into the barrels of a pair of shotguns!
Behind the guns were two youths. They were Sidna and Wesley Edwards, his nephews, sons of his sister. The shotguns were aimed, as he got to his feet, squarely at the huge gold chain that stretched across the Rev. Mr. Allen’s gaunt middle.
The Rev. Mr. Allen knew that the boys meant business. He knew that he had violated the family creed. He knew that Floyd Allen would not submit to one of his own family bowing before the yoke of the hated Republicans.
In other words, he knew that he was in for it.
The congregation sat, spellbound. Someone moved as if to aid the beleaguered minister. Wesley Edwards left the preacher to his brother and swept the congregation with his shotgun. Then Sidna Edwards declaimed sonorously, from the pulpit.
“He ain’t gonna preach to you no more — he’s too danged ornery to preach t’ other folks.”
The nephews prodded the godly man down the aisle. The congregation muttered threateningly. Wesley Edwards swung the gun around again. Worshippers dived under pews. The muttering was replaced by the hysterical screams of women, the bleating of children.
The community was outraged. The churchgoers demanded that the law do something. One parishioner suggested that Floyd Allen would attend to the kids. He cited their action as a prank of two boys that would be attended to by Floyd Allen and attended to properly.
But Floyd Allen refused to punish the boys. They had done just right, he said. The fighting Allens wanted no milksop preachers among them, milksop preachers who would bend the humble knee before the mongrels who sought to destroy Carroll County’s then greatest industry and to defy the law and order that had been.
“The Allens is all fighters!” he bellowed, louder than before, and his bellowings detonated the most spectacular community feud of all time and resulted in one of the greatest political calamities in the history of rural America.
The Foster clique leaped at the outrage as offering a new opportunity to humiliate the Allens. Childish as it seemed, this prank of two youths, one of whom wasn’t yet seventeen, the other slightly under twenty, the Republicans were ready to make a mountain of it. They promptly ordered the two youths arrested.