They would show Floyd Allen who was running Carroll County. They would show him when the clans ruled and when they did not. They would show him whether or not the will of the people could be coerced by armed men demanding, at the point of guns, to know what candidate each citizen voted for.
They would destroy this Frankenstein monster now. If they didn’t it would destroy them.
When Floyd Allen heard of the arrest of his nephews, his rage was boundless. He raised his clan cry until it was heard on every farm in the county, until it echoed from Carolina to Richmond. And while he waited for the clans to gather, he planned to act and act with brutal finality. He would break the invaders for once and for all and restore Carroll County to the Democrats — and to the Allens.
There is no question but what the man suffered from delusions of grandeur, from dreams of dictatorship over all Virginia. Often he had said that the Allens should run Virginia, that they could better care for the unfortunate and administer the laws that currently catered to wealth, than the men then in power.
He had come to believe in a certain omnipotence. His kinsmen had encouraged it, had driven him, by their unquestioning obedience to his every whim, to regard himself as a ruler by divine right. The defection of Garland Allen, who was a younger brother, had been the first break in the clan’s complete subjugation. The defeat of Walter Allen by Foster had been the first intimation that there was mutiny in the county.
Now Foster had bearded him again. And he was not ready to take it He was not willing to have his hold on the people who had licked his boots and those of his father, Jeremiah Allen, for fifty years, loosened.
As a means of saving the boys from jail until the clans could gather, Floyd Allen offered Foster a real estate bond for the release of the pair. Foster refused it point blank and Floyd Allen decided to wait no longer. In fact he was incapable of waiting longer. The anger that had been burning higher each hour had totally consumed his reason. He was like a sorefooted lion, bearded to an uncontrollable pitch of fury by a lesser enemy, an enemy the lion might have ignored if not already mad with annoyance.
The giant mountaineer mounted his best horse and started toward Hillsville. He had heard that Deputy Sheriff Pinky Samuels and another deputy had gone to the Edwards home and arrested the boys and were taking them toward Hillsville in a buggy.
III
A few miles out of Hillsville, the giant came upon the quartet. The youths were manacled to the buggy. Samuels and another deputy rode on either side of them. Both the boys were exhausted from their struggles. Their arms bled from injuries caused by the relentless steel handcuffs.
Floyd Allen rode down upon the deputies, swung his horse across the road in front of the buggy and grabbed the deputy’s horse by the bit. No one ever will know why Samuels didn’t shoot the giant then and there, but he didn’t. Instead, he waited calmly until Floyd Allen dismounted and then demanded to know what the patriarch wanted.
“I want them kids and I want them damned quick,” the big man roared. “If you don’t let them loose now, there’s gonna be blood let in this county before night.”
Samuels, an easy going mountaineer until aroused, sneered at the giant.
“Listen, Allen,” he said, “these kids are going to jail and there’s no Allen in this or any other county that can scare me out of doing my duty. Get to hell outa the way and let me pass.”
Floyd Allen emitted one bellow and rushed the buggy. Samuels, a big man himself, but far from a match for the behemothic Allen, kicked savagely at the giant.
Floyd Allen grabbed the kicking foot and whirled Samuels from the buggy like a rag cat. He slammed him to the ground with a berserk fury and beat him into complete insensibility. So wild was he with the fury of his attack on Samuels that he did not see that the other deputy was speeding away with the nephews, who screamed at the uncle, but to no avail.
When Floyd Allen had beaten Samuels to within a hair’s breadth of death, he arose and looked about for the other deputy. He fully intended to beat him into unconsciousness and then release the beleaguered nephews. He’d settle the question of what the law meant to the Allens for once and for all. He’d put Carroll County back where it belonged — on a plane fit to be inhabited by Virginia moonshiners with pride in their family line.
But the deputy was gone. Only a gray swirl of dust, fast rolling into Hillsville, a mile away, told him the story.
The two horses drawing the carriage were galloping furiously and the deputy was alternately plying them with the whip and using the butt of it to subdue the two youthful members of the fighting Allens, who tugged at his coat tails and kicked viciously at him with their free feet.
Big Floyd leaped to his mount and rode furiously after the flying carriage. Through the flying dust he charged, bellowing on high as he rode, so that other mountaineers, thinking there was a kidnapping, or fearing to do otherwise under the spell of the Allen chief’s awful voice, joined pursuit.
Into Hillsville the steaming horses of the deputy thundered. Down the main street and into the courthouse yard.
The deputy was quavering with fear, but he delivered the prisoners to tight-lipped and steely-eyed Sheriff Webb, and the sheriff immediately clamped them into the strongest and most remote cell in the Carroll County jail, gathered his guns about him and awaited the oncharging Allens.
He had no more than reached the front of the combination courthouse and jail than Floyd Allen galloped up to the door, leaped from his horse and charged Webb. It was an ill timed charge. Webb, not a big man, but a game one and an old enemy of Allen’s, leveled his rifle at the onrushing giant, sighted beadily down the barrel and wriggled his right forefinger menacingly.
Floyd Allen saw the sheriff’s stern and white face. He saw the barrel of the rifle, that bulked as big as the mouth of a water hose.
He saw the quivering finger on the trigger, saw the steel blue eyes looking unflinchingly down the barrel, and—
He stopped in his tracks.
Suddenly behind Sheriff Webb appeared Foster and the two deputies, including the one who saved the prisoners.
They carried revolvers, two revolvers each. They held them on Floyd Allen and the half dozen men lined up behind him, men who had joined the chase willy-nilly.
The sheriff continued to glare down the barrel of the rifle. The barrel was on a dead level with the giant Floyd Alien’s heart. The sheriff spoke no words.
Floyd Allen pulled himself together. He hunched his huge shoulders as if to charge. The finger on the trigger became more and more restive. The men behind the giant slunk away, edged toward their horses and rigs.
But Floyd Allen wasn’t beaten yet, even if his cohorts were.
He raised a huge fist above his head, shaking it violently. The sheriff never retreated an inch, nor did the barrel of the rifle waver one iota from the line of the patriarch’s heart.
“You little weasel-faced rat,” Floyd Allen shouted, “you let them young ’uns out in two minutes or I’ll break you in a million pieces.”
“You get out of this jail yard in thirty seconds, or I’ll blow you in two,” Sheriff Webb snapped back, without hesitation.
Foster and the deputy advanced menacingly. Sheriff Webb suddenly stepped forward and placed the muzzle of the rifle squarely over Big Floyd Allen’s heart.
The patriarch of all the Fighting Allens looked about for his confederates. He saw none. He began to back away. He sidled toward his horse. He did it with a tremendous dignity and with his fierce, black eyes riveted on Sheriff Webb