“I will not decide this case until I have considered every angle of it,” said Judge Massie. “In this consideration, the attitude of this defendant will be weighed heavily, I assure you. I will give my decision and pass sentence on March 14.”
Floyd Allen threw his shaggy white head back and laughed boisterously. The other Allens joined him. There came from their vicinity noises that sounded like what the English call the bird. Then court, anxious to avoid trouble at the time, withdrew with as much dignity as possible. Floyd Allen and his clan, with the henchmen that had gathered about him like rats when they saw that the court seemed intimidated, went out into the street, shouting their defiance of the court and the authorities.
The Allens celebrated that night. The clan met at the home of Floyd Allen and the Allenites gathered with them. They drank deeply. It was like a night of victory in old Rome. Until far into the morning the carousing continued. The Allens were in the saddle. Carroll County was at their feet.
For days Floyd Allen paraded before those who had dared to question his omnipotence. He glowered at the renegades, then took them back under his wing magnificently. He sent his sons and brothers to see to it that all the poor were provided for. He distributed food among the negroes, and generally outdid himself.
To add to the joy of the clan, Wesley Edwards and Sidna Edwards came home from the county jail. They had served their terms and left Hillsville flinging taunts over their shoulders at the commonwealth. They were going back to the realm of the Allens. They were answering only to their patriarch, to the fierce, beady-eyed, bulging-shouldered, white-haired Floyd Allen, chief of the Fighting Allens.
Whether the Allen celebration was an ill-timed thing or not is more or less conjecture. But it did add fuel to the flaming hate of the anti-Allenites and it brought a new social element into the troubled affairs of Carroll County, an element that might well have been known, to maintain the literary standards set by Floyd Allen, as The Fighting Anti-Aliens.
The county became one great arena, hedged about by dynamite. Men went around with guns strapped to their hips. Neighbor suspected and hated neighbor. Neighbors’ wives suspected neighbors’ wives. Children no longer were children, seeking their schooling in the crude hill schools. They were Allenites or Anti-Allenites.
The Allens tried to camouflage the schism. They tried to make it an issue of Democrats, or Allenites, and Republicans, or anti-Allenites. They fomented political hatred, branded the Foster-Massie-Webb group as interlopers who were bowing at the feet of northern masters.
They went further. They proclaimed widely that the Republicans were trying to establish a foothold so that they might deliver Carroll County into the hands of the northern industrialists. They professed to see ideal factory sites in Carroll County, with its mountain streams and fair valleys. They pictured the agony of the Carolina towns that had been caught in the coils of the cruel northern monster of industrialization. They told the people their homes would be taken away.
Carroll County was a country in the midst of civil war. The mountain men were armed against the townsmen. Hillsville and Galaxy, the two principal towns of the county, became the strongholds of an enemy common to hill men. Those of the hills and valleys who were not avowed Allenites flocked into the town, believing that there lay protection.
Cool heads, who wished their businesses preserved, sought state intervention. They advised Foster or Webb to call for the military. They pictured the hill country as swarming with Allenites, desperate men, armed to the teeth. They feared that the town might be sacked and burned to the ground.
But Webb and Foster and Massie were of sturdier stuff. They stood by their guns, scorned the threats of the Allenites and virtually dared the patriarch to lead his forces into the town. They didn’t even bother to prepare themselves against such an invasion and Sheriff Webb publicly challenged the bellowing Floyd Allen to show his hand.
March 14 approached. The tension in the county and in the town mounted. Men sat at their doors with shotguns across their knees, bolted themselves in at night or stood guard, in relays, over their property. No women or children ventured out after sunset, few during the day. The town of Hillsville was an armed camp.
On the day before the judgment, the mountains became strangely quiet.
It was the calm before the storm.
V
The morning of the judgment broke. The day was misty. The mist came down from the hills and settled like a blanket of dire prophecy over the little courthouse.
Hillsville had not slept that night. Webb and Foster and Massie had not slept. They had paced their quarters, or sat about Webb’s office, waiting for the fateful tomorrow.
Dawn came ominously through the clouds, a red dawn, with blood on the foothills, blood on the sun. The men of the town went about their business guardedly. They were armed, stealthily armed.
Sheriff Webb ordered all places where firearms and ammunition might be dispensed closed for the day. He swore in extra deputies. They were difficult to get, these deputies. They feared the retribution of the Fighting Allens.
Families began to come out of the mountains early. They gathered about the courthouse, silent and fearful. They hitched their rigs in convenient places and left their horses in the harness. No path to flight was barred. The hill men were brave men, but they had brought their families. They didn’t know what odds the townspeople held against them. All they knew was that the Allens would make a fight for it if Judge Massie dared to defy them.
As the morning wore on toward 9 o’clock, the tension became more and more fearful. Men spoke in whispers. Women stood about, holding their children close to them, or remained inside the stores, watching through cluttered windows.
Presently hill men began to appear in the crowds. They went silently from group to group, dropping a few words here, a few there. They were grim-faced men, with heavy revolvers strapped to their hips and shotguns over their arms.
The men began to move toward the courthouse. Sheriff Webb stood on the steps. No one was to enter until Judge Massie arrived. His deputies stood a little back of him. Foster waited in the sheriff’s office.
The sun began to break through the mist. It was spring in the mountain town, with the vague quietude that spring brings to the hills. The trees were budding and the sun goaded them to new spawning.
Suddenly, out of the south, came a cataract of voices. It was a wild, fierce song, a song of bravado and recklessness, the song of men drunk with the feel of adventure.
A cloud of dust appeared. The figures of men, and horses, materialized from the cloud of dust. The song of the fighting Allens arose from the cloud.
Then the dust cloud was on the edge of the city. It swept into the main street. The battle song of the hill men rose above the beat of the hoofs of a score or more horses.
A giant man, with gray hair and a huge head and great, hulking shoulders thrown back, rode at the head of a troop of giants.
The Fighting Allens had come to judgment, with a song on their lips and scorn in their eyes.
The crowds in the street fell back. The women pulled their children nearer to them, slunk away from the cluttered windows of the few stores.
Big Floyd sat his horse like Attila. The gleam of unconquered scorn shone in his beady black eyes.
The cavalcade swept down the street to the courthouse. They swung off their horses, threw the reins over hitching posts.