The Code of the Mountains

This morning the boy from the forks of Troublesome Creek had back his name once more. It was not a distinguished name, nor one to be flaunted in pride of race or achievement. On...

Courts can not enforce laws upon which public opinion sets its embargo. The men of the mountains have lived isolated lives for a hundred years. They inhabit an island of medieva...

The late convict had wasted his strength. His violent paroxysm of anger had exhausted him more than his laborious tramp. It had sent his temperature up and brought a sickening w...

A group of shabby men lounging in front of Fult Cawsler's restaurant paid scant attention to a wild-eyed youth who came down the street at a run and dashed into the door. Newt f...

Newt Spooner saw General Braden and a companion carrying the limp figure of the mountain lawyer down the stairway of the platform and heard them cursing the lawlessness of the m...

When Newt Spooner had begun his search for Henry Falkins that afternoon he had not been so unobserved as he thought himself. Not very far behind him had walked Red Newton. He ha...

Henry Falkins and Lucinda Merton had not kept close count on the flying moments since they had entered the summer-house. The girl had promised to sit out two consecutive dances...

When the pitchiness of night closed in until it seemed that the mountains moved up and huddled closer together, Newt was on well-remembered roads and did not pause. In an hour o...

On the morning after the convict's return, in the hour when the mists still hung in wraith-like fogs over the slopes, Newt and the other men of the household gathered around the...

Gravely restraining their protests until the visitor should have spoken, yet heavy-hearted with premonition, the elder and younger Falkins led the way up the flagstone path to t...

For a little space the two men looked at each other, the Deacon to outward seeming with the casual interest of a chance meeting, and the boy with a lowering truculence which aug...

Sam Hoover he thought he could trust. Sam, at least, had come to him when they were taking him to prison, and had denounced the lethargy with which his kinsmen were standing idl...

For years no man had heard McAllister Falkins speak except in the smooth and cultivated parlance of the lowlands. In Congress he had been accounted silver-tongued, yet now, by s...

The town marshal at Jackson was Micah French, and he was town marshal because his temperament was not one to be depressed by the quick step of stressful events. The arrival in t...

A man whose outlook on life had been broader than Newt's, and whose brain did not receive constant poisoning from within, would have softened that fall and winter, because a new...

When the two companies from the hills entrained that raw morning they had no idea where they were going or what prospects lay ahead, but they conceived days of action, and fell...

The high-landers wore the appearance of veterans now, as they marched down to the crowded wharves, loaded with their field-equipment, and went across the gang-plank to the decks...

During the night a siege-gun had been brought up by hand, and now, from its place where the road cut through the entrenchments, it opened with the morning greeting of a hoarse b...

That inflexible grip which the service takes upon its units and fractions of units, had slowly and unconsciously altered the view-point of The Fifth Kentucky foot. Back there in...

Two general officers were eye-witnesses to that river crossing; they chatted about it over the cable with the government at Washington. Major Falkins, too, who had conceived the...

Months in the isolation of a tropic garrison bring to the minds of men strange vagaries. When the work is that of hunting down elusive little traitors, who present faces of frie...

At a place where they came upon the ashes of a dead fire, Henry Falkins halted the command, and, accompanied by a lieutenant and Sergeant Newton Spooner, undertook some investig...

The policy of splitting the command into bits, and leaving one platoon to carry on the seeming of the full force, had brought both disaster and success. The main body had taken...

In three days more, according to the articles of war, his name must be dropped from the company roll, and his status become that of death or desertion. Even if he came back at o...