tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">CHAPTER XXX. The Shooting of Peter Burton
CHAPTER XXXI. In which Slab prophesies
CHAPTER XXXII. The Near Assassin
CHAPTER XXXIII. Belle-Ann comes back
CHAPTER XXXIV. The Reunion
CHAPTER XXXV. The Downfall of Sap McGill
CHAPTER XXXVI. Belle-Ann's Recanted Creed
CHAPTER XXXVII. The Ghost-Man
CHAPTER XXXVIII. The Haunted Church
CHAPTER XXXIX. The Flight
CHAPTER XL. His Rock of Ages
CHAPTER XLI. In which Providence takes a Hand

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"... use me as best you can for a grandfather?"

"Yo' know where they be"

"He kilt my maw—he ded—an' he kilt my pap"

"Who air th' head o' th' people—who air Cap'in heah in Moon?"

"Hit air God's buryin' now"

THE RED DEBT

CHAPTER I

A MIGHTY MAN

No imagery can adequately picture the profound grandeur and wide wild beauty of these Kentucky highlands. At the age when its purity was whitest, a great moon hung midway between Southpaw peak and Moon mountain. Its divine splendor, unalloyed with any tithe of partisanship, laved with a mystic luster these two primeval ranges that had scowled impenitently at each other, behind their mask of flowers and tinseled verdure, across the lethal gulch separating them, for fifty blood-touched, feudal years.

This wondrous effulgence purged every exposed crevice, naked rock and open cove with its chastity. On the ground underneath the patch-quilt of virgin petals and emerald leafage, it peopled a theatre of animated pictures. And the coppice pooled the shadows, creating a hippodrome of transitory caricatures, fanciful, grotesque and fearful. Each sullen moss-hooded boulder flung its distorted, exaggerated image down and fixed a creeping mummy hard by.

Still another white beacon leaned over the hills where, like a stellar flambeau, the lead-star trembled and sputtered, kindled just on the apex of Henhawk's knob. The chasm that furrowed between and, topographically, held these two warring communities apart, sunk its rock-lined bed sheer two hundred feet below. Through this sinuous adamantine artery the head waters of Hellsfork dashed in rampant flight, beating themselves into a madness against a troup of gigantic, orange-tinctured boulders polished glassy by the torrents Nature had unloosed at the beginning of time.

The onrushing wavelets leaped like furious creatures at these menacing things which evermore preyed upon their foaming, impotent wrath; shaping crystal goblets that bubbled over and burst, and flung showers of magical frothy flowers aloft. From across the silvery expanse of spectral mist that overhung the mountains, near and afar, a hundred voices of the wilderness night were calling.

That this barnacle of blood-lust should leech itself upon the fair face of a modern civilization; that in this nineteen hundred and twelve epoch of obeisant civism, hedged about with emollient Christian culture—such a vast stratum of malignant strife should coil here, hidden amidst a congress of Nature's sublime artistry, is an irony at once awesome and hopelessly insoluble. Nevertheless, immured upon natural ramifications on the shoulder of Moon mountain, old Cap Lutts, a strategist and mountain despot of kingly renown, dominated as the head of an implacable dynasty that boded ill to inimical invaders; be it agents of the government or spies of the shaggy Southpaw clan where Sap McGill, who had stepped into his father's war shoes at the end of their last fatal encounter with Cap Lutts, now marshalled his horde of bush-whackers, bent upon the speedy annihilation of the Lutts folk, kith and kin.

Supported on a platform-like plot projecting from the hip of Moon mountain, the domicile of old Lutts stood out in the moonlight, traced in silver brocade against a somber ribbon of scrub timber that girded the waist of the mountain.

From the Lutts abode the eye traveled for miles along the gorge to the right. To the left the chasm cut deeper into the hills, until it ended in the valley where Boon Creek and Hellsfork intersected; where the paw-paws and the ferns, the weeping willows and the familiar, unnamed flowers were luxuriant.

Straight ahead, traversing the dry bed of a blind gulch, a train of pigmy peaks, left dun and naked by a river dead a thousand years, rose up and bared their serried spurs like hound's teeth.

On the opposite side of Hellsfork, lifted the stupendous Southpaw range—the stronghold of the enemy—rearing its savage peaks higher and higher, piling upward and onward until they pierced the myriad stars; then tumbled downward into the russet realms of lilac mist.

Beyond the Lutts cabin and towering above it, a single monster boulder jutted outward from the perpendicular wall of granite and hung perilously over sheer space. This freakish rock, known as Eagle Crown, looked like a ragged punctuation pause in a folk-lore story; a relic tossed on high by some legendary, boastful giant.

The wonder was how Cap Lutts gained its forbidding lofty platform, for surely there was no visible means of ascent. Howbeit, Eagle Crown had been the old man's retreat for sixty-odd years. This imperishable shelf of granite offered him sanctuary when travail and sorrow, that weighted his life, pressed hard