"JohnFoxJr-ACumberlandVendetta" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fox John)

cry of triumph rose from below. It was good marksmanship, but
on the cliff Rome did not heed it. Something had fluttered in the
air above the girl's head, and he laughed aloud. She was waving
her bonnet at him.

II

JUST where young Stetson stood, the mountains racing along each
bank of the Cumberland had sent out against each other, by mutual
impulse, two great spurs. At the river's brink they stopped sheer,
with crests uplifted, as though some hand at the last moment had
hurled them apart, and had led the water through the breach to
keep them at peace. To-day the crags looked seamed by thwarted
passion; and, sullen with firs, they made fit symbols of the human
hate about the base of each.

When the feud began, no one knew. Even the original cause was
forgotten. Both families had come as friends from Virginia long
ago, and had lived as enemies nearly half a century. There was
hostility before the war, but, until then, little bloodshed. Through
the hatred of change, characteristic of the mountaineer the world
over, the Lewallens were for the Union. The Stetsons owned a few
slaves, and they fought for them. Peace found both still neighbors
and worse foes. The war armed them, and brought back an
ancestral contempt for human life; it left them a heritage of
lawlessness that for mutual protection made necessary the very
means used by their feudal forefathers; personal hatred supplanted
its dead issues, and with them the war went on. The Stetsons had a
good strain of Anglo-Saxon blood, and owned valley-lands; the
Lewallens kept store and made "moonshine"; so kindred and
debtors and kindred and tenants were arrayed with one or the other
leader, and gradually the retainers of both settled on one or the
other side of the river. In time of hostility the Cumberland came
to be the boundary between life and death for the dwellers on each
shore. It was feudalism born again.

Above one of the spurs each family had its home; the Stetsons,
under the seared face of Thunderstruck Knob; the Lewallens, just
beneath the wooded rim of Wolf's Head. The eaves and chimney
of each cabin were faintly visible from the porch of the other. The
first light touched the house of the Stetsons; the last, the Lewallen
cabin. So there were times when the one could not turn to the
sunrise nor the other to the sunset but with a curse in his heart, for
his eye must fall on the home of his enemy.

For years there had been peace. The death of Rome Stetson's
father from ambush, and the fight in the court-house square, had
forced it. After that fight only four were left-old Jasper Lewallen
and young Jasper, the boy Rome and his uncle, Rufe Stetson.
Then Rufe fled to the West, and the Stetsons were helpless. For