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THE END OF THE ROAD
(American)
n the days when our p a r e n t s were y o u n g ; w h e n Southerners were still called ‘ ‘ rebels ’ ’ and we were d u b b e d “tyrants” and worse; in the shameful days of reconstruction, when Northern politicians were sent South to pick a slick living from the dry bones of the vanquished, a certain Richard Quigg closed his law-office in Washington, and, by river-boat and wagon, made his tedious way to the mountains of eastern Kentucky.
To these the Kentucky mountaineers clung in their little, steep-hilled farms that neither grew nor diminished from father to son — a queer and
( Twenty-one )
By EDWIN M. LA ROCHE
unfathomable race ; a strange blend of primitive manliness and meanness — hospitable, generous, proud, shiftless, dissolute, and glorying with a religious fanaticism in their sins of murder and feud.
It was into one of their shadowed valleys that Quigg had come, making himself a useful finger of the government in the dismal years after the war. He borrowed funds in Washington and loaned them at double rates to the land-poor settlers.
Quigg was always on the move ; his long, bent-shoulclered figure, with his dust-colored eyes and black string-tie, was a familiar sight on the valley roads.
At a certain place the walls of the valley receded, and the finest bit of land in the country spread out in
seeming largeness. A little removed from the road was the whitewashed homestead, with pretentious Doric columns, set in a grove of magnolia trees. Quigg always pulled his horse down to a walk on passing Magnolia Hall. The quiet majesty of the place fascinated him. Then again, he felt a proprietary interest in it. He had bought a mortgage on the place and knew that it could not be paid off.
A wisp of a girl with maize-colored hair and corn-flower eyes, whose crimson lips drawled their words out deliciously, but whose laughing eyes spurred them on out of all semblance of indolence, was the principal tenant and owner of the hall. Colonel Wilson, her father, had been killed leading a charge of North Carolinians. His daughter’s inheritance had been