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NORMAN BRUCE
This story was written from the Photoplay of HERMAN A. BLACKMAN
»qtaxd by your kinsman to the
^ death! Fight for him; steal,
lie, kill for him; and never,
under any circumstances, betray
him." This is the mountain law.
Death is not so powerful as this law; life is not so powerful; love is not so powerful. It is not a law learnt from books; not a law made by lawmakers. It is instilled into the very blood and being of the child generations before he is born. " Those who are old in mountain lore realize this, but the younger generation was always slow to admit its chains.
Bob Tyler was jubilant. Sitting on the worm fence, a bit apart from the group of silent, grim mountaineers in front of the cabin, he looked away over the narrow valley, with its shiftless corn-patches and rooting hogs, upon a glorified world. The tang of crushed smartweed was in his nostrils like an odor of success. He watched a bright, blue speck moving on the hillside, and the young blood leaped to his face and heart,* warming him.
"Bob!"
The boy sprang down from his perch. "Yes, pap ■ "
"Hyar's whar ye make yore mark, I reckon."
The group chuckled. Bcb Tyler stooped over the smooched and bleary sheet of paper with swelling heart. A
peace pact at last between Hurf and Tyler ! He saw the ungainly scrawls of the others' signatures from hands more ready with the gun than the pen, and a mist obscured his eyes as he added his name. The consumptive circuit-rider bowed his head and raised a bony hand when the scratch of the stub-pen ceased.
"Let us thank Gawd, my brothers an' sisters, in th' spirit of brotherly and sisterly love," he droned. A woman's sobs sounded on the outskirts of the group. Mattie Hurf stood in the low door of the cabin, gingham apron over her head. Her unlovely elbows protruded thru rents in her calico dress. The cords stood out startlingly on her yellow neck. Once she had been called the "Lily of B'ar Mountain." That was twenty years ago, before she married Tom Hurf, bore him twelve children and watched her father, two brothers and one son brought home dead, with a Tyler bullet in their hearts. She was thirty-six years old now — an old woman, Bob thought, contrasting with her seamy, faded face and dingy screw cf hair Betty's wistful loveliness. Need of her seized him ; he leaped the low fence and plunged into the underbrush.
"Oh, Gawd! we thank Thee," droned the circuit-rider. The smell
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