Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol.69, No. 5, August 13, 1932

“Us Allens is all fighters!” Was their cry. And they proved it by making Carroll County, Va., a place of death and terror.

I

Back in 1911, before the greatest conflict in the world’s history had begun, Carroll County, Virginia, was peaceful, contented and, after its serene fashion, prosperous.

The wealthy people, and there were few of great wealth, lived among simple pleasures and the poor always were cared for by these rich to whom richness was a goodness for the less fortunate.

The county was a remote one and there were few of the irksome laws of a more enlightened community to chafe the proud souls of the meek and the mighty, alike. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you was law enough for the Carroll country.

Mightiest in this pastoral Utopia were the Allens. The Allens ruled the county, but they ruled it justly and, having amassed more than their share of the wealth of the country, used it to do good among others. None suffered in want so long as the Allens knew of it. Masterful and dominating they might have been, but they were the soul of charity and helpfulness.

The Allens were strictly products of Carroll County. Jeremiah Allen, a crusty fighter for the south in the Civil War, had founded the feudal chain. Now Floyd Allen, his son, a giant of a man, with a shaggy, snow white mane, carried it on.

It would be wrong to say the Allens were a power in Carroll County. They were Carroll County. Floyd Allen, with his great head and hulking shoulders and beady eyes set deep in a furrowed, weatherbeaten face, led. Jasper and Sidna and Garland, his brothers, and their sons and his sister’s sons, the Edwardses, followed.

They even went into the professions. There was a minister among them. He was Garland Allen. He was a fire-belching, hell-and-damnation soldier of the Cross, reviling sinners and scourging Beelzebub with a blacksnake whip technic. He battered his flock into line and kept them there because he was a fierce orator — and an Allen.

There was a lawyer, too. His name was Walter Allen, son of Jasper Allen. He went to the University of Virginia. Then he came back and did as his kinsmen did. He looked out for the Allens, then for the poor, then for the negroes, then for the Allens some more. He furnished the advice to the family, Big Floyd the leadership.

It is about these two, Garland and Walter, that this greatest of American social tragedies revolves. Without them and their leanings for the professions, there would be no story. But without the shibboleth of Big Floyd Allen, they wouldn’t have been driven into the story. It was a proud cry, and the giant patriarch, with his booming voice and his blazing eyes, never neglected to shout it when he felt the Allens were about to be forgotten, the battle cry of:

“The Allens is all fighters!”

Most of the Allens were farmers. They raised cotton and corn and tended the forests for pine and other woods. But they had another trade. It was a common trade among the rich and poor alike. To the Allens it meant money — ultimately death. But that’s another story.

They were moonshiners. They operated on a big scale. They had giant stills, hidden in the mountain fastnesses. Many men tended them. They produced white mule one year, buried it and dug it up ten years later, mellow and potent and marketable. They sold the finest moonshine in Virginia. Thousands of satisfied customers carried on a direct business with them. Allen moonshine was unexcelled and they prospered.

Floyd Allen owned the greatest house in Carroll County, or all that part of Virginia. Sidna owned the next finest house. Jasper’s home was beautiful. Even Garland Allen’s house was clean and well appointed and large and his church was a showplace among rural churches. All these things tended to add to the omnipotent legend of the Allens. People thought they respected them. Actually they feared them.

Then came the break. The beginning of the succession of events, that followed each other with staggering swiftness, until they fetched up against a blood red wall of tragedy and catastrophe. Until they spilled blood over one of the most peaceful of all American rural communities, spilled it from Hillsville to Richmond and splashed it over a dozen homes.

The yoke of the Allens had, somehow, become onerous to certain men of the town. They regarded the Allens as a menace to law and order. They distrusted their domination of the mountain people. Yet, because the Allens were charitable and kindly to the helpless, they had no means of fighting them, their wealth being what it was. Until some one devised a means, rattled the sword of political warfare and touched off the bombshell.

The Allens were Democrats. Their enemies in Hillsville announced that there would be a Republican ticket in the county elections of 1911. They announced that William Foster, a fiery non-Allenite of Hillsville would run for district attorney. That was the office the patriarch of the Allens had selected for Walter Allen, newly out of the university.

The patriarch and his clan gave scant attention to Foster. They electioneered in their own way. They passed out the best moonshine, instructed the hill men on what to do and waited for election day.

To their amazement, William Foster was elected prosecutor and his entire slate, including Thornton Massie as county judge and Louis Webb as sheriff, was swept in with him.

The patriarch raged and thundered. He charged misconduct at the polls. He sent the Allens out to canvass the county. They went directly to the voters, asked them point blank if they had voted Republican or Democratic.

The statistics thus compiled might have been valuable had they been compiled in the regular way. But the Allen canvassers carried shotguns or revolvers with them and fingered them suggestively as they asked about the ballots. The voters, with a nervous eye on the ordnance, declared for a straight Democratic ticket.

That convinced Floyd Allen that he had been bilked. He announced that he would not recognize the law at Hillsville and that those who swore allegiance to the Allens would be governed from his palatial home, eight miles out of Hillsville.

Foster saw the handwriting on the wall. He saw the portent of disaster, red and menacing, in the actions of the Allens. He heard the ominous rumblings of rebellion, sensed the hatred of the clan. He knew his position was untenable, but he was a fighter, too. A little reckless, perhaps, a little too determined to break the Allen grip on the county.

Almost immediately after taking office, he arrested Sidna Allen on a charge of illegally making liquor and selling it.

This was an unheard of usurpation of power. While the Virginia law does not countenance moonshining, the Virginia law machinery did. Only the Federal revenue men sought to stamp it out and they were foolish men who were regarded as the poorest insurance risks, barring aviators and human flies, of the time.

To make a very bad matter worse, Judge Massie upheld Foster and sentenced Sidna Allen to jail.

Sidna Allen didn’t remain long in jail. But he didn’t like it as long as he remained. He emerged embittered and filled with the lust for revenge, and found Floyd Allen grimly planning the extinction of his baiters.

“The Allens is all fighters,” the giant bellowed, again and again. “The Allens won’t stand for this highhanded domineering. The Allens won’t stand for political spitework.”

Suddenly, in the midst of these disturbances, a new blow fell upon the patriarch. Garland Allen announced from his pulpit that the law, having been duly constituted, must be obeyed. He charged his flock with obeying it. If moonshine was to be outlawed, it must be outlawed.

He even closed his own still as an example to the righteous.

II

On the following Sunday, as the Rev. Mr. Allen arose from his knees following the invocation, he looked squarely into the barrels of a pair of shotguns!

Behind the guns were two youths. They were Sidna and Wesley Edwards, his nephews, sons of his sister. The shotguns were aimed, as he got to his feet, squarely at the huge gold chain that stretched across the Rev. Mr. Allen’s gaunt middle.

The Rev. Mr. Allen knew that the boys meant business. He knew that he had violated the family creed. He knew that Floyd Allen would not submit to one of his own family bowing before the yoke of the hated Republicans.

In other words, he knew that he was in for it.

The congregation sat, spellbound. Someone moved as if to aid the beleaguered minister. Wesley Edwards left the preacher to his brother and swept the congregation with his shotgun. Then Sidna Edwards declaimed sonorously, from the pulpit.

“He ain’t gonna preach to you no more — he’s too danged ornery to preach t’ other folks.”

The nephews prodded the godly man down the aisle. The congregation muttered threateningly. Wesley Edwards swung the gun around again. Worshippers dived under pews. The muttering was replaced by the hysterical screams of women, the bleating of children.

The community was outraged. The churchgoers demanded that the law do something. One parishioner suggested that Floyd Allen would attend to the kids. He cited their action as a prank of two boys that would be attended to by Floyd Allen and attended to properly.

But Floyd Allen refused to punish the boys. They had done just right, he said. The fighting Allens wanted no milksop preachers among them, milksop preachers who would bend the humble knee before the mongrels who sought to destroy Carroll County’s then greatest industry and to defy the law and order that had been.

“The Allens is all fighters!” he bellowed, louder than before, and his bellowings detonated the most spectacular community feud of all time and resulted in one of the greatest political calamities in the history of rural America.

The Foster clique leaped at the outrage as offering a new opportunity to humiliate the Allens. Childish as it seemed, this prank of two youths, one of whom wasn’t yet seventeen, the other slightly under twenty, the Republicans were ready to make a mountain of it. They promptly ordered the two youths arrested.

They would show Floyd Allen who was running Carroll County. They would show him when the clans ruled and when they did not. They would show him whether or not the will of the people could be coerced by armed men demanding, at the point of guns, to know what candidate each citizen voted for.

They would destroy this Frankenstein monster now. If they didn’t it would destroy them.

When Floyd Allen heard of the arrest of his nephews, his rage was boundless. He raised his clan cry until it was heard on every farm in the county, until it echoed from Carolina to Richmond. And while he waited for the clans to gather, he planned to act and act with brutal finality. He would break the invaders for once and for all and restore Carroll County to the Democrats — and to the Allens.

There is no question but what the man suffered from delusions of grandeur, from dreams of dictatorship over all Virginia. Often he had said that the Allens should run Virginia, that they could better care for the unfortunate and administer the laws that currently catered to wealth, than the men then in power.

He had come to believe in a certain omnipotence. His kinsmen had encouraged it, had driven him, by their unquestioning obedience to his every whim, to regard himself as a ruler by divine right. The defection of Garland Allen, who was a younger brother, had been the first break in the clan’s complete subjugation. The defeat of Walter Allen by Foster had been the first intimation that there was mutiny in the county.

Now Foster had bearded him again. And he was not ready to take it He was not willing to have his hold on the people who had licked his boots and those of his father, Jeremiah Allen, for fifty years, loosened.

As a means of saving the boys from jail until the clans could gather, Floyd Allen offered Foster a real estate bond for the release of the pair. Foster refused it point blank and Floyd Allen decided to wait no longer. In fact he was incapable of waiting longer. The anger that had been burning higher each hour had totally consumed his reason. He was like a sorefooted lion, bearded to an uncontrollable pitch of fury by a lesser enemy, an enemy the lion might have ignored if not already mad with annoyance.

The giant mountaineer mounted his best horse and started toward Hillsville. He had heard that Deputy Sheriff Pinky Samuels and another deputy had gone to the Edwards home and arrested the boys and were taking them toward Hillsville in a buggy.

III

A few miles out of Hillsville, the giant came upon the quartet. The youths were manacled to the buggy. Samuels and another deputy rode on either side of them. Both the boys were exhausted from their struggles. Their arms bled from injuries caused by the relentless steel handcuffs.

Floyd Allen rode down upon the deputies, swung his horse across the road in front of the buggy and grabbed the deputy’s horse by the bit. No one ever will know why Samuels didn’t shoot the giant then and there, but he didn’t. Instead, he waited calmly until Floyd Allen dismounted and then demanded to know what the patriarch wanted.

“I want them kids and I want them damned quick,” the big man roared. “If you don’t let them loose now, there’s gonna be blood let in this county before night.”

Samuels, an easy going mountaineer until aroused, sneered at the giant.

“Listen, Allen,” he said, “these kids are going to jail and there’s no Allen in this or any other county that can scare me out of doing my duty. Get to hell outa the way and let me pass.”

Floyd Allen emitted one bellow and rushed the buggy. Samuels, a big man himself, but far from a match for the behemothic Allen, kicked savagely at the giant.

Floyd Allen grabbed the kicking foot and whirled Samuels from the buggy like a rag cat. He slammed him to the ground with a berserk fury and beat him into complete insensibility. So wild was he with the fury of his attack on Samuels that he did not see that the other deputy was speeding away with the nephews, who screamed at the uncle, but to no avail.

When Floyd Allen had beaten Samuels to within a hair’s breadth of death, he arose and looked about for the other deputy. He fully intended to beat him into unconsciousness and then release the beleaguered nephews. He’d settle the question of what the law meant to the Allens for once and for all. He’d put Carroll County back where it belonged — on a plane fit to be inhabited by Virginia moonshiners with pride in their family line.

But the deputy was gone. Only a gray swirl of dust, fast rolling into Hillsville, a mile away, told him the story.

The two horses drawing the carriage were galloping furiously and the deputy was alternately plying them with the whip and using the butt of it to subdue the two youthful members of the fighting Allens, who tugged at his coat tails and kicked viciously at him with their free feet.

Big Floyd leaped to his mount and rode furiously after the flying carriage. Through the flying dust he charged, bellowing on high as he rode, so that other mountaineers, thinking there was a kidnapping, or fearing to do otherwise under the spell of the Allen chief’s awful voice, joined pursuit.

Into Hillsville the steaming horses of the deputy thundered. Down the main street and into the courthouse yard.

The deputy was quavering with fear, but he delivered the prisoners to tight-lipped and steely-eyed Sheriff Webb, and the sheriff immediately clamped them into the strongest and most remote cell in the Carroll County jail, gathered his guns about him and awaited the oncharging Allens.

He had no more than reached the front of the combination courthouse and jail than Floyd Allen galloped up to the door, leaped from his horse and charged Webb. It was an ill timed charge. Webb, not a big man, but a game one and an old enemy of Allen’s, leveled his rifle at the onrushing giant, sighted beadily down the barrel and wriggled his right forefinger menacingly.

Floyd Allen saw the sheriff’s stern and white face. He saw the barrel of the rifle, that bulked as big as the mouth of a water hose.

He saw the quivering finger on the trigger, saw the steel blue eyes looking unflinchingly down the barrel, and—

He stopped in his tracks.

Suddenly behind Sheriff Webb appeared Foster and the two deputies, including the one who saved the prisoners.

They carried revolvers, two revolvers each. They held them on Floyd Allen and the half dozen men lined up behind him, men who had joined the chase willy-nilly.

The sheriff continued to glare down the barrel of the rifle. The barrel was on a dead level with the giant Floyd Alien’s heart. The sheriff spoke no words.

Floyd Allen pulled himself together. He hunched his huge shoulders as if to charge. The finger on the trigger became more and more restive. The men behind the giant slunk away, edged toward their horses and rigs.

But Floyd Allen wasn’t beaten yet, even if his cohorts were.

He raised a huge fist above his head, shaking it violently. The sheriff never retreated an inch, nor did the barrel of the rifle waver one iota from the line of the patriarch’s heart.

“You little weasel-faced rat,” Floyd Allen shouted, “you let them young ’uns out in two minutes or I’ll break you in a million pieces.”

“You get out of this jail yard in thirty seconds, or I’ll blow you in two,” Sheriff Webb snapped back, without hesitation.

Foster and the deputy advanced menacingly. Sheriff Webb suddenly stepped forward and placed the muzzle of the rifle squarely over Big Floyd Allen’s heart.

The patriarch of all the Fighting Allens looked about for his confederates. He saw none. He began to back away. He sidled toward his horse. He did it with a tremendous dignity and with his fierce, black eyes riveted on Sheriff Webb

He reached his horse, swung into the saddle. Sheriff Webb still kept the rifle raised. Foster and the deputy kept the big man covered with their pistols.

“All right, you yellow pups,” snarled Big Floyd Allen, “you’ve got me now, but I’m warning you, Lou Webb, and you, too, Foster, you stealing pig, you’ll pay for this with your—”

“What’s that?” rasped Foster, fiercely.

“You’ll pay for this, you pigs,” Allen bellowed, so that the entire town of Hillsville could hear him. “You’ll be lucky if the Allens just run you out of Carroll County.”

With that he wheeled his horse and rode out of the town, leaving dynamite and fury in every hitherto peaceful home in Hillsville, or Carroll County for that matter, leaving the imprint of death on half a dozen houses.

He left the little town of Hillsville in an uproar. People swarmed up and down the streets, demanding that the Allens be jailed. Others took issue with them. They were pro-Allenites and they seemed to be in the majority. At least, inspired by the example of the full lunged Floyd Allen, they shouted loudest and threatened most and succeeded in awing, temporarily, the anti-Allenites.

Then, out of the dust of the road that led southward toward the Carolinas, came the bleeding and broken figure of Pinky Samuels. His eyes were blackened, his mouth was cut and his teeth were strewn over the dusty highway. There were cuts and bruises on his face and body and he staggered like a drunken man as he picked his precarious way to the courthouse, to collapse, in view of the outraged townsmen, on the courthouse steps.

This ignited the spark all over again. The anti-Allenites ran riot. They swept through the town, demanding vengeance. Many shouted that their lives weren’t safe with the ruthless patriarch of the mountaineers at large. They called him the gray peril and demanded that Sheriff Webb do something.

One citizen, more excited than the others, telephoned to Richmond. He reached the governor’s office. The governor was not available, but his secretary referred the indignant citizen to the attorney general. The attorney general called Hillsville back, seeking to get in touch with Foster.

He found Foster in conference with Judge Massie. The bitter partisan, Massie, took the telephone and shouted angrily back at the attorney general that he would lock every damned one of the Allens behind bars. The attorney general agreed that, for the sake of peace and the dignity of the commonwealth, this should be done, at once.

Foster leaped into the prosecution of the two boys with fierce diligence. To the amazement of the Allens, the boys were convicted and sentenced to six months in a county jail.

Floyd Allen delivered a new ultimatum. Somehow, he conceived the idea that the town people had combined against the mountain people, that they were determined to rule the county and stamp out the Allen clan. He professed a great dread of this. He began mustering his forces again. He armed the Allens and the Edwardses and the others.

Foster anticipated him. He issued a warrant for Floyd Alien’s arrest, on a charge of assault and battery, growing-out of the beating of Samuels. He gave the warrant to a deputy, or a pair of deputies, to serve. They demurred at first, but then set out to run Floyd Allen down or supposedly to run him down.

But they returned and said they could not find him. Other deputies were sent out. They came back with the same report. One returned badly beaten. Another limped from a flesh wound. They reported the mountains alive with enemies.

Then Louis Webb, with three men, went out to hunt for Floyd Allen.

All this time, Floyd Allen had been seen in his usual haunts. Once he had even dared to visit Hillsville, and had stood before the courthouse guffawing and daring the courthouse force to come out and arrest him. Later he learned that Webb was not in the courthouse on that occasion and that Samuels still was unable to be about because of the beating on the road.

It was after this gesture of defiance that Webb personally went out to serve the warrant. Foster and Massie insisted upon accompanying him. Political and official zealots, they wanted to be in at the kill. Webb refused to permit it. In his capacity of sheriff, he could.

Foster demanded to know why Webb refused.

“Because,” said the little man, “I want you and the judge here to clap him into jail when he comes in.”

He rode away before the judge and Foster could figure out just what he meant.

Fortunately, they didn’t have long to remain in ignorance.

IV

Four hours after the word got around that Sheriff Louis Webb personally had gone out to get him, Floyd Allen walked into the courthouse and surrendered.

Then they knew, Judge Massie and Foster, what the steely-eyed sheriff had meant. Allen was willing to defy them by putting himself in their power.

“All right, lock me up, you pups,” Floyd Allen roared, seeing no sign of Webb. “Go ahead — and see what it brings you to.”

They didn’t lock him up. The Allens waited for him outside, brothers and sons and nephews, ugly customers, armed to the teeth.

They paraded before the courthouse and Walter and Claude Allen entered with him. Walter was the lawyer. He demanded bail, and got it, so that Floyd Allen did not have to undergo the indignity of spending a night behind the bars. They gave him his liberty, so that he could go out and foment new trouble and make new terrors for the distressed county.

Something told Floyd Allen that he was heading into trouble. He saw, and his brothers and sons saw, the handwriting on the wall. The clan gathered nightly in conclave, waiting for the day when Floyd Allen was to stand trial.

There began a series of terroristic raids. No one knew who committed the raids. They defied the sheriff and Foster. But they were directed at the Republican voters, or those who were suspected of being Republican voters. Men were taken out and horsewhipped. Many were stripped of their clothing and left on the mountains, in the deathly fogs and cold.

Those who rode into Hillsville behind Floyd Allen the day he was halted before the courthouse and who had slunk away when Sheriff Webb confronted him with a rifle, flanked by Foster and the deputy, were victims of night riders. Citizens flocked into Hillsville for protection.

A reign of terror, that could be traced to no one, not even by the zealous Foster or the grim Webb, made a place of horror and dread of the county.

Judge Massie ordered Floyd Allen brought to trial at once. In this way, and this alone, he reasoned, could he fling the defy of elected law and order to the terrorists.

Floyd Allen, boasting of his immunity, appeared in court, smiling a sinister smile. The Allens clustered behind him. Sheriff Webb suddenly ordered all but Walter Allen and Claude, the son, out of the courtroom. Walter beat the order. The Allens, and everyone else who wished to, were permitted to remain.

The trial was a brief one. The Allens, still believing in their superiority to constituted authority, declined even to bother about presenting witnesses. The experience of the two youths had not taught them that these despised enemies were not to be scoffed at.

Pinky Samuels took the stand. Reluctantly, with the fierce eyes of Floyd Allen and his sons and brothers upon him, he told his story. Foster and Webb, together, aided by Judge Massie, had to drag it from him. Ominous rumblings filled the room.

When the hearing was completed, Floyd Allen and the Allenites arose to leave the courtroom. They declined to wait until Judge Massie had left, or had made disposition of the case. The court, controlling the rage that welled up, ordered them to take their seats.

Floyd Allen contemptuously refused. He stood, with his hat on, looking grimly at Judge Massie. His son, Claude, stood beside him. Jasper, Walter, Sidna, and the others, were grouped about him, in a sort of semicircle, a phalanx that looked capable of sweeping through the court.

“I will not decide this case until I have considered every angle of it,” said Judge Massie. “In this consideration, the attitude of this defendant will be weighed heavily, I assure you. I will give my decision and pass sentence on March 14.”

Floyd Allen threw his shaggy white head back and laughed boisterously. The other Allens joined him. There came from their vicinity noises that sounded like what the English call the bird. Then court, anxious to avoid trouble at the time, withdrew with as much dignity as possible. Floyd Allen and his clan, with the henchmen that had gathered about him like rats when they saw that the court seemed intimidated, went out into the street, shouting their defiance of the court and the authorities.

The Allens celebrated that night. The clan met at the home of Floyd Allen and the Allenites gathered with them. They drank deeply. It was like a night of victory in old Rome. Until far into the morning the carousing continued. The Allens were in the saddle. Carroll County was at their feet.

For days Floyd Allen paraded before those who had dared to question his omnipotence. He glowered at the renegades, then took them back under his wing magnificently. He sent his sons and brothers to see to it that all the poor were provided for. He distributed food among the negroes, and generally outdid himself.

To add to the joy of the clan, Wesley Edwards and Sidna Edwards came home from the county jail. They had served their terms and left Hillsville flinging taunts over their shoulders at the commonwealth. They were going back to the realm of the Allens. They were answering only to their patriarch, to the fierce, beady-eyed, bulging-shouldered, white-haired Floyd Allen, chief of the Fighting Allens.

Whether the Allen celebration was an ill-timed thing or not is more or less conjecture. But it did add fuel to the flaming hate of the anti-Allenites and it brought a new social element into the troubled affairs of Carroll County, an element that might well have been known, to maintain the literary standards set by Floyd Allen, as The Fighting Anti-Aliens.

The county became one great arena, hedged about by dynamite. Men went around with guns strapped to their hips. Neighbor suspected and hated neighbor. Neighbors’ wives suspected neighbors’ wives. Children no longer were children, seeking their schooling in the crude hill schools. They were Allenites or Anti-Allenites.

The Allens tried to camouflage the schism. They tried to make it an issue of Democrats, or Allenites, and Republicans, or anti-Allenites. They fomented political hatred, branded the Foster-Massie-Webb group as interlopers who were bowing at the feet of northern masters.

They went further. They proclaimed widely that the Republicans were trying to establish a foothold so that they might deliver Carroll County into the hands of the northern industrialists. They professed to see ideal factory sites in Carroll County, with its mountain streams and fair valleys. They pictured the agony of the Carolina towns that had been caught in the coils of the cruel northern monster of industrialization. They told the people their homes would be taken away.

Carroll County was a country in the midst of civil war. The mountain men were armed against the townsmen. Hillsville and Galaxy, the two principal towns of the county, became the strongholds of an enemy common to hill men. Those of the hills and valleys who were not avowed Allenites flocked into the town, believing that there lay protection.

Cool heads, who wished their businesses preserved, sought state intervention. They advised Foster or Webb to call for the military. They pictured the hill country as swarming with Allenites, desperate men, armed to the teeth. They feared that the town might be sacked and burned to the ground.

But Webb and Foster and Massie were of sturdier stuff. They stood by their guns, scorned the threats of the Allenites and virtually dared the patriarch to lead his forces into the town. They didn’t even bother to prepare themselves against such an invasion and Sheriff Webb publicly challenged the bellowing Floyd Allen to show his hand.

March 14 approached. The tension in the county and in the town mounted. Men sat at their doors with shotguns across their knees, bolted themselves in at night or stood guard, in relays, over their property. No women or children ventured out after sunset, few during the day. The town of Hillsville was an armed camp.

On the day before the judgment, the mountains became strangely quiet.

It was the calm before the storm.

V

The morning of the judgment broke. The day was misty. The mist came down from the hills and settled like a blanket of dire prophecy over the little courthouse.

Hillsville had not slept that night. Webb and Foster and Massie had not slept. They had paced their quarters, or sat about Webb’s office, waiting for the fateful tomorrow.

Dawn came ominously through the clouds, a red dawn, with blood on the foothills, blood on the sun. The men of the town went about their business guardedly. They were armed, stealthily armed.

Sheriff Webb ordered all places where firearms and ammunition might be dispensed closed for the day. He swore in extra deputies. They were difficult to get, these deputies. They feared the retribution of the Fighting Allens.

Families began to come out of the mountains early. They gathered about the courthouse, silent and fearful. They hitched their rigs in convenient places and left their horses in the harness. No path to flight was barred. The hill men were brave men, but they had brought their families. They didn’t know what odds the townspeople held against them. All they knew was that the Allens would make a fight for it if Judge Massie dared to defy them.

As the morning wore on toward 9 o’clock, the tension became more and more fearful. Men spoke in whispers. Women stood about, holding their children close to them, or remained inside the stores, watching through cluttered windows.

Presently hill men began to appear in the crowds. They went silently from group to group, dropping a few words here, a few there. They were grim-faced men, with heavy revolvers strapped to their hips and shotguns over their arms.

The men began to move toward the courthouse. Sheriff Webb stood on the steps. No one was to enter until Judge Massie arrived. His deputies stood a little back of him. Foster waited in the sheriff’s office.

The sun began to break through the mist. It was spring in the mountain town, with the vague quietude that spring brings to the hills. The trees were budding and the sun goaded them to new spawning.

Suddenly, out of the south, came a cataract of voices. It was a wild, fierce song, a song of bravado and recklessness, the song of men drunk with the feel of adventure.

A cloud of dust appeared. The figures of men, and horses, materialized from the cloud of dust. The song of the fighting Allens arose from the cloud.

Then the dust cloud was on the edge of the city. It swept into the main street. The battle song of the hill men rose above the beat of the hoofs of a score or more horses.

A giant man, with gray hair and a huge head and great, hulking shoulders thrown back, rode at the head of a troop of giants.

The Fighting Allens had come to judgment, with a song on their lips and scorn in their eyes.

The crowds in the street fell back. The women pulled their children nearer to them, slunk away from the cluttered windows of the few stores.

Big Floyd sat his horse like Attila. The gleam of unconquered scorn shone in his beady black eyes.

The cavalcade swept down the street to the courthouse. They swung off their horses, threw the reins over hitching posts.

Floyd Allen strode toward the courthouse steps. Sheriff Webb waited for him. As the big man approached, Judge Massie appeared. Without a glance at the Allens, he stalked into the courthouse and on into his chambers.

Sheriff Webb and his deputies stepped aside and permitted the Allens to pass in. Behind them trooped the more daring of the Hillsville men and women, and those of the hill men who had taken no definite sides, but had kept their convictions to themselves as best they could.

Floyd Allen strode into the prisoner’s bay. Claude, his son, was at his heels, Sidna, his brother, at his side.

The three took chairs. They sat down, with the patriarch in the middle, Claude on the left and Sidna on the right. Judge Massie still was in his chambers. Sheriff Webb was aligning his special deputies about the courtroom.

The rest of the Allens, the twenty who had ridden into town behind the patriarch, ranged themselves in the front seats of the spectator’s bay. They were not all Allens, but they were Allenites, many of them blood relatives of the man awaiting judgment.

Among them were Sidna and Wesley Edwards, but recently released from the county jail for the Garland Allen kidnaping.

The Hillsville people filed in. They took seats about the courtroom. Those who could not find seats stood around the walls.

Sitting in one of the seats, near the front, was Nancy Elizabeth Ayres, a pretty woman who had testified for Floyd Allen at his hearing.

Half a dozen deputies ranged themselves about the Allenites, standing back of them, watching them intently.

Dexter Goad, clerk of the court, a grim, uncompromising fighter against the Allen rule of the county, came in. He wore a pistol strapped to his waist, leaned a shotgun against his desk.

He looked at Floyd Allen with the calm scorn of a fanatical enemy. His blue eyes blazed a challenge that was backed up adequately by the pistol and the shotgun. He sat down and began calmly riffling his papers, his face stern, his jaw set. He was known as one of the bravest men in Carroll County, a berserk fighter who had lived through a dozen threatened feuds.

Floyd Allen looked back at him, curling his crooked, heavy lip in scorn. Claude Allen kept his eyes on Goad and Sidna Allen watched him covertly.

Sheriff Webb stepped through a door in the rear of the courtroom. He reappeared, almost instantly, and Judge Massie followed.

Goad, with his eyes fastened on Floyd Allen and his hand caressing the butt of his revolver, banged a gavel on his table and announced the court, at the same time getting to his feet.

The spectators arose. The Allenites in the spectators’ bay arose.

VI

Floyd Allen sat adamant, glowering contemptuously at Judge Massie. Sidna and Claude Allen sat with him, their grim faces riveted on their leader.

Dexter Goad tugged at his revolver. Floyd Allen saw him. A pair of deputies stepped into the bay.

Floyd Allen got up slowly. A forced smile overspread his dark face. Claude and Sidna Allen got up and stood, surly and scowling, beside him.

“I wouldn’t ’a’ done that, paw,” said Claude Allen, aloud, “who’s he that we have to get up when he comes in?”

The giant patriarch said nothing. He continued to curl his lip in that contemptuous smile until Judge Massie was seated. Then he sat down as Dexter Goad resumed his seat and picked up his papers.

Dexter Goad rapped for order. The courtroom was silent as a tomb. Floyd Allen leaned back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other and waited with supreme confidence.

The Allenites in the front rows of the spectators’ bay sat immobile. The deputies shifted from one foot to the other, keeping an alert eye on the men. Walter Tipton, one of Floyd Alien’s lawyers, coughed spasmodically. His hand shook noticeably as he wiped his mouth with his handkerchief.

Dexter Goad arose and handed a sheaf of papers to Judge Massie. A low hum ran over the courtroom. Dexter Goad rapped sharply. The deputies deployed toward the seat of the disturbance. Silence fell again.

Foster walked to the bench, before Judge Massie. Goad continued to stand. Walter Tipton took his place at the other end of the bench. He wet his lips with his tongue. Foster wet his lips. Goad’s hard eyes were upon Floyd Allen.

Judge Massie studied the papers. It was unnecessary. What he wanted was time for the tension to ease. His face was white, but stern. His fighting jaw was outthrust and the veins showed in his strong hands.

He looked up from the papers, out over the courtroom. He looked at Floyd Allen and the Allenites in the front row of seats. A contemptuous smile came to his lips as he swept the courtroom.

His eyes were blazing with the bitterness of his resentment against the show the Allens had staged.

In an even, dispassionate voice, he began his pronouncement.

“We are confronted here, not with the case of the Commonwealth of Virginia versus Floyd Allen, but with the case of Law and Order versus feudalism,” he began. “Unfortunately, we are authorized only to deal with the case of the Commonwealth of Virginia versus Floyd Allen, charged with assault and battery and interfering with an officer in performance of his duty.

“The defendant in this case has seen fit to defy this court and to create a situation in this county that is inimical to the proper functioning of justice and intolerable to duly constituted authorities. He has seen fit to attempt to set up a dictatorship, to place himself and those of his family without the law or, if you please, above the law.

“The proceedings in this case do not, as I have pointed out before, permit us to deal with outlawry and rebellion, since this defendant is not charged with these crimes. But it does permit us to show to this defendant and those who have encouraged and applauded him in his course and to those whom we are charged with protecting through the duly constituted law, that law does and will prevail, despite threats of violence and attempted coercion.

“Therefore, in full consideration of the evidence as it has been presented to me, I shall render my judgment and sentence in the case of the Commonwealth of Virginia versus Floyd Allen—”

Walter Tipton wet his lips again. Dexter Goad watched Floyd Allen like a cat. Sidna and Claude Allen leaned forward. They sensed the voice of calamity in Judge Massie’s opening remarks.

Floyd Allen was unmoved. He sat back in his chair, glaring at Massie. His hand rested on his side, significantly. The leer still creased his heavy face.

Now Judge Massie, looking directly at Floyd Allen, resumed his pronouncement.

“I pronounce the defendant guilty as charged and sentence him to one year in prison—”

A sibilant, rasping sound escaped Floyd Allen’s lips. Sidna and Claude Allen were on their feet. The Allenites in the spectators’ bay were on their feet. A dull roar that mounted to a storm of voices ran over the courtroom.

Dexter Goad banged his table fiercely. Walter Tipton was shouting to the court:

“I move that the judgment be set aside and a new trial granted.”

Now Judge Massie banged his gavel.

“Motion denied,” he said. “Sheriff Webb, take this prisoner to jail.”

“I ain’t a-goin’t’ go, I ain’t a-goin’ t’ go,” bellowed the giant patriarch.

Dexter Goad was running to Sheriff Webb’s side. Floyd Allen whispered quickly to Sidna and Claude.

Then, in a flash, the giant whipped his revolver from his belt. He fired point blank at Sheriff Webb.

Webb staggered back, wrenched his own pistol from its holster.

Another shot sounded. Sidna Alien’s revolver spat fire.

Judge Massie started to his feet, clutched at his heart, coughed harshly and then slumped in his chair, slowly sinking from sight behind the bench.

Claude Allen leveled his gun at District Attorney Foster. Foster saw it and grabbed for his own weapon. Claude Allen’s gun barked. Foster whirled, threw his head back, cried insanely once, and then dropped heavily across a chair and slipped to the floor.

Now Sheriff Webb and Floyd Allen were shooting it out. Three spots of blood showed on the courageous little sheriff’s white shirt, but he kept advancing.

Now he was within two feet of the giant. Floyd Allen reeled, but fired again and again.

Webb’s eyes were glassy. His legs were buckling. But he continued to fire.

Then his knees gave way. He sank down. His last shot, fired from bloodless hands, went into the floor. He was beaten down, but he was still firing.

Floyd Allen turned, staggered. He tripped over the body of Webb, plunged to the floor and lay still.

Dexter Goad was firing at Sidna Allen. Sidna Allen and Claude bolted for the door, firing back as they ran.

Nancy Elizabeth Ayres attempted to run after them. In the aisle she staggered, screamed hideously, clutched at her abdomen, and slumped down. As she slumped her head jerked back. A second bullet had struck her in the temple.

The Allens were running toward the exit. Both were firing at Goad. Another took up the fusillade, firing point blank at the little gamecock. No one ever knew definitely whether it was Friel Allen, youngest of the clan, or Wesley or Sidna Edwards.

Sidna and Claude Allen ran onto the porch. Goad still followed them. Friel Allen raised his gun, pointed it at Goad’s head, from behind. Something whisked him off the porch, left him kicking and struggling in a flower bed. The high school daughter of Dexter Goad had saved her father’s life.

Goad fell on the porch, still tugging at the trigger of his empty gun. He pulled himself to a sitting posture and hurled the empty weapon after the fleeing Allens. Then he tumbled over.

They found eight bullet wounds in his body. But, iron of soul and iron of body, he lived.

Sidna Allen ran across the street to an ammunition store, seeking more cartridges. The store was closed. Seeing this, Sidna Allen ran, shouting for his relatives, to his horse. Although badly wounded, he managed to flee the town with the remnants of the clan at his heels.

The patriarch was abandoned. He lay in a pool of blood half over the body of Sheriff Webb, his leg broken and two other bullet wounds in his giant form.

Massie and Foster were dead. Elizabeth Ayres was dead. Goad was near death. Five jurors, who had been called to hear the decision and sentencing, were wounded. Three spectators were in hospitals with bullets in their bodies. Fifteen casualties.

VII

Ensued now the hunt for the fugitives. Governor William Mann of Virginia took a hand. He ordered the militia into Hillsville. He sent twenty plainclothes men from Roanoke, sent Judge Staples of Roanoke to take charge, ordered Attorney General Williams to the scene.

These reinforcements went by train to Galaxy. Then, because no one knew they were coming, they had to walk through nine miles of mud and slime to Hillsville. There is no railroad in Hillsville.

The hunt spread over Carroll County. Then word came that one of the Allens had robbed an ammunition store in Mount Airy, North Carolina. Floyd Allen, hearing of this while flat on his back with his broken leg, exclaimed:

“Good. Us Allens is all fighters!”

A week later Sidna Edwards was captured while asleep in an abandoned hut sixteen miles from Hillsville. Five days later the seventeen-year-old Friel Allen was taken in a carriage shed near his father’s home. He was sick and whimpering. The bravado of the fighting Allens had been drowned in the homesickness of a scared boy.

Sidna Allen and Wesley Edwards still were at large. In spite of this, the state insisted upon bringing the captured four to trial, Floyd Allen, his son, Claude, and his nephews, Friel and Sidna Edwards.

Carroll County was in a state of chaos. Every citizen was an armed man, a self constituted avenger of a wrong, either against the commonwealth or the Allens. Thought of conducting the trial there was madness.

The hearings were transferred to Wytheville, county seat of a neighboring county. Militiamen were thrown about the courthouse. Plainclothes men from Richmond and Roanoke and Norfolk guarded the courtroom, watched everyone who came in.

No one was admitted to the hearings without first being searched for weapons. No known Allenites, not witnesses in the trial, were permitted in the town. Extra policemen from half a dozen towns patrolled the streets. Militiamen in their stuffy uniforms patrolled the main streets and checked up the hotels and train arrivals.

The county line of Carroll County was patrolled like an international border in war time.

No single juryman who ever had heard of the Allens was accepted.

Thus the trial started and thus it ended, in spectacular time. Friel Allen and Sidna Edwards pleaded guilty and were sentenced to fifteen and eighteen years, respectively.

Claude Allen and his father were found guilty of murder and sentenced to hang.

Then Wesley Edwards and Sidna Allen were captured in Des Moines. Sidna Allen charged that Wesley Edwards’ sweetheart, with whom they were living in the Des Moines town, had betrayed them for a reward.

They were given prison sentences, Sidna’s totalling thirty-five years, Wesley’s twenty-seven.

Then they took Floyd Allen and Claude to the state penitentiary. Half a dozen deputies rode with them. Militiamen guarded the procession. Plainclothes men moved among those who watched the start of the hegira. But there was no disturbance in Wytheville. Only in incendiary Carroll County, where Allenites burned farmhouses and some houses in the city in protest against the sentence.

Then began the appeals for mercy. There were more than a dozen of them. Finally, as a last hope, the case went to the United States supreme court. The plea was denied.

On the night of March 27, 1913, one year after the tragedy of Hillsville courthouse, the warden of the state penitentiary pushed his way into Floyd Alien’s cell.

The great, gray mane was unbowed. The huge head was held erect and the beady eyes were as fierce and defiant as ever.

“Your last appeal has been denied,” said the warden, gravely. “This means that we must execute sentence on you and your son at sunrise. Are you prepared?”

The giant patriarch stood up. He looked the warden square in the eye.

“The Allens is fighters,” he said. “They know how to die — if they have to die.”

The last was said with a startling significance. The warden looked apprehensive, then quickly left the cell to take the news to Claude Allen.

The warden called for a military guard. It was thrown about the prison walls that night. Every guard was ordered to be on duty throughout the night.

The next morning, amid an ominous silence outside the walls, the old man walked from his cell with his head high and a smile on his face. His shaggy mane looked whiter than ever in the spring sunlight.

He mounted the steps quickly. He seemed to be looking about him. There was hope, some trust in an omnipotence he still believed, in his fiery eyes.

Even as they placed the hood over his gray locks, he asked, in a firm voice:

“Do you really mean to hang an Allen?”

No one replied. The warden reached for the trigger. Just before the rattle of the trap broke the words, the giant patriarch bellowed, as he had bellowed two years before, to his eternal tragedy:

“Thank God, the Allens is all fighters!”

Then the rope muffled his cry into a crackling scream.

Claude Allen died without a word. Ten years later Governor Trinkle pardoned Friel Allen and Sidna Edwards. Then, in 1926, Governor Harry Byrd, brother of the noted polar explorer, pardoned Sidna Allen and Wesley Edwards.

The four of them live today, in Virginia, quiet, law abiding, industrious citizens, saddened and broken by their experience.

And no longer there echoes through the beautiful hills of matchless Carroll County the fateful war cry:

“The Allens Is All Fighters!”