Pa seemed not to have heard and walked on even faster than he had been walking, which was quite unnecessary, for though Jim could run along like a squirrel, he was almost out of breath trying to keep up with his father. Now, however, he made a dash and caught at his father’s suspender. “And what did they do with ’em dad?” “They took ’em down to Lee, Jim, and stood ’em up in the public square—them twenty young chaps, some of ’em not more than eighteen—and their old neighbors faced up there in double file and shot ’em down.” “What!” cried Jim. “Had to, boy. _Had to_! Military law. The old colonel made ’em.” “Oh!” “But that finished him. He lived down there in that big shut-up place they call The Shoals. You know it. It ain’t been opened in your day, but it’s a grand old house. Well, after the old colonel had made the people do the thing I told you about, the countryside was up and buzzing like a nest of hornets, and old colonel, he had to black his face and put on women’s clothes and hike out. And his wife went back to Alabama where she come from, and nobody heard of the Athertons any more.” “And are there any folks living at Lee now that did the shooting?” Pa McBirney stopped to get his breath, and he looked about him at the lovely day, at the shining woods and the down-plunging stream. Then he dropped on a convenient rock and motioned Jim to sit beside him. “I’m a-going to tell you something, Jim,” he said, “that I want you to remember. Us mountain folks has got a bad name in some ways. Folks say we’re shiftless—some of us—and revengeful. But do you know what the people down at Lee done after old Colonel Atherton was run out? They got together and they took an oath never, no matter what come, to carry on the story of that dreadful thing. They said they wouldn’t speak of it nor hand it on to their children, nor wage war nor nurse hard feelings. So who done the shooting and who was shot is something I don’t know and don’t want to know. My father knew, and what he knew turned him old before his time. And I remember hearing about an older brother, and never was I told about his end. So maybe your own uncle was one of them poor martyrs. But it don’t matter now. It’s all healed up, like the hole the fire burned in that there chestnut. It’s healed up in brotherly love, and if you was to go to Lee and ask any questions about that there rumpus, you’d get your trouble for your pains. They’d pretend they didn’t know what you was talking about. And the young people, they don’t know any more about it than just that it happened, and they’ve married and intermarried, till them that was forced to be slayers and them that was slain have their names passed on in the same family. And I’m proud of it, Jim, and want you to know it, and to say to folks, when they hold out that we’re a quarrelsome people, that we’re a forgiving people too.”