Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other StoriesFox, John, Jr.
General
Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories
Fox, John, Jr.
Cumberland Mountains -- Fiction; Kentucky -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Mountain life -- Fiction
"Fellow citizens! There's beauty in the stars, of night and in the
glowin' orb of day. There's beauty in the rollin' meadow and in the
quiet stream. There's beauty in the smilin' valley and in the
everlastin' hills. Therefore, fellow citizens--THEREFORE, fellow
citizens, allow me to introduce to you the future Governor of these
United States--Senator William Bayhone." And he sat down with such a
beatific smile of self-satisfaction that a fiend would not have had the
heart to say he had not won.
Now, there are wandering minstrels yet in the Cumberland Hills. They
play fiddles and go about making up "ballets" that involve local
history. Sometimes they make a pretty good verse--this, for instance,
about a feud:
The death of these two men
Caused great trouble in our land.
Caused men to leave their families
And take the parting hand.
Retaliation, still at war,
May never, never cease.
I would that I could only see
Our land once more at peace.
There was a minstrel out in the crowd, and pretty soon he struck up his
fiddle and his lay, and he did not exactly sing the virtues of Billy
Bayhone. Evidently some partisan thought he ought, for he smote him on
the thigh with the toe of his boot and raised such a stir as a rude
stranger might had he smitten a troubadour in Arthur's Court. The crowd
thickened and surged, and four of the Guard emerged with the fiddler and
his assailant under arrest. It was as though the Valley were a sheet of
water straightway and the fiddler the dropping of a stone, for the
ripple of mischief started in every direction. It caught two
mountaineers on the edge of the crowd, who for no particular reason
thumped each other with their huge fists, and were swiftly led away by
that silent Guard. The operation of a mysterious force was in the air
and it puzzled the crowd. Somewhere a whistle would blow, and, from this
point and that, a quiet, well-dressed young man would start swiftly
toward it. The crowd got restless and uneasy, and, by and by,
experimental and defiant. For in that crowd was the spirit of Bunker
Hill and King's Mountain. It couldn't fiddle and sing; it couldn't
settle its little troubles after the good old fashion of fist and skull;
it couldn't charge up and down the streets on horseback if it pleased;
it couldn't ride over those puncheon sidewalks; it couldn't drink openly
and without shame; and, Shades of the American Eagle and the Stars and
Stripes, it couldn't even yell. No wonder, like the heathen, it raged.
What did these blanked "furriners" have against them anyhow? They
couldn't run _their_ country--not much.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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