Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 48219-h.htm or 48219-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48219/48219-h/48219-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48219/48219-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/redbelts00pend Transcriber’s note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). RED BELTS [Illustration: “_On the ground lay Elsie Tonpit, hurled there by a bandit, a huge brute of a man, bending over her._”] RED BELTS by HUGH PENDEXTER [Illustration: Printer decoration] Frontispiece by Ralph Pallen Coleman Garden City New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1920 Copyright, 1920, by Doubleday, Page & Company All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian Copyright, 1919, by The Ridgway Company FOREWORD In 1784 North Carolina’s share of the national debt was a ninth, or about five millions of dollars—a prodigious sum for a commonwealth just emerging from a colonial chrysalis to raise. Yet North Carolina was more fortunate than some of her sister débutantes into Statehood, in that she possessed some twenty-nine million acres of virgin country beyond the Alleghanies. This noble realm, from which the State of Tennessee was to be fashioned, had been won by confiscation and the rifles of the over-mountain settlers and had cost North Carolina neither blood nor money. The republic was too young to have developed coalescence. A man might be a New Yorker, a New Englander, a Virginian and so on, but as yet seldom an American. The majority of the Northern representatives to the national Congress believed the Union was full grown, geographically; that it covered too much territory already. To all such narrow visions the Alleghanies appealed as being the natural western boundary. These conservatives insisted the future of the country was to be found on the seaboard. Charles III of Spain heartily approved of this policy of restriction and set in motion his mighty machinery to prevent further expansion of the United States. He knew the stimuli for restoring his kingdom to a world plane could be found only in his American possessions. As a result of those sturdy adventurers, crossing the mountains to plunge into the unknown, carried with them scant encouragement from their home States or the central Government. In truth, the national Congress was quite powerless to protect its citizens. And this, perhaps, because the new States had not yet fully evolved above the plan of Colonial kinship. It was to be many years before the rights of States gave way to the rights of the nation. The States were often at odds with one another and would stand shoulder to shoulder only in face of a general and overwhelming peril.