The little county seat on Tug River slept in a pocket. Behind it and on every side except the river were great mountains, half-hidden by a gigantic cloak of fog. On the opposite side, from the great coal plants of the Norfolk and Western Railroad a counter-canopy of smoke arose, dense and voluminous, and stretched itself like a black hand out over the town and across to the fog of the mountain. Man, it seemed, had conspired with nature to cover up and hide the town of Welch. “Strange,” drawled the sheriff, “strange, that a white man should be willing to leave a paradise like this, and with river water in his stomach too.” Then he chuckled comfortably. The sheriff of the county of McDowell was all right. He represented the entire machinery of the law obtaining south of Tug River, and he carried the momentous responsibility with the languid grace of a bank clerk at a charity german. The sheriff was a Virginian. But, marvel of marvels, he was a Virginian without a title. He was plain W. M. Carter. The statement is not quite accurate. Among the boys he was “White” Carter. But he was no “colonel” and no “major,” and he gloried in the distinction and guarded it well. The sheriff was a comfortably fat man and most genial. His eyes were round, blue, and dreamy, and he never hurried. He was never abrupt or a jarring element. He slipped easily into any position and filled it up without a ripple, as water slips in and fills up the outlines of a vessel. Still the sheriff was all right. When he looked out of his dreamy blue eyes through his rimless nose glasses at a negro miner who had used his razor as an adjunct to an argument, and mildly requested the negro to accompany him to the confines of the county jail, it was as certain as the advent of death that the negro would obey, and obey without comment. And when the sheriff mounted his “murky dun” horse and passed up into the mountains for the purpose of inducing a moonshiner to come down to civilization and submit his rights to the decision of a judicial tribunal, it was a matter of familiar history that the moonshiner always came. To the inquiring stranger, no man seemed a native of McDowell.