Part 13

A series of land-frauds sprang up under the cloak of the law. Upon vacant farms false debts were levied; fake administrators took charge of lands whose owners had died during the conflict; other property was hastily forced under sale for taxes.

That the proceedings should appear legal, the foreclosures were by due process of law. But if quietly circulated warnings against a general bidding for property when offered at court sale were not effective, some well-known desperate character would appear at the sale and threaten anyone who dared bid against him.

The bitterness of the feeling of the two sides subsided slowly, but there was ever present the realization that old alinements could be quickly and bloodily revived. Champ Ferguson, sought by the Federal authorities, appeared suddenly upon the streets of Jamestown. That day his old rival, "Tinker," was there. It was a personal battle the two leaders fought, while Jamestown looked on silently, fearful of the outcome. Beaty received three wounds, but escaped on horseback.

A short time afterward Ferguson was hanged at Nashville by order of court martial. The charge against him was that he had entered the hospital at Emery and Henry College and shot to death a wounded Federal lieutenant. Ferguson claimed justification as the Federal lieutenant, under orders to escort a war-prisoner--a Confederate officer and personal friend of Ferguson's--to headquarters, had, instead, stood his prisoner against a tree by a roadside and ordered a firing-squad to kill him. And the court-martial indictment of Ferguson read--"and for other crimes."

One of "Tinker" Beaty's men was Pres Huff, who lived in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." It was generally believed that he was the leader of the band who had ridden out of the woods and killed Jeff Pile, as he traveled unarmed along the Byrdstown road.

Huff's father had been shot. The scene of his death was where the branch from the York Spring crosses the public road at the Pile home. The deed was done by a band of Confederates who had taken the elder Huff prisoner, and neither Jeff Pile, nor his brothers, were to be connected with it, except in the quickly prejudiced mind of the victim's son.

The desperate character of Pres Huff is evidenced by the records of the United States Circuit Court for the Middle District of Tennessee in the suit of the McGinnis heirs for land in Fentress county. Their bill recites:

"Armed men who were led and controlled by one Preston Huff, who was a brigand of the most desperate character, forced complainants' father and themselves to leave the county to secure their lives and kept them from the county by threats of most brutal violence. The history of these men and the times prove clearly that these threats were not idle, nor those who opposed them survived their vengeance."

At the foreclosure on the McGinnis property, Pres Huff rode his horse between the court officers and those attending the sale, and pistol in hand declared the land his by right of possession. The bill continues as follows:

"Preston Huff, who was the desperado heretofore referred to, publicly proclaimed that he had fought for the land, had run the McGinnises from the county, and if anyone bid for the land against him he would kill him on sight. Even his co-conspirators would not brook his displeasure. The land was sold on his bid, no one dared oppose him. The history of his career shows it was wisdom to shun him. Many have been killed by him in the most cold and brutal manner."

There came to Pall Mall, when General Burnside was moving his Federal forces southward, a young man by the name of William Brooks. He had joined the Union Army at his home in Michigan. He was a daring horseman, handsome, fair and his hair was red-a rich copperesque red. The army moved on, but young Brooks remained in the valley. He claimed that as a private soldier he had done more than his share in the conquest of the South--and that the conquest that should ever go to his credit was the conquest of Nancy Pile.

When they were married, his father-in-law, Elijah Pile, gave him a farm and he tilled it, and he smiled his way into the favor of the community.

He lived in the valley about two years, and a baby had been born to them. The feeling between the children of Elijah Pile and Pres Huff was silent but tense; over it there fell constantly the shadow of the murder of Jeff Pile.

Meeting down at the old mill one day, Pres Huff and "Willie" Brooks engaged in an excited argument. Between the dark-browed, sullen mountaineer and the slender, gay young man a contest seemed uneven, and was prevented. Huff told Brooks that the next time they met he would kill him.

They met next day, on the mountainside, on the road that leads by the Brooks home, on across the spring-branch, up beside the York home and then up the mountain. Huff's riderless horse galloped on and stopped in front of a mountain cabin; his body lay dead in the road.

There was a hurried consultation at the home of Elijah Pile. Huff's friends, it was realized, would not be long in coming. Young Brooks went out of the house, down by the spring, and up the mountain back of it. He was never seen in the valley again.

Huff's friends waited.

Weeks afterward, Nancy Brooks, carrying her baby, went to visit a friend. She evaded the watchfulness of her husband's enemies, succeeded in crossing the Kentucky line and disappeared in the mountains to the north of it.

The friends of Pres Huff knew she would write home. Months elapsed, but finally a letter came, and was intercepted. She and her husband were at a logging-camp in the northern woods of Michigan.

Secretly, extradition papers for Brooks were secured, and Huff's former partner in a mercantile business, fully equipped with warrant appeared with a sheriff before the door of the cabin in the Michigan woods, Brooks was brought back to Jamestown, and put into the log-ribbed jail that John M. Clemens, "Mark Twain's" father, had built.

But there was no trial by law. The next night, through the moonlight and the pines, a little body of men rode. Up the valley, across the plateau, they went, and Jamestown was sleeping.

Taking Brooks from the jail they carried him three miles down the road toward Pall Mall. Here they bound a rope around his feet, unbridled a horse and tied the other end of the rope to the horse's tail. They taunted Brooks. But they could not make him break his silence, until he asked to be allowed to see his wife and baby. Rough men laughed, and there was the report of a gun. The horse, frightened, galloped down the road, and bullets were fired into the squirming body as it was dragged over the rocks.

The war had steeled men for the coming of death and crime, but at the manner of the death of "Willie" Brooks a shudder passed over the mountainsides. To Nancy Brooks was born a son a short time afterward, and he was named after his father.

A silent, broken-hearted woman, Nancy Brooks took up again her life at her father's home. To the little girl she had carried on her flight to Michigan and to the boy whose hair had the copper-red of the father, she devoted herself. The girl had been named Mary, and she inherited the piquancy and wit that had made her mother the belle of the valley, and as she grew to womanhood the mountaineers saw again the Nancy Brooks they had loved before war had come with its cold blighting fingers of death.

At the age of fifteen Mary Brooks met William York, the son of Uriah York, and they were married. A home was built for them, beyond the branch, beside the spring. And Alvin York was their third son.

IV The Molding of a Man

The first year after the marriage of William York and Mary Brooks, they lived at the Old Coonrod Pile home, and William York worked as a "cropper." Securing the farm that had been given the bride, they modeled into a one-room home the corn-crib of Elijah Pile, that stood across the spring-branch and up the mountainside. It was a log crib, and they chinked it with clay, and using split logs from the walls of the old shed, a puncheon floor was made. The coming of spring brought the blossoms of flowers the girl-wife had planted.

Honeysuckle and roses have bloomed around that cabin each succeeding summer, and it proved the foundation of a home that was to withstand the troubles of poverty in many winters. It was a home so rare and real that it pulled back to the mountains a son who had gone out into the world and won fame and the offers of fortunes for the deeds he had done as a soldier.