Free The Gothic Terror MEGAPACK™: 17 Classic Tales by Henry James, Ann Radcliffe, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Gertrude Atherton

the face of day, commit the most daring crimes, trusting to an escape to Shelby for protection. They seemed determined, at any risk, to hold the county good against the encroachments of all honest citizens; and this came to be so notorious, that no man could move among them with any citizen-like and proper motives, but at the expense of his personal safety or his conscience—for the crime of refusing to take part with them, was in itself sufficient to subject all newcomers to a series of persecutions, which soon brought them into terms, or resulted in their extermination.
    We do not wish to be understood that the whole population of the county were avowedly horse thieves and cut-throats! There was one different class of wealthy planters, and another of the old stamp of restless migrating hunters, who first led the tide of population over the Alleghanies. These two classes made some pretensions to outward decorum, and in various ways acted as restraints upon that of the worse disposed; while they, with that utter intolerance of restraint, which so unbounded license necessarily engenders, determined to submit to no presence which should in any way rebuke or embarrass their deeds. Most of these bad men were a kind of small landholders, who only cultivated patches of ground, dotting the spaces between the larger plantations; but they kept very fine horses, and depended more on their speed for acquiring plunder, than any capacity of their own for labor.
    They were finally wrought up to the last pitch of restlessness by this closing around of unmanageable persons, and organized themselves into a band of Regulators, as they termed themselves. They proclaimed that the county limits needed purification, and that they felt themselves specially called to the work. Accordingly, under the lead of a man, who was himself a brutal monster, named Hinch, they commenced operations. In this public-spirited and praiseworthy operation, they soon managed to reduce the county to the subjection of fear, if not to an affectionate recognition of the prerogatives they arrogated to themselves.
    The richer Planters they compelled to pay a heavy blackmail rent, in fee simple of a right to enjoy their own property and lives, with the further understanding that they were to be protected in these immunities from all danger from without of a similar kind. The Planters, in return, were to wink upon any deeds, whose coloring might otherwise chance to be offensive to eyes polite.
    The other class of simple-hearted sturdy men were goaded and tortured by the most aggravated annoyances, until, driven in despair to some act of retaliation, they furnished their tyrants with the shadow of an excuse, which even they felt to be needed, and were then either lynched with lashes and warned to leave the county in so many days, or shot if they persisted in remaining! So relentless and vindictive did these wretches show themselves in hunting down every one who dared to oppose himself to them in any way, that very soon their ascendency in the county was almost without any dispute. Indeed, there were very few left who from any cause could presume to do so. Among these few, and one of this last class of wandering hunters, was Jack Long.
    Jack had come of a “wild turkey breed,” as I have mentioned the phrase to be in the West for a family remarkable for its wandering propensities. He had already pushed ahead of two States and a Territory, and following the game still farther towards the south, had been pleased with the promise of an abundance of it in Shelby county, and stopped there, just as he would have stopped at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, had it been necessary to have gone so far; without troubling himself or caring to know who his neighbors were.
    He had never thought it at all essential to ask leave of any government as to how or where he should make himself a home, or even to inquire what particular nation put in its claim to any region that suited his purposes.