While Spicer South and his cousins had been sustaining themselves or
building up competences by tilling their soil, the leaders of the other
faction were basing larger fortunes on the profits of merchandise and
trade. So, although Spicer South could neither read nor write, his
chief enemy, Micah Hollman, was to outward seeming an urbane and fairly
equipped man of affairs. Judged by their heads, the clansmen were
rougher and more illiterate on Misery, and in closer touch with
civilization on Crippleshin. A deeper scrutiny showed this seeming to
be one of the strange anomalies of the mountains.
Micah Hollman had established himself at Hixon, that shack town which
had passed of late years from feudal county seat to the section's one
point of contact with the outside world; a town where the ancient and
modern orders brushed shoulders; where the new was tolerated, but dared
not become aggressive. Directly across the street from the court-house
stood an ample frame building, on whose side wall was emblazoned the
legend: "Hollman's Mammoth Department Store." That was the secret
stronghold of Hollman power.
He had always spoken deploringly of that
spirit of lawlessness which had given the mountains a bad name. He
himself, he declared, believed that the best assets of any community
were tenets of peace and brotherhood. Any mountain man or foreigner who
came to town was sure of a welcome from Judge Micah Hollman, who added
to his title of storekeeper that of magistrate.
As the years went on, the proprietor of the "Mammoth Department Store"
found that he had money to lend and, as a natural sequence, mortgages
stored away in his strong box. To the cry of distress, he turned a
sympathetic ear. His infectious smile and suave manner won him fame as
"the best-hearted man in the mountains." Steadily and unostentatiously,
his fortune fattened.
When the railroad came to Hixon, it found in Judge Hollman a "public-
spirited citizen." Incidentally, the timber that it hauled and the coal
that its flat cars carried down to the Bluegrass went largely to his
consignees. He had so astutely anticipated coming events that, when the
first scouts of capital sought options, they found themselves
constantly referred to Judge Hollman. No wheel, it seemed, could turn
without his nod. It was natural that the genial storekeeper should
become the big man of the community and inevitable that the one big man
should become the dictator. His inherited place as leader of the
Hollmans in the feud he had seemingly passed on as an obsolete
prerogative.
Yet, in business matters, he was found to drive a hard bargain, and
men came to regard it the part of good policy to meet rather than
combat his requirements. It was essential to his purposes that the
officers of the law in his county should be in sympathy with him.
Sympathy soon became abject subservience. When a South had opposed
Jesse Purvy in the primary as candidate for High Sheriff, he was found
one day lying on his face with a bullet-riddled body. It may have been
a coincidence which pointed to Jim Asberry, the judge's nephew, as the
assassin. At all events, the judge's nephew was a poor boy, and a
charitable Grand Jury declined to indict him.