ty of any of the
dwellers therein. It is rather of the unknown tract, which lay vague
and undefined in between the several neighborhoods of the upper end. The
history of the former is known both in peace and in war: in the pleasant
homesteads which lie on the hills above the little rivers which make
down through the county to join the great river below, and in the long
list of those who fell in battle, and whose names are recorded on the
slabs set up by their comrades on the walls of the old Court House. The
history of the latter, however, is unrecorded. The lands were in the
main very poor and grown up in pine, or else, where the head-waters of
a little stream made down in a number of "branches", were swampy and
malarial. Possibly it was this poverty of the soil or unwholesomeness
of their location, which more than anything else kept the people of this
district somewhat distinct from others around them, however poor they
might be. They dwelt in their little cabins among their pines, or down
on the edges of the swampy district, distinct both from the gentlemen
on their old plantations and from the sturdy farmer-folk who owned the
smaller places. What title they had to their lands originally, or how
they traced it back, or where they had come from, no one knew. They had
been there from time immemorial, as long or longer, if anything, than
the owners of the plantations about them; and insignificant as they
were, they were not the kind to attempt to question, even had anyone
been inclined to do so, which no one was.

They had the names of the old English gentry, and were a clean-limbed,
blond, blue-eyed people.

When they were growing to middle age, their life told on them and made
them weather-beaten, and not infrequently hard-visaged; but when they
were young there were often among them straight, supple young fellows
with clear-cut features, and lithe, willowy-looking girls, with pink
faces and blue, or brown, or hazel eyes, and a mien which one might have
expected to find in a hall rather than in a cabin.

Darby Stanley and Cove Mills (short for Coverley) were the leaders of
the rival factions of the district. They lived as their fathers had
lived before them, on opposite sides of the little stream, the branches
of which crept through the alder and gum thickets between them,
and contributed to make the district almost as impenetrable to
the uninitiated as a mountain fastness. The long log-cabin of the
Cove-Millses, w