ot have been etiquette for the sheriff
to come for him. He came in, well guarded on the way by certain of his
clan, pleaded self-defense before a friendly county judge and was locked
up in a one-cell log jail. His own cousin was the jailer and ministered
to him kindly. He avoided passing the single barred window of the jail
in the daytime or at night when there was a light behind him, and he
expected to "come clear" shortly, as was customary.

But the Tranthams broke the rules of the game. The circuit judge lived
half-way across the mountains in a county on the Virginia line; he was
not an active partizan of either side in the feud. These Tranthams,
disregarding all the ethics, went before this circuit judge and asked
him for a change of venue, and got it, which was more; so that instead
of being tried in Clayton County--and promptly acquitted--Anse Dugmore
was taken to Woodbine County and there lodged in a shiny new brick jail.
Things were in process of change in Woodbine. A spur of the railroad had
nosed its way up from the lowlands and on through the Gap, and had made
Loudon, the county-seat, a division terminal. Strangers from the North
had come in, opening up the mountains to mines and sawmills and bringing
with them many swarthy foreign laborers. A young man of large hopes and
an Eastern college education had started a weekly newspaper and was
talking big, in his editorial columns, of a new order of things. The
foundation had even been laid for a graded school. Plainly Woodbine
County was falling out of touch with the century-old traditions of her
sisters to the north and west of her.

In due season, then, Anse Dugmore was brought up on a charge of
homicide. The trial lasted less than a day. A jury of strangers heard
the stories of Anse himself and of the dead Pegleg's white-eyed nephew.
In the early afternoon they came back, a wooden toothpick in each mouth,
from the new hotel where they had just had a most satisfying fifty-cent
dinner at the expense of the commonwealth, and sentenced the defendant,
Anderson Dugmore, to state prison at hard labor for the balance of his
natural life.

The sheriff of Woodbine padlocked on Anse's ankles a set of leg irons
that had been made by a mountain blacksmith out of log chains and led
him to the new depot. It was Anse Dugmore's first ride on a railroad
train; also it was the first ride on any train for Wyatt Trantham, head
of the other clan, who, having been elected to the l