For Sam by hchladybug1218

On the face of it one might have questioned the wisdom of selecting for a task so difficult a man who knew absolutely nothing about it. When the work in hand was the apprehension of a band of violators of the law who had for years defied and intimidated the whole countryside, this course seemed even more unusual. But the wonder would have still further multiplied itself if the casual observer could have given Billy Gard the once over as he sat nervously on the edge of the cane seat of the day coach as the accommodation train pulled into the hill country.

For this special agent of the Department of Justice, mind you, was to take up a piece of work upon which local constables and sheriffs, United States marshals and revenue agents had failed. There was murder at one end of the road he was to travel and the gallows at the other. And Gard was a nondescript youngster who looked less than thirty, neither light nor dark, large nor small-inconspicuous, easily lost in a crowd. The careful observer might have noticed the breadth of brow and the wrinkles that come to the man who thinks, or the tenseness of his slim form that indicated physical fitness. For to be sure, these federal sleuths of the new school are mostly college men, lawyers, expert accountants, as was Gard; but youngsters in whom is to be found the love of a bit of adventure and the steel of a set determination.

And now this slip of a lad was going back into the Cumberlands where the whisky still whispers its secret to the mountaineer; where the revenue agent penetrates at his peril and the Long Tom speaks from the thickets; where the clansman sets what he considers his rights above the law of the land and stands ready to lay his life or that of any who oppose him on the altar he has built. Gard was after a community of moonshiners who had defied all local authority and thrown down the gauntlet to the Federal Government itself. He came alone with a little wicker grip.

"I am looking for a place to board," the special agent told Todd, the livery stable man at Wheeler, the mountain town at which he had stopped off. "I have been clerking in a store in Atlanta and got pretty well run down. The doctor said I ought to stay in the mountains for a month or two."

"How much can you pay?" asked Todd.

"I would like to get it as cheap as five dollars a week," said Gard.

"You can buy a farm up here for five dollars a week," said Todd.

"Well, I want good board where I can get lots of milk to drink and eggs and where I can tramp around and shoot squirrels. Do you know such a place?"

The liveryman was accustomed to driving summer boarders out to the few places where they might stay in the Cumberlands. He sketched these possibilities and told of the location of each. Gard already had the map of the country well in mind and selected the farm near Sam Lunsford's, he being the mountaineer whom the agent most wanted to cultivate.

Todd reviewed the situation as between the mountaineers and the Government as he drove his customer out to the Tenney farm where he was to ask to be put up.

"You see," he said, "they have always made moonshine whisky around here and they just won't stop for nobody. They ain't many ideas gits into the head of a man who lives in the mountains, and when one gits set there, you can't get it out. They think they got a right to make whisky and whisky they are goin' to make or bust.

"Then along comes Tom Reynolds and Sam Lunsford and me and some more of us. We see that it ain't right to fight the Government and that whisky is no good anyhow, so whenever we find out where there is a still, we tell the revenue agents about it. Well, we git warnin's that we better not do it no more, but them fellers can't skeer us so we go right ahead.

"Then one night, Tom Reynolds starts home from Wheeler late in the evenin' but he don't never get there. Next mornin' we find his wagon standin' off to the side of the road and Tom is down in front of the seat dead with a load of buckshot in his head.

"Sam Lunsford has still got the idea, though, that the boys ought not to make moonshine so he goes right ahead reportin' every still he finds. So things goes on for two months. Then, one night, Sam was up late with one of his babies that had the colic. He was settin' before the fire a rockin' the baby when, bang! somebody shoots him through the winder.

"Well, that shot didn't quite get Sam. Did you ever try to shoot the head off of a chicken as it walked across the yard? Its head moves for'd and back and it is mighty hard to hit it. That's the way with Sam rockin' the baby, I reckon. Anyway, the buckshot just got Sam in the back part of his head and didn't kill him. Next day his old woman picked the buckshot out with a pocket knife because the doctor was afraid to go. Now Sam is as well as he ever was and he ain't changed his mind about the stills. Him and me reported two of them last week."

This story was about in accordance with the information Gard received from Washington. The revenue agents were too well known to work effectually in the Cumberlands any more, so the Department of Justice had taken over the case. The murderers and those who attempted murder should be apprehended.

As the wagon wound along the country road Todd called the special agent's attention to the report of a rifle from a hillside to the right. Soon another gun was discharged further ahead and a third still further on. This, the liveryman said, was a system of signals that told of their presence.

A little farther along the road wound into a hollow down which flowed a brook. Out of the brush in this hollow stepped the form of a mountaineer with a rifle across his arm. Todd drew up his team.

"What have you got there?" asked the man in the road.

"Summer boarder," said Todd.

"Where's he goin'?" was the query.

"To Tenney's," answered Todd.

The mountaineer walked around to the back of the wagon where Gard's little wicker grip was carried. Without a word he opened the grip and carefully examined everything in it. Seemingly satisfied, he waved permission for them to proceed.

"Young feller," he said to Gard in parting, "you are in durn bad company. You can't never tell whether you will git back when you start out with that skunk."

To which Todd grinned as he drove on.

"They ain't never made the bullet that'll kill me," he said.

It was three days later that Billy Gard, squirrel rifle on his shoulder, walked into the clearing about the house of Sam Lunsford, the man who had survived the charge of buckshot in the back of his head. The Lunsford house consisted of one log room with a lean-to addition at the back. There was a clearing of some thirty acres where grew a most indifferent sprinkling of corn and cotton. There was a crib for the corn, a ramshackle wagon, a flea-bitten gray horse and some hogs running wild in the woods. Such was the Lunsford estate, presided over by this huge mountaineer and to which his eleven children were heir. Seldom did an echo of the outside world reach this home in the woods. Not a member of the family was able to read. Every Sunday Sam Lunsford drove the flea-bitten gray or walked seven miles to a little mountain church where was preached a gospel of hellfire and brimstone. He was hated by his neighbors and constantly in the shadow of death. Yet he went unswervingly on the way of his duty in accordance with his lights.

Gard already had the measure of his man. No sooner had he presented himself than he put his business up to the mountaineer, "cold turkey," as the agents say when they lay all the cards on the table. Would Lunsford help the government in getting the facts that would bring the murderers of Tom Reynolds and the men who shot him to justice? Lunsford would do all he could.

"Whom do you suspect?" the agent asked.

"There are so many of them agin me," said Lunsford, "that it is hard to tell which ones done it."

"Will you show me just how you were sitting when you were shot?"

The mountaineer placed the rocking chair in front of the fire directly between a hole in the window and a spot in the opposite wall where the buckshot had lodged themselves, peppering up a surface two feet square. Thus was it easy to trace the flight of the shot through the room. The special agent examined both window pane and wall.

"Could you tell where the man stood when he fired?" he asked.

"Yes," said Lunsford. "I looked for tracks next day. Let me show you."

He led the way into the yard and there pointed out a stout peg which had been driven into the ground not a dozen feet from the window.

"The tracks came up to there and stopped," he said.

"Did you measure the tracks?" asked the special agent.

The mountaineer had done so and had cut a stick just the length of the track. This stick had been carefully preserved.

"Did you find any of the gun wadding?" asked the agent.

Even this precaution was taken by Lunsford. These men of the mountains mostly load their own shells and the wads in this case had been made by cutting pieces out of a pasteboard box. So there were a number of clues at hand.

Special Agent Billy Gard stood on the spot from which the shot had been fired. From this point to that at which the buckshot had entered the wall of the cabin was not more than thirty feet.

"An ordinary shotgun at thirty feet," he reflected, remembering his squirrel hunting days, "shoots almost like a rifle. The shot at that distance are all in a bunch not bigger than your fist. Yet the shot in the cabin wall were scattered. The man with the gun must have been further away."

Gard stated this view of the matter to the mountaineer, but that individual showed how it would have been impossible for the shot to have been fired from a greater distance because there was a depression that would have placed the man with the gun too low down to see in at the window. The shot could have been fired from but the one spot. The window pane through which the shot had passed was about half way between the peg and the wall where the charge had lodged. The hole in the window was not more than half as large as the wall surface peppered by the shot. This scatter of shot at such short range was significant.

"The shot must have been fired from a sawed-off shotgun," said the special agent. "Only a short-barreled gun would have scattered so much at this short range."