Page:Melville Davisson Post--The Man of Last Resort.djvu/163

Rh water slips in and fills up the outlines of a vessel.

Still the sheriff was all right. When he looked out of his dreamy blue eyes through his rimless nose glasses at a negro miner who had used his razor as an adjunct to an argument, and mildly requested the negro to accompany him to the confines of the county jail, it was as certain as the advent of death that the negro would obey, and obey without comment. And when the sheriff mounted his “murky dun” horse and passed up into the mountains for the purpose of inducing a moonshiner to come down to civilization and submit his rights to the decision of a judicial tribunal, it was a matter of familiar history that the moonshiner always came.

To the inquiring stranger, no man seemed a native of McDowell.

This impression arose from the fact that the stranger adhered to the railroad and the coal towns which sprang up in its wake, and in these every man came from somewhere. The railroad had brought in the coal companies, and the coal companies had brought in the negroes,