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By Root 300 0

been writing for a week. Maybe they've got to kill me to wipe it all out, what happened, so they can have each other again, or think they have, and maybe they're going to tell it, so they get off. But I've got to tell it too, because I didn't do anything but what I thought was right. What I told him I thought was true, and if he didn't think enough of her to go see her about it, to give her her chance to say what she had to say, then that was his lookout. After I found out how it really was, she was anybody's woman, and all I've got to say is, I love her as much as he does. So I'm putting it down. It's finished now, and tonight I'm taking it with me when I leave, and maybe there won't have to be any telling, and they'll decide they can have each other without any killing. Because my leg's better now, and there's one thing they've forgotten. And that's the mine.

I slipped out the back way when it got dark, crossed the creek above the cabin, and got up the path without their seeing me. I got to the timbered drift, went inside, and soon as I was well inside so no light could be seen from the road I got out the carbide lamp I had brought with me. All I had to do now was slip through to the bottom of the shaft, go up the ladder to the top, kill the light, and then slide down the mountainside and come out on the road about a mile below where they're laying for me. From there on to the bus stop is a short walk, and I'd be away. But when I hit the lamp to strike the flint, I dropped it, and I heard the top pop open and the carbide go all over the track. And while I was feeling around for a couple of crumbs I could put in there with a little spit, I heard something that almost made me drop dead. It was Moke, in there under the tunnel, prizing around with the gun barrel, trying to get out. He would hit a rock three or four times, then get the steel in a crack, twist it around, move a chunk, then start all over again. I gave a yell and started to run out of the place, but I fell and hit my head and that was the last I knew for a while. When I came to he was nearer, and I could hear his chinking plainer. I got out of there somehow. When I got back it was day.

It's still raining out, but it's daylight now, and I've been listening to the water run off the roof and I've figured out what that was in the mine. It wasn't Moke. It was water dripping. Now I know what it is, I won't mind it any more, and tonight I'll get out of here.

I'm cut off. Ed Blue is out there and

The End

Preface

This story goes back to 1922, when I was much under the spell of the Big Sandy country and anxious to make it the locale of a novel that would deal with its mine wars and utilize its "beautiful bleak ugliness," as I called it at the time, as setting. I went down there, worked in its mines, studied, trudged, and crammed, but when I came back was unequal to the novel; indeed, it was another ten years before it entered my mind again that I might be able to write a novel, for I had at least learned it is no easy trick, despite a large body of opinion to the contrary. But then I did write a novel, and the earlier idea began recurring to me not the part about labor, for reflection had long since convinced me that this theme, though it constantly attracts a certain type of intellectual, is really dead seed for a novelist but the rocky, wooded countryside itself, together with the clear, cool creeks that purl through it, and its gentle, charming inhabitants, whose little hamlets quite often look as they must have looked in the time of Daniel Boone. And then one day, in California, I encountered a family from Kentucky, running a roadside sandwich place. Certain reticences about a charming little boy they had led me to suspect he was the reason for the hegira from Harlan County, and the idea for a story began to take shape in my mind. The peculiarities of a birthmark possessed by one branch of my family helped quite a lot, and presently I had something fairly definite: a girl's disgrace, in a mountain village, which causes a family to make the grand