Beyond the Lutts cabin and towering above it, a single monster boulder jutted outward from the perpendicular wall of granite and hung perilously over sheer space. This freakish rock, known as Eagle Crown, looked like a ragged punctuation pause in a folk-lore story; a relic tossed on high by some legendary, boastful giant.
The wonder was how Cap Lutts gained its forbidding lofty platform, for surely there was no visible means of ascent. Howbeit, Eagle Crown had been the old man's retreat for sixty-odd years. This imperishable shelf of granite offered him sanctuary when travail and sorrow, that weighted his life, pressed hard upon him. There he had spent his moody hours since boyhood. There his father and his great-grandfather had gone to be alone. And there to-night, high up and alone, his majestic form was silhouetted plainly against the sky.
A mighty man, this Lutts. At seventy-six he stood six feet seven inches--straight as an arrow; a seasoned ball-bearing pyramid of big bones, mounted with iron-fibered muscles; and a drop of chilled steel for a fighting heart. In the premises of peace, this same heart swelled up to proportions of compassion and generosity that named him father of all the community north of Hellsfork--a man who never failed his people; one to whom they hurried with their woes when they needed material help, succor, sympathy and protection.
From this height, the old man fondly turned his eyes downward toward the clearing that now held his sacred treasure--a log church. There, high up toward heaven, in the profundity of his loneness, only God knew this somber, silent man's thoughts--this feud-hunted, law-hounded man whose soul brimmed with his own religion; whose being was wrapped about with that which he took for the right; whose heart spurned all that he thought wrong.
His so-called bandit-spirit was insulated with the convictions of his own peculiar faith. His every utterance and deed were tempered with the tenets of a unique creed handed down by his mountain fore-fathers. In his heart there murmured a runic cadence, the language of which was only interpreted by the omnipotent, all-merciful Over-soul.
Why the menacing hand of an outer world was lifted against him was a problem he had long since despaired of solving. Fondly now he gazed down toward the spot where the new cedar clapboards of the meeting-house shimmered like a disk of true gold beneath the moon's whiteness; beckoning to him with an insistence that stirred his stoic heart to its depths.