商品簡介
Jesse Sutherlin has returned to Buffalo Mountain after making a name for himself during trench warfare in World War I and reaching the rank of officer. He is also conscious of being viewed as a hillbilly by fellow soldiers, who had a meeting with his knuckles.While on the mountain, his cousin and fellow soldier, Solomon McAdoo, who returned suffering from shell shock, is shot in the back while attending a family moonshine still. When Jesse learns of this, he knows violence is going to boil up. The west side of the mountain is McAdoo territory, and the east side, Lebrun territory. It will be like the West Virginia Hatfields and McCoys, with no winners, only more dead men. The mountain is a hard place, where even shooting someone over a disagreement is just part of life. Jesse decides to head off the violence by investigating the crime.But he's hampered by his family who want retribution. Jesse is also held back by the requests of Serena Barker, a Lebrun relative, who insists that he get away before he gets himself killed, and by a bigoted local sheriff who soon arrests him on the testimony of an eyewitness to Solomon's death.Over all this drama, and more deaths, looms the specter of the influenza epidemic that killed more people worldwide than died in the trenches, as well as the kind of poverty that has become a way of life for folks on the played-out farmland of this corner of Appalachia. Jesse gets a job as foreman at the local sawmill, encounters a lawyer in Floyd, the county seat, who is hired to defend him when he's arrested, romances the girl from the enemy camp, and tries to stay alive while preventing more, perhaps wholesale, deaths.
