The Law of Hemlock Mountain — Edition Insights

(0 User reviews) 756

In Category - Romantic Drama

Authors: Lundsford, Hugh, 1879-1957, Duer, Douglas, 1887-1964 [Illustrator] Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2010 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Love stories; Kentucky -- Fiction; Cumberland Mountains -- Fiction Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 84,288

Reading time 367 min

Text sections 11

The catalog record for The Law of Hemlock Mountain — Edition Insights provides practical reading context through 84,288 words, 6 hr 7 min estimated reading time, and 11 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 19.7 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Love stories,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #34208

An editorial note examining how Hugh Lundsford's 1920 romantic drama uses recurring images of sweat, heat, and hallucinatory visions to bridge a Philippine army camp and the Cumberland Mountains, tracking Spurrier's moral unraveling through structural parallels and sensory detail.

Editorial Edition Score 4.8/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg34208

Read the Text

There were three left battling for the often sweetened pot now, with three more who had dropped out, looking on, and a tensity enveloped the long-drawn climax of the evening's session.

Captain Comyn's cheek bones had reddened and his irascible frown lines deepened. For the moment his fears of melancholia had been swallowed up in a fitful fury against Spurrier and his smiling face.

At last came the decisive moment of the final call and the show-down, and through the dead silence of the moment sounded the distant sing-song of a sentry:

"Corporal of the guard, number one, relief!"

Over the window sill a tiny green lizard slithered quietly and hesitated, pressing itself flat against the whitewash.

Then the major's cards came down face upward--and showed a queen-high straight.

"Not quite good enough, major," announced Comyn brusquely as his breath broke from him with a sort of gasp and he spread out a heart flush.

But Spurrier, who had drawn three cards, echoed the captain's words: "Not quite good enough." He laid down two aces and two deuces, which under the cutthroat rule of "deuces wild" he was privileged to call four aces.

Comyn came to his feet and pushed back his chair, but he stood unsteadily. The fever in his bones was playing queer pranks with his brain. He, whose courtesy had always been marked in its punctilio, blazed volcano-fashion into the eruption that had been gathering through these abnormal days and nights.

Yet even now the long habit of decorum held waveringly for a little before its breaking, and he began with a queer strain in his voice:

"You'll have to take my IOU. I've lost more than I can pay on the peg."

"That's all right, Comyn," began the victor, "Pay when----" but before he could finish the other interrupted with a frenzy of anger:

"No, by God, it's not all right! It's all wrong, and this is the last game I sit in where they deal a hand to you."

Spurrier's smiling lips tightened instantly out of their infectious amiability into a forbidding straightness. He pushed aside the chips he had been stacking and rose stiffly.

"That's a statement, Captain Comyn," he said with a warning note in his level voice, "which requires some explaining."

The abrupt bursting of the tempest had left the others in a tableau of amazement, but now the authoritative voice of Major Withers broke in upon the dialogue.

"Gentlemen, this is an army post, and I am in command here. I will tolerate no quarrels."

Without shifting the gaze of eyes that held those of the captain, Spurrier answered insistently:

"I have every respect, major, for the requirements of discipline--but Captain Comyn must finish telling why he will no longer play cards with me."

"And I'll tell you _pronto_," came the truculent response. "I won't play with you because you are too damned lucky."

"Oh!" Spurrier's tensity of expression relaxed into something like amusement for the anticlimax. "That accusation can be stomached, I suppose."

"Too damned lucky," went on the other with a gathering momentum of rancor, "and too continuously lucky for a game that's not professional. When a man is so proficient--or lucky if you prefer--that the card table pays him more than the government thinks he's worth, it's time----"

Spurrier stepped forward.

"It's time for you to stop," he cautioned sharply. "I give you the fairest warning!"

But Comyn, riding the flood tide of his passion--a passion of distempered nerves--was beyond the reach of warnings and his words came in a bitter outpouring:

"I dare say it was only luck that let you bankrupt young Tillsdale, but it was as fatal to him as if it bore an uglier name."

The sound in Spurrier's throat was incoherent and his bodily impulse swift beyond interference. His flat palm smote Captain Comyn's cheek, to come away leaving a red welt behind it, and as the others swept forward to intervene the two men grappled.

They were torn apart, still struggling, as Major Withers, unaccustomed to the brooking of such mutinies, interposed between them the bulk of his body and the moral force of his indignantly blazing eyes.

"I will have no more of this," he thundered. "I am not a prize-fight referee, that I must break my officers out of clinches! Go to your quarters, Comyn! You, too, Spurrier. You are under arrest. I shall prefer charges against you both. I mean to make an example of this matter."

Continue Reading →

The novel opens not in the Cumberland Mountains of its catalog subject but in a sweltering Philippine army post, where sweat “seemed to ooze and simmer in their brains like the oil from overheated asphalt.” This visceral image of oppressive heat and mental strain establishes a pattern: throughout the excerpts, physical discomfort—jungle fevers, the “fevered breath” of night breezes, the “jaundiced yellow” of guttering lights—mirrors psychological disintegration. The poker game that opens the story is less a pastime than an “expedient against boredom,” and the language of irritation (“edgy sharpness on their nerves”) foreshadows the moral friction that will later define Spurrier’s crisis in the Kentucky hills.

Heat as a Moral Atmosphere

The excerpts repeatedly link temperature to temperament. In the Philippines, the “jungle-hot weather made men irresponsible,” and sweat makes the playing cards slippery—a small but telling detail that suggests how environment erodes control. Later, in the mountain cabin, Spurrier sits before a hearth, but the heat there is internal: his “poignant personality” and “unaccustomed surrender to imagination” produce a vision as vivid as any fever dream. The novel uses heat not merely as setting but as a force that loosens restraint, pushing characters toward confession or collapse. The reader is invited to track how each scene’s physical temperature corresponds to the emotional pressure on Spurrier.

The Double Vision: Hallucination and Self-Confrontation

One of the most structurally striking passages in the excerpts is Spurrier’s waking vision of his younger self. He sees “a figure sitting there and regarding him out of contemptuous eyes”—first a West Point cadet, then a lieutenant in khaki. The imagined Spurrier speaks: “I was a gentleman and you are a cad!” This device, described as like a “motion picture effect” showing a character confronting his “dual and separate self,” is not a ghost or a dream but a deliberate narrative rupture. It externalizes internal conflict in a way that recalls the poker game’s hidden tensions. The novel appears to use such hallucinatory moments to dramatize moral reckoning, and readers should note how these visions are triggered—here by solitude, a three-legged stool, and the “silences” of the cabin.

Shifting Ground: From Barracks to Cabin

The story moves between two sharply different settings: the claustrophobic, all-male card room in the Philippines and the isolated mountain cabin in Kentucky. The excerpts show Spurrier in both, but the transition is abrupt—the text jumps from the poker game to his solitary meditation on “Glory” and the mountaineers. What connects the two is a shared vocabulary of confinement and surveillance. In the Philippines, officers are “forced into a companionship of monotony”; in the mountains, Spurrier feels “silences about his lonely cabin that seemed speaking in still voices of vastness.” The novel’s structure seems to hinge on this contrast: the open landscape of the Cumberland Mountains paradoxically intensifies Spurrier’s sense of being trapped by his own past actions.

The Weight of an Agent’s Conscience

Spurrier’s moral dilemma is laid out in the excerpts with unusual explicitness for a romantic drama. He is an agent for “money-grabbing financiers” who plans to buy mountain land cheaply, betraying the hospitality of people who “had taken him at first with reserve and then accepted him with faith.” The language of debt and betrayal is precise: he has “eaten their bread and salt” and drunk their “illicit whiskey.” Yet he cannot make restitution because he acts for others. The novel frames this as a kind of surrender: “the soldier who has unconditionally surrendered, can subsequently demand terms.” Readers should watch how this language of military surrender and agency recurs—Spurrier was once a soldier, then a gambler, now a land-schemer—and how each role carries its own code of honor that he feels he has violated.

Because the excerpts represent only a fraction of the novel—roughly two chapters from an 84,000-word work—the full arc of Spurrier’s story remains unknown. What is clear is that Lundsford builds his romantic drama not on sweeping action but on small, accumulating details: the slickness of a playing card, the shape of a stool, the imagined voice of a former self. Readers attentive to these recurring images will find a work more interested in internal pressure than external plot, and one that uses its mountain setting less as picturesque backdrop than as a stage for a conscience under siege.

Reading about Spurrier’s heat-soaked unraveling, I found myself back in a sticky Carolina July, watching my father’s damp shirt cling as he worked. That same shimmering fatigue returned in The Silent Battle — Edition Insights, where the quiet dread felt less like plot and more like weather pressing in. I just sat with it, remembering how a place can hold a feeling long after you leave.