Project Gutenberg 2025-06-14 Public domain in the USA. 211 Craddock, Charles Egbert 1850 1922 Dembry, R. Emmett Murfree, Mary Noailles 07031841 The despot of Broomsedge Cove $aBoston :$bHoughton, Mifflin and Company, $c1889. Peter Becker and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) The despot of Broomsedge Cove by Charles Egbert Craddock is a novel written in the late 19th century. Set in the Great Smoky Mountains, it explores a tight-knit Appalachian community caught between religious fervor, frontier law, and personal vendettas. The story centers on Teck Jepson, a charismatic and overbearing zealot, the embattled constable Eli Strobe and his family, and Jake Baintree, a young man acquitted of a neighbor’s murder but still shadowed by suspicion. The opening of the novel lingers on the wild grandeur of the Smokies and introduces Teck Jepson, who merges Old Testament drama with local life and harbors a relentless conviction that Jake Baintree killed Samuel Keale. After tense exchanges with constable Eli Strobe and Ben Bowles, and a glimpse of Bowles’s uneasy household, Jepson wanders into a gorge at night and finds a hat and coat hidden behind a split rock—garments he believes belonged to the missing Keale. At a river baptism soon after, Jepson publicly brandishes the items and denounces Baintree, prompting the parson to refuse baptism until a confession is made, as thunder and rain scatter the crowd. In the storm’s aftermath, Jepson shelters under a cliff with Eli Strobe’s daughters, Marcella and Isabel; their wary, lively talk reveals Marcella’s worry over her father’s reelection and his principled defense of the court’s verdict, while Jepson insists Eli’s stance will cost him votes. The section closes with hints of Baintree’s odd, subdued behavior since jail and the community’s simmering conflict over guilt, grace, and power. (This is an automatically generated summary.) https://archive.org/details/despotofbroomsed00craduoft 20201018095647craddock 1889 us Reading ease score: 77.1 (7th grade). Fairly easy to read. en Mountain life -- Fiction Tennessee -- Fiction PS Text Category: Novels Category: American Literature 1089871 2025-07-30T07:28:26.316769 text/html 1065403 2025-06-14T01:11:33 text/html 663119 2025-07-30T07:28:39.889728 application/epub+zip 658479 2025-07-30T07:28:28.681748 application/epub+zip 562785 2025-07-30T07:28:27.401723 application/epub+zip 1150504 2025-07-30T07:28:48.147621 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 1095135 2025-07-30T07:28:38.760719 application/x-mobipocket-ebook 1014210 2025-07-30T07:28:24.005789 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 994289 2025-06-14T01:11:33 text/plain; charset=us-ascii 14193 2025-07-30T07:28:48.384620 application/rdf+xml 14290 2025-07-30T07:28:27.799730 image/jpeg 2256 2025-07-30T07:28:27.595723 image/jpeg 821818 2025-07-30T07:28:26.409755 application/octet-stream application/zip Archives containing the RDF files for *all* our books can be downloaded at https://book.klll.cc/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog en.wikipedia