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In the Carolinas they say “hill people” are different from “flatlands people,” and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I’m inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I’d been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Unlike Porterville or Hollister, Bass Lake was a mountain community … and if the old Appalachian pattern held, the people would be much slower to anger or panic, but absolutely without reason or mercy once the fat was in the fire. Like the Angels, they would tend to fall back in an emergency on their own native sense of justice — which bears only a primitive resemblance to anything written in law books. I thought the mountain types would be far more tolerant of the Angels’ noisy showboating, but — compared to their flatlands cousins — much quicker to retaliate in kind at the first evidence of physical insult or abuse.
