"naught and grief"

I'm half tempted to just play this video of a fiddler playing "Bonaparte's Retreat" and leave it at that.

This is a curious, short chapter that doesn't directly include either Ada, Ruby or Inman.  Instead its central characters are Stobrod and Pangle, his retarded companion who plays the banjo.  In fact, it is Pangle who mouths the words that contain the chapter's title.

A group of "The Guard" has caught Stobrod and Pangle asleep at a cross-trail around Cold Mountain. The men are "after a bunch of outliers said to live in a cave."  Stobrod lies and says he doesn't know anything, but Pangle naively tells them the truth. "Much obliged," says Teague, their leader and he invites the two to join his men in a meal. "And then in a little bit we'll hear you boys pick some. See if you're any account," Teague adds.

When Stobrod and Pangle start to play, Pangle starts on his own: "but when he got to where the tune was ready to come around again, the notes scrambled all together and he bogged down and halted."

---That'un's come to naught and grief, he said to Stobrod. If you was to pitch in we might get somewhere.

The suggestion, of course, is that two people (Stobrod and Pangle. Ada and Inman?) can succeed in getting "somewhere" (the life represented by Cold Mountain)  when one person has failed.

Stobrod is initially reluctant to play because  "he figured his audience had no thought of music, lacked entirely what was needed to love it." But he gets caught up in his playing and even sings.

When he was done singing, they played one more round and then stopped. They consulted and twisted pegs again to make the dead man's tuning, and they then set in playing a piece slightly reminiscent of Bonaparte's Retreat . . . This was softer, more meditative, yet nevertheless grim as death. . . . It was awful old music in one of the ancient modalities, music that sums up a culture and is the true expression of inner life." 

The men are apparently impressed -- one says, "Good God, these is holy men -- put that doesn't stop them from rather nonchalantly killing them.  The only thing that makes them hesitate is Pangle's foolish and persistent smile: "I can't shoot a man grinning at me, one of the men said."

The solution is to have Pangle cover his face with his hat (a hat again, not tossed this time, but held).

Pangle raised the hat and put it over his face, and when he did the Guard tripped the triggers and wood chips flew from the great poplar trunk where balls struck after passing through the meat of the two men.

By the way, standard tuning on a fiddle is GDAE.  You get "Dead man's tuning" by lowering the G string to D to give you "DDAD" which can be pronounced "Dee-Dad" or "dead."