The Tempering

no longer flared vermilion and the flam

er icy fords. The hills were scowling ranks of slate gray. A tarnished sun paraded m

r came to this isolation, another

blatant warnings of an attempt at rape upon the ballot. There was irresponsible talk of the freeman's final recourse to arms and of blood-letting in the name of liberty. At last had come the day of election itself with how

sional District with all its counties solidly Republican. Already the margin was recognized as narrow enough, perhaps, to hinge on the "Bloody Eleventh." While

ch do y

craters, and one day the rumour was born that

county seat. They made light of quicksand and flooded ford. They laughed at shelving precipice brinks. Each of them shouted inflammatory words at every cabin and dwelling house alon

commissioners certified the ballots as cast, and the

h mandamus and injunction, the fight went on bitterly and

creeks and valleys of Marlin County, a herd of cattle collected from scattered sources for marketing in the bluegrass. It was an undertaking that a man could hardly manage single handed

nly a few miles from the state capitol itself, where these two men, each of whom called hi

in a voice shaken with emotion, that the day h

n with the glare of coke furnaces biting red hole

s dignity, he would have looked through widened eyes of amazement from the first miles of his travelling. When the broken raggedness of peaks began to flatten toward the billowing bluegrass, his wonder grew. There at home the world stoo

tumult-and dissonance. Men no longer walked with

ment mounted almost to vertigo, for about the court house square were con

ught and sold them, were fuller nourished and fuller voiced. It was as if they never whispered and had never had to talk in soft caution. Upon himself from time to

he twelfth of December, he stood, with a heart that hammered his ribs, in a great crowd before the state ho

executive's staff, and as he turned away, in the amber light of the winter afte

e arch of blue sparkle, he trudged at Saul's side along a white turnpike between smooth stone walls and well-kept fences.

and without greeting. The threadbare poorness of his clothes, a thing of which he had never before been conscious, now uncomfortably obtruded i

nd at its end a great brick house. Against the age-tempered fa?ade stood out the trim of white paint and the dignity

o stubble. Boone followed past fodder-racks and pig-sties, until they brought up at a square, two-roomed house with blank, unpainted walls, set in a small yard as barren as those of the hills, but unrelieved by any backgr

Boone's rather timid query. "Ther huge brick on

b'longs ter Colonel Tom Wallifarro, ther lawyer, but

ed. "Ther whole kit and kaboodle of 'em will be hyar soon, though. They all c

d the boy's eyes, and he asked simply

endly with no rich lowlander that holds scor

emed almost as quiet as though it were totally untenanted, but wi

d at the nobility that summer leafage must give to its parklike spaces. His way carried him close to the paddocks flanking

t interested the passer-by, even more than the people, were the high-headed, gin

s, a "mine boss," and the gentleman who had come with him out of the mountain hotel. The boy s

than himself. But she was unlike any other he had ever seen, and it puzzled him that so much attention should be squandered on a "gal-child," though he acknowledged to h