The people had come in rapidly—­giants from the Crab Orchard, mountaineers from through the Gap, and from Cracker’s Neck and Thunderstruck Knob; Valley people from Little Stone-Gap, from the furnace site and Bum Hollow and Wildcat, and people from Lee, from Turkey Cove, and from the Pocket—­the much-dreaded Pocket—­far down in the river hills.

They came on foot and on horseback, and left their horses in the bushes and crowded the streets and filled the saloon of one Jack Woods—­who had the cackling laugh of Satan and did not like the Guard, for good reasons, and whose particular pleasure was to persuade some customer to stir up a hornet’s nest of trouble.  From the saloon the crowd moved up towards the big spring at the foot of Imboden Hill, where, under beautiful trunk-mottled beeches, was built the speakers’ platform.

Precisely at three o’clock the local orator much flurried, rose, ran his hand through his long hair and looked in silence over the crowd.

“Fellow citizens!  There’s beauty in the stars, of night and in the glowin’ orb of day.  There’s beauty in the rollin’ meadow and in the quiet stream.  There’s beauty in the smilin’ valley and in the everlastin’ hills.  Therefore, fellow citizens—­THEREFORE, fellow citizens, allow me to introduce to you the future Governor of these United States—­Senator William Bayhone.”  And he sat down with such a beatific smile of self-satisfaction that a fiend would not have had the heart to say he had not won.

Now, there are wandering minstrels yet in the Cumberland Hills.  They play fiddles and go about making up “ballets” that involve local history.  Sometimes they make a pretty good verse—­this, for instance, about a feud: 

  The death of these two men
    Caused great trouble in our land. 
  Caused men to leave their families
    And take the parting hand. 
  Retaliation, still at war,
    May never, never cease. 
  I would that I could only see
    Our land once more at peace.

There was a minstrel out in the crowd, and pretty soon he struck up his fiddle and his lay, and he did not exactly sing the virtues of Billy Bayhone.  Evidently some partisan thought he ought, for he smote him on the thigh with the toe of his boot and raised such a stir as a rude stranger might had he smitten a troubadour in Arthur’s Court.  The crowd thickened and surged, and four of the Guard emerged with the fiddler and his assailant under arrest.  It was as though the Valley were a sheet of water straightway and the fiddler the dropping of a stone, for the ripple of mischief started in every direction.  It caught two mountaineers on the edge of the crowd, who for no particular reason thumped each other with their huge fists, and were swiftly led away by that silent Guard.  The operation of a mysterious force was in the air and it puzzled the crowd.  Somewhere a whistle would blow, and, from this point and that, a quiet, well-dressed young man would start swiftly