He did not feel his defeat in the first race for the Presidency nearly so deeply and keenly as this; and then that was afterward retrieved by a most brilliant victory.  But, as a friend once said of him—­although he went on achieving great victories of many kinds, overcoming powerful enemies, conquering the Indians, subduing the lawless, defying the Spanish and the French, vanquishing the British and slaying single-handed the Dragon of the Bank—­he could never find a horse to beat Maria.

But he was still trying everywhere and under all circumstances however unpromising.  On that day he cast anxious glances through the open door of the log court-house at the horses which Tommy Dye, in a forlorn hope, was having paraded up and down the forest path.  He turned away with a sigh, and went on talking to the United States Attorney for Kentucky at whose request he had come to the court-house that day.  He had done for his own territory in a lesser degree, the identical thing which Joseph Hamilton Daviess was desperately striving to do for this country; and he had consented to give him the benefit of his own experience, and to advise him as to ways and means.  These were always strenuous with Andrew Jackson, and Joe Daviess himself was not a man of half measures.  In mind and body he was quite as powerful as the man to whom he now listened with such profound deference.  He was also a handsomer man and younger.  He was fully as tall, too, with as lordly a bearing; the most marked contrast in their appearance being in their dress.  General Jackson wore broadcloth of the cut seen in all his older portraits; Joe Daviess wore buckskin breeches and a hunting shirt belted at the waist, both richly fringed on the leg and sleeve.  The suit was the same that he had worn when he rode over the Alleghanies to Washington, to plead the historic case before the Supreme Court.  But the rudest garb could never make him seem other than the courtly gentleman that he was.  He was a scholar moreover, and a writer of books.  A great mind, and ever eager to learn, he now stood listening to General Jackson with the humility of true greatness.  He bowed to the judge, seeing him enter, but he did not move or cease to listen.  His grave, intent face brightened suddenly as if a light had passed over it, when he saw Father Orin’s merry, ruddy countenance look in at the open door.  He and the priest were close friends, although they held widely different faiths, and argued fiercely over their differences of opinion whenever they met—­and had time—­and notwithstanding that neither ever yielded to the other so much as a single hair’s breadth.