And Chad?  The news reached Major Buford’s farm at noon, and Chad went to the woods and came in at dusk, haggard and spent.  Miserably now he held his tongue and tortured his brain.  Purposely, he never opened his lips to Harry Dean.  He tried to make known to the Major the struggle going on within him, but the iron-willed old man brushed away all argument with an impatient wave of his hand.  With Margaret he talked once, and straightway the question was dropped like a living coal.  So, Chad withdrew from his fellows.  The social life of the town, gayer than ever now, knew him no more.  He kept up his college work, but when he was not at his books, he walked the fields, and many a moonlit midnight found him striding along a white turnpike, or sitting motionless on top of a fence along the border of some woodland, his chin in both hands, fighting his fight out in the cool stillness alone.  He himself little knew the unmeant significance there was in the old Continental uniform he had worn to the dance.  Even his old rifle, had he but known it, had been carried with Daniel Morgan from Virginia to Washington’s aid in Cambridge.  His earliest memories of war were rooted in thrilling stories of King’s Mountain.  He had heard old men tell of pointing deadly rifles at red-coats at New Orleans, and had absorbed their own love of Old Hickory.  The school-master himself, when a mere lad, had been with Scott in Mexico.  The spirit of the back-woodsman had been caught in the hills, and was alive and unchanged at that very hour.  The boy was practically born in Revolutionary days, and that was why, like all mountaineers, Chad had little love of State and only love of country—­was first, last and all the time, simply American.  It was not reason—­it was instinct.  The heroes the school-master had taught him to love and some day to emulate, had fought under one flag, and, like them, the mountaineers never dreamed there could be another.  And so the boy was an unconscious reincarnation of that old spirit, uninfluenced by temporary apostasies in the outside world, untouched absolutely by sectional prejudice or the appeal of the slave.  The mountaineer had no hatred of the valley aristocrat, because he knew nothing of him, and envied no man what he was, what he had, or the life he led.  So, as for slavery, that question, singularly enough, never troubled his soul.  To him slaves were hewers of wood and drawers of water.  The Lord had made them so and the Bible said that it was right.  That the school-master had taught Chad.  He had read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and the story made him smile.  The tragedies of it he had never known and he did not believe.  Slaves were sleek, well-fed, well-housed, loved and trusted, rightly inferior and happy; and no aristocrat ever moved among them with a more lordly, righteous air of authority than did this mountain lad who had known them little more than half a dozen years.  Unlike the North, the boy had no prejudice, no antagonism,