Dillon sheep had been killed and she had kept the Sheriff from shooting Jack.  And she saw and noted everything with a piteous pain and dry eyes.  But she gave no sign that night, and not until she was in bed did she with covered head give way.  Then the bed shook with her smothered sobs.  This is the sad way with women.  After the way of men, Chad proudly marched the old Wilderness Road that led to a big, bright, beautiful world where one had but to do and dare to reach the stars.  The men who had trod that road had made that big world beyond, and their life Chad himself had lived so far.  Only, where they had lived he had been born—­in a log cabin.  Their weapons—­the axe and the rifle—­ had been his.  He had had the same fight with Nature as they.  He knew as well as they what life in the woods in “a half-faced camp” was.  Their rude sports and pastimes, their log-rollings, house-raisings, quilting parties, corn-huskings, feats of strength, had been his.  He had the same lynx eyes, cool courage, swiftness of foot, readiness of resource that had been trained into them.  His heart was as stout and his life as simple and pure.  He was taking their path and, in the far West, beyond the Bluegrass world where he was going, he could, if he pleased, take up the same life at the precise point where they had left off.  At sunset, Chad and the school-master stood on the summit of the Cumberland foothills and looked over the rolling land with little less of a thrill, doubtless, than the first hunters felt when the land before them was as much a wilderness as the wilds through which they had made their way.  Below them a farmhouse shrank half out of sight into a little hollow, and toward it they went down.

The outside world had moved swiftly during the two years that they had been buried in the hills as they learned at the farm-house that night.  Already the national storm was threatening, the air was electrically charged with alarms, and already here and there the lightning had flashed.  The underground railway was busy with black freight, and John Brown, fanatic, was boldly lifting his shaggy head.  Old Brutus Dean was even publishing an abolitionist paper at Lexington, the aristocratic heart of the State.  He was making abolition speeches throughout the Bluegrass with a dagger thrust in the table before him—­shaking his black mane and roaring defiance like a lion.  The news thrilled Chad unaccountably, as did the shadow of any danger, but it threw the school-master into gloom.  There was more.  A dark little man by the name of Douglas and a sinewy giant by the name of Lincoln were thrilling the West.  Phillips and Garrison were thundering in Massachusetts, and fiery tongues in the South were flashing back scornful challenges and threats that would imperil a nation.  An invisible air-line shot suddenly between the North and the South, destined to drop some day and lie a dead-line on the earth, and on each side of it two hordes of brothers, who thought themselves two hostile peoples, were shrinking away from each other with the half-conscious purpose of making ready for a charge.  In no other State in the Union was the fratricidal character of the coming war to be so marked as in Kentucky, in no other State was the national drama to be so fully played to the bitter end.