This was to be a war of extermination of one side or the other.  No quarter would be given or asked, and every weapon hitherto known to politics would be used.  Of the three men who realized this, and all that would happen if one side or the other were victorious, one was Alexander Duncan, another Isaac D. Worthington, and the third was Jethro Bass.

Jethro would never have been capable of being master of the state had he not foreseen the time when the railroads, tired of paying tribute, would turn and try to exterminate the boss.  The really astonishing thing about Jethro’s foresight (known to few only) was that he perceived clearly that the time would come when the railroads and other aggregations of capital would exterminate the boss, or at least subserviate him.  This alone, the writer thinks, gives him some right to greatness.  And Jethro Bass made up his mind that the victory of the railroads, in his state at least, should not come in his day.  He would hold and keep what he had fought all his life to gain.

Jethro knew, when Jake Wheeler failed to bring him a message back from Clovelly, that the war had begun, and that Isaac D. Worthington, commander of the railroad forces in the field, had captured his pawn, the hill-Rajah.  By getting through to Harwich, the Truro had made a sad muddle in railroad affairs.  It was now a connecting link; and its president, the first citizen of Brampton, a man of no small importance in the state.  This fact was not lost upon Jethro, who perceived clearly enough the fight for consolidation that was coming in the next Legislature.

Seated on an old haystack on Thousand Acre Hill, that sits in turn on the lap of Coniston, Jethro smiled as he reflected that the first trial of strength in this mighty struggle was to be over (what the unsuspecting world would deem a trivial matter) the postmastership of Brampton.  And Worthington’s first move in the game would be to attempt to capture for his faction the support of the Administration itself.

Jethro thought the view from Thousand Acre Hill, especially in September, to be one of the sublimest efforts of the Creator.  It was September, first of the purple months in Coniston, not the red-purple of the Maine coast, but the blue-purple of the mountain, the color of the bloom on the Concord grape.  His eyes, sweeping the mountain from the notch to the granite ramp of the northern buttress, fell on the weather-beaten little farmhouse in which he had lived for many years, and rested lovingly on the orchard, where the golden early apples shone among the leaves.  But Jethro was not looking at the apples.

“Cynthy,” he called out abruptly, “h-how’d you like to go to Washington?”

“Washington!” exclaimed Cynthia.  “When?”

“N-now—­to-morrow.”  Then he added uneasily, “C-can’t you get ready?”

Cynthia laughed.

“Why, I’ll go to-night, Uncle Jethro,” she answered.

“Well,” he said admiringly, “you hain’t one of them clutterin’ females.  We can get some finery for you in New York, Cynthy.  D-don’t want any of them town ladies to put you to shame.  Er—­not that they would,” he added hastily—­“not that they would.”