“I’ll send for this later,” it read, and that was all.

Jason was gone.

XXV

The little capital sits at the feet of hills on the edge of the Blue-grass, for the Kentucky River that sweeps past it has brought down those hills from the majestic highlands of the Cumberland.  The great railroad of the State had to bore through rock to reach the place and clangs impudently through it along the main street.  For many years other sections of the State fought to wrest this fountain-head of law and government from its moorings and transplant it to the heart of the Blue-grass, or to the big town on the Ohio, because, as one claimant said: 

“You had to climb a mountain, swim a river, or go through a hole to get to it.”

This geographical witticism cost the claimant his eternal political life, and the capital clung to its water, its wooded heaps of earth, and its hole in the gray wall.  Not only hills did the river bring down but birds, trees, and even mountain mists, and from out the black mouth of that hole in the wall and into those morning mists stole one day a long train and stopped before the six great gray pillars of the historic old State-house.  Out of this train climbed a thousand men, with a thousand guns, and the mists might have been the breath of the universal whisper: 

“The mountaineers are here!”

Of their coming Jason had known for some time from Arch Hawn, and just when they were to come he had learned from Steve.  The boy had not enough carfare even for the short ride of less than thirty miles to the capital, so he rode as far as his money would carry him and an hour before noon found him striding along on foot, his revolver bulging at his hip, his dogged eyes on the frozen turnpike.  It was all over for him, he thought with the passionate finality of youth—­his college career with its ambitions and dreams.  He was sorry to disappoint Saint Hilda and John Burnham, but his pride was broken and he was going back now to the people and the life that he never should have left.  He would find his friends and kinsmen down there at the capital, and he would play his part first in whatever they meant to do.  Babe Honeycutt would be there, and about Babe he had not forgotten his mother’s caution.  He had taken his promise back from Marjorie merely to be free to act in a double emergency, but Babe would be safe until he himself was sure.  Then he would tell his mother what he meant to do, or after it was done, and as to what she would then say the boy had hardly a passing wonder, so thin yet was the coating with which civilization had veneered him.  And yet the boy almost smiled to himself to think how submerged that childhood oath was now in the big new hatred that had grown within him for the man who was threatening the political life of his people and his State—­had grown steadily since the morning before he had taken the train in the mountains