The Big Trust had cut out competitive buyers, cut down prices to the cost of production, and put up the price of the tobacco bag and the plug.  So that the farmer must smoke and chew his own tobacco, or sell it at a loss and buy it back again at whatever price the trust chose to charge him.  Already along the southern border of the State the farmers had organized for mutual protection and the members had agreed to plant only half the usual acreage.  When the non-members planted more than ever, masked men descended upon them at night and put the raiser to the whip and his barn to the torch.  It seemed as though the passions of men, aroused by the political troubles and getting no vent in action, welcomed this new outlet, and already the night-riding of ku-klux and toll gate days was having a new and easy birth.  And these sinister forces were sweeping slowly toward the Blue-grass.  Thus the injection of this new problem brought a swift subsidence of politics in the popular mind.  It caused a swift withdrawal of the political background from the lives of the Pendletons and dwarfed its importance for the time in the lives of the Hawns, for again the following spring Colonel Pendleton, in the teeth of the coming storm, raised tobacco, and so, for his mother, did Jason Hawn.

In the mountains, meanwhile, the trend, contrariwise, was upward—­ all upward.  Railroads were building, mines were opening, great trees were falling for timber.  Even the Hawns and Honeycutts were too busy for an actual renewal of the feud, though the casual traveller was amazed to discover slowly how bitter the enmity still was.  But the feud in no way checked the growth going on in all ways, nor was that growth all material.  More schools than St. Hilda’s had come into the hills from the outside and were doing hardly less effective work.  County schools, too, were increasing in number and in strength.  More and more mountain boys and girls were each year going away to college, bringing back the fruits of their work and planting the seeds of them at home.  The log cabin was rapidly disappearing, the frame cottages were being built with more neatness and taste, and garish colors were becoming things of the past.  Indeed, a quick uplift through all the mountains was perceptible to any observant eye that had known and knew now the hills.  To the law-makers at the capital and to the men of law and business in the Blue-grass, that change was plain when they came into conflict with the lawyers and bankers and merchants of the highlands, for they found this new hillsman shrewd, resourceful, quick-witted, tenacious, and strong, and John Burnham began to wonder if the vigorous type of Kentuckian that seemed passing in the Blue-grass might not be coming to a new birth in the hills.  He smiled grimly that following spring when he heard that a company of mountain militia from a county that was notorious for a desperate feud had been sent down to keep order in the tobacco lowlands;