Once more about each pair the elements of social tragedy began to concentrate, intensify, and become active.  The new development in the hills made business competition keen between Shade Hawn and Hiram Honeycutt, who each ran a hotel and store in the county-seat.  As old Jason Hawn and old Aaron Honeycutt had retired from the leadership, and little Jason and little Aaron had been out of the hills, leadership naturally was assumed by these two business rivals, who revived the old hostility between the factions, but gave vent to it in a secret, underhanded way that disgusted not only old Jason but even old Aaron as well.  For now and then a hired Hawn would drop a Honeycutt from the bushes and a hired Honeycutt would drop a Hawn.  There was, said old Jason with an oath of contempt, no manhood left in the feud.  No principal went gunning for a principal—­no hired assassin for another of his kind.

“Nobody ain’t shootin’ the right feller,” said the old man.  “Looks like hit’s a question of which hired feller gits fust the man who hired the other feller.”

And when this observation reached old Aaron he agreed heartily.

“Fer once in his life,” he said, “old Jason Hawn kind o’ by accident is a-hittin’ the truth.”  And each old man bet in his secret heart, if little Aaron and little Jason were only at home together, things would go on in quite a different way.

In the lowlands the tobacco pool had been formed and, when persuasion and argument failed, was starting violent measures to force into the pool raisers who would not go in willingly.  In the western and southern parts of the State the night riders had been more than ever active.  Tobacco beds had been destroyed, barns had been burned, and men had been threatened, whipped, and shot.  Colonel Pendleton found himself gradually getting estranged from some of his best friends.  He quarrelled with old Morton Sanders, and in time he retired to his farm, as though it were the pole of the earth.  His land was his own to do with as he pleased.  No man, no power but the Almighty and the law, could tell him what he must do.  The tobacco pool was using the very methods of the trust it was seeking to destroy.  Under those circumstances he considered his duty to himself paramount to his duty to his neighbor, and his duty to himself he would do; and so the old gentleman lived proudly in his loneliness and refused to know fear, though the night riders were getting busy now in the counties adjacent to the Blue-grass, and were threatening raids into the colonel’s own county—­the proudest in the State.  Other “independents” hardly less lonely, hardly less hated, had electrified their barbed-wire fences, and had hired guards—­fighting men from the mountains—­to watch their barns and houses, but such an example the colonel would not follow, though John Burnham pleaded with him, and even Jason dared at last to give him a covert warning, with no hint, however, that the warning was against his own step-father Steve.  It was the duty of the law to protect him, the colonel further argued; the county judge had sworn that the law would do its best; and only when the law could not protect him would the colonel protect himself.