to the colonel’s needs and to his accidental hour of opportunity.  Only a short while before old Morton Sanders, an Eastern capitalist of Kentucky birth, had been making inquiry of him that the mountaineer’s talk answered precisely, and soon the colonel found himself an intermediary between buried coal and open millions, and such a quick unlooked-for chance of exchange made Arch Hawn’s brain reel.  Only a few days before the colonel started for the mountains, Babe Honeycutt had broken the truce by shooting Shade Hawn, but as Shade was going to get well, Arch’s oily tongue had licked the wound to the pride of every Honeycutt except Shade, and he calculated that the latter would be so long in bed that his interference would never count.  But things were going wrong.  Arch had had a hard time with old Jason the night before.  Again he had to go over the same weary argument that he had so often travelled before:  the mountain people could do nothing with the mineral wealth of their hills; the coal was of no value to them where it was; they could not dig it, they had no market for it; and they could never get it into the markets of the outside world.  It was the boy’s talk that had halted the old man, and to Arch’s amazement the colonel’s sense of fairness seemed to have been touched and his enthusiasm seemed to have waned a little.  That morning, too, Arch had heard that Shade Hawn was getting well a little too fast, and he was on his way to see about it.  Shade was getting well fast, and with troubled eyes Arch saw him sitting up in a chair and cleaning his Winchester.

“What’s yo’ hurry?”

“I ain’t never agreed to no truce,” said Shade truculently.

“Don’t you think you might save a little time—­waitin’ fer Babe to git tame?  He’s hidin’ out.  You can’t find him now.”

“I can look fer him.”

“Shade!”—­wily Arch purposely spoke loud enough for Shade’s wife to hear, and he saw her thin, worn, shrewish face turn eagerly—­ “I’ll give ye just fifty dollars to stay here in the house an’ git well fer two more weeks.  You know why, an’ you know hit’s wuth it to me.  What you say?”

Shade rubbed his stubbled chin ruminatively and his wife Mandy broke in sharply: 

“Take it, you fool!”

Apparently Shade paid no heed to the advice nor the epithet, which was not meant to be offensive, but he knew that Mandy wanted a cow of just that price and a cow she would have; while he needed cartridges and other little “fixin’s,” and he owed for moonshine up a certain creek, and wanted more just then and badly.  But mental calculation was laborious and he made a plunge: 

“Not a cent less’n seventy-five, an’ I ain’t goin’ to argue with ye.”

Arch scowled.

“Split the difference!” he commanded.

“All right.”

A few minutes later Arch was loping back up the river road.  Within an hour he had won old Jason to a non-committal silence and straight-way volunteered to show the colonel the outcroppings of his coal.  And old Jason mounted his sorrel mare and rode with the party up the creek.