“The death-knell of me and mine has been sounded unless boys like Gray here keep us alive after death, but the light of your hills is only dawning.  It’s a case of the least shall be first, for your pauper counties are going to be the richest in the State.  The Easterners are buying up our farms as they would buy a yacht or a motor-car, the tobacco tenants are getting their mites of land here and there, and even you mountaineers, when you sell your coal lands, are taking up Blue-grass acres.  Don’t let the Easterner swallow you, too.  Go home, and, while you are getting rich, enrich your citizenship, and you and Gray help land-locked, primitive old Kentucky take her place among the modern sisterhood that is making the nation.  To use a phrase of your own—­get busy, boys, get busy after I am gone.”

And then Colonel Pendleton laughed.

“I am hardly the one to say all this, or rather I am just the one because I am a—­failure.”

“Father.”

The word came like a sob from Gray.

“Oh, yes, I am—­but I have never lied except for others, and I have not been afraid.”

Again his face went toward the window.

“Even now,” he added in a solemn whisper that was all to himself, “I believe, and am not afraid.”

Presently he lifted himself on one elbow and with Gray’s assistance got to a sitting posture.  Then he pulled a paper from beneath his pillow.

“I want to tell you something, Jason.  That was all true, every word you said the first time Gray and I saw you at your grandfather’s house, and I want you to know now that your land was bought over my protest and without my knowledge.  My own interest in the general purchase was in the form of stock, and here it is.”

Jason’s heart began to beat violently.

“Whatever happens to me, this farm will have to be sold, but there will be something left for Gray.  This stock is in Gray’s name, and it is worth now just about what would have been a fair price for your land five years after it was bought.  It is Gray’s, and I am going to give it to him.”  He handed the paper to bewildered Gray, who looked at it dazedly, went with it to the window, and stood there looking out—­his father watching him closely.

“You might win in a suit, Jason, I know, but I also know that you could never collect even damages.”

At these words Gray wheeled.

“Then this belongs to you, Jason.”

The father smiled and nodded approval and assent.

That night there was a fusillade of shots, and Jason and Gray rushed out with a Winchester in hand to see one barn in flames and a tall figure with a firebrand sneaking toward the other.  Both fired and the man dropped, rose to his feet, limped back to the edge of the woods, and they let him disappear.  But all the night, fighting the fire and on guard against another attack, Jason was possessed with apprehension and fear—­that limping figure looked like Steve Hawn.  So at the first streak of dawn he started for his mother’s home, and when that early he saw her from afar standing on the porch and apparently looking for him, he went toward her on a run.  She looked wild-eyed, white, and sleepless, but she showed no signs of tears.