“Stop, Mrs. Temple!” I cried, lifting up in bed.  And to my astonishment she was silenced, looking at me in amazement.  “You had your vengeance when I came to you, when you turned from me with a lift of your shoulders at the news of my father’s death.  And now—­”

“And now?” she repeated questioningly.

“Now I thought you were changed,” I said slowly, for the excitement was telling on me.

“You listened!” she said.

“I pitied you.”

“Oh, pity!” she cried.  “My God, that you should pity me!” She straightened, and summoned all the spirit that was in her.  “I would rather be called a name than have the pity of you and yours.”

“You cannot change it, Mrs. Temple,” I answered, and fell back on the nettle-bark sheets.  “You cannot change it,” I heard myself repeating, as though it were another’s voice.  And I knew that Polly Ann was bending over me and calling me.

* * * * * * *

“Where did they go, Polly Ann?” I asked.

“Acrost the Mississippi, to the lands of the Spanish King,” said Polly Ann.

“And where in those dominions?” I demanded.

“John Saunders took ’em as far as the Falls,” Polly Ann answered.  “He ‘lowed they was goin’ to St. Louis.  But they never said a word.  I reckon they’ll be hunted as long as they live.”

I had thought of them much as I lay on my back recovering from the fever,—­the fever for which Mrs. Temple was to blame.  Yet I bore her no malice.  And many other thoughts I had, probing back into childhood memories for the solving of problems there.

“I knowed ye come of gentlefolks, Davy,” Polly Ann had said when we talked together.

So I was first cousin to Nick, and nephew to that selfish gentleman, Mr. Temple, in whose affectionate care I had been left in Charlestown by my father.  And my father?  Who had he been?  I remembered the speech that he had used and taught me, and how his neighbors had dubbed him “aristocrat.”  But Mrs. Temple was gone, and it was not in likelihood that I should ever see her more.

CHAPTER III

WE GO TO DANVILLE

Two years went by, two uneventful years for me, two mighty years for Kentucky.  Westward rolled the tide of emigrants to change her character, but to swell her power.  Towns and settlements sprang up in a season and flourished, and a man could scarce keep pace with the growth of them.  Doctors came, and ministers, and lawyers; generals and majors, and captains and subalterns of the Revolution, to till their grants and to found families.  There were gentry, too, from the tide-waters, come to retrieve the fortunes which they had lost by their patriotism.  There were storekeepers like Mr. Scarlett, adventurers and ne’er-do-weels who hoped to start with a clean slate, and a host of lazy vagrants who thought to scratch the soil and find abundance.