“Ye have the grit, ma’am,” he said, as he mounted his horse again.  “Here’s luck to ye!”

The remembrance of Mr. Potts weighed heavily upon my mind during the next week.  Perchance Tom would have to pay for this prank likewise.  ’Twas indeed a foolish, childish thing to have done, and I might have known that it would only have put off the evil day of reckoning.  Since then, by reason of the mill site and the business we got by it, the land had become the most valuable in that part of the country.  Had I known Colonel Clark’s whereabouts, I should have gone to him for advice and comfort.  As it was, we were forced to await the issue without counsel.  Polly Ann and I talked it over many times while Tom sat, morose and silent, in a corner.  He was the pioneer pure and simple, afraid of no man, red or white, in open combat, but defenceless in such matters as this.

“‘Tis Davy will save us, Tom,” said Polly Ann, “with the l’arnin’ he’s got while the corn was grindin’.”

I had, indeed, been reading at the mill while the hopper emptied itself, such odd books as drifted into Harrodstown.  One of these was called “Bacon’s Abridgment”; it dealt with law and it puzzled me sorely.

“And the children,” Polly Ann continued,—­“ye’ll not make me pick up the four of ’em, and pack it to Louisiana, because Mr. Colfax wants the land we’ve made for ourselves.”

There were four of them now, indeed,—­the youngest still in the bark cradle in the corner.  He bore a no less illustrious name than that of the writer of these chronicles.

It would be hard to say which was the more troubled, Tom or I, that windy morning we set out on the Danville trace.  Polly Ann alone had been serene,—­ay, and smiling and hopeful.  She had kissed us each good-by impartially.  And we left her, with a future governor of Kentucky on her shoulder, tripping lightly down to the mill to grind the McGarrys’ corn.

When the forest was cleared at Danville, Justice was housed first.  She was not the serene, inexorable dame whom we have seen in pictures holding her scales above the jars of earth.  Justice at Danville was a somewhat high-spirited, quarrelsome lady who decided matters oftenest with the stroke of a sword.  There was a certain dignity about her temple withal,—­for instance, if a judge wore linen, that linen must not be soiled.  Nor was it etiquette for a judge to lay his own hands in chastisement on contemptuous persons, though Justice at Danville had more compassion than her sisters in older communities upon human failings.

There was a temple built to her “of hewed or sawed logs nine inches thick”—­so said the specifications.  Within the temple was a rude platform which served as a bar, and since Justice is supposed to carry a torch in her hand, there were no windows,—­nor any windows in the jail next door, where some dozen offenders languished on the afternoon that Tom and I rode into town.