s by the pole. I dunno how
high nor how long a thousand feet air. The gover'mint jes' want ter
spend a leetle money, I reckon. It 'pears toler'ble weak-kneed in its
mind, wunst in a while. But ef it wants ter fool money away, it's
mighty well able ter afford sech. It hev got a power o' ways a-comin'
at money,--we all know that, we all know that."

He said this with a gloomy inflection and a downward look that might
have implied a liability for taxes beyond his willingness to pay. But,
barring the assessment on a small holding of mountain land, Constant
Hite seemed in case to contribute naught to his country's exchequer.

"It needs all it can get, now," replied the stranger casually, but
doubtless from a sophisticated knowledge, as behooved a reader of the
journals of the day, of the condition of the treasury.

He could not account for the quick glance of alarm and enmity which
the mountaineer cast upon him. It roused in him a certain constraint
which he had not experienced earlier in their chance association. It
caused him to remember that this was a lonely way and a wild country.
He was an alien to the temper and sentiment of the people. He felt
suddenly that sense of distance in mind and spirit which is the true
isolation of the foreigner, and which even an identity of tongue and
kindred cannot annul. Looking keenly into the mountaineer's
half-averted, angry, excited face, he could not for his life discern
how its expression might comport with the tenor of the casual
conversation which had elicited it. He did not even dimly surmise that
his allusion to the finances of the government could be construed as a
justification of the whiskey tax, generally esteemed in the mountains
a measure of tyrannous oppression; that from his supposititious
advocacy of it he had laid himself liable to the suspicion of being
himself of the revenue force,--his mission here to spy out
moonshiners; that his companion's mind was even now dwelling anew, and
with a rueful difference, on that masterly drawing of himself in the
stranger's sketch-book.

"But what do that prove, though?" Hite thought, a certain hope
springing up with the joy of the very recollection of the simulacrum
of the brilliant rural coxcomb adorning the page. "Jes' that me is
_Me_. All he kin say 'bout me air that hyar I be goin' home from
huntin' ter kerry my game. _That_ ain't agin the law, surely."

The "revenuers," he argued, too, never rode alone, as did this man,