llection
with a most poignant appeal. Strangers, wretches, dying alone, desolate
outcasts, the terror of their kind, the epitome of repulsion--they were
naught to her! Yet they represented humanity in its helplessness, its
suffering, its isolated woe, and its great and final mystery; she felt
vaguely grieved for their sake, and she gave the clay that covered them,
still crude red clods with not yet a blade of grass, the fellowship of
her tears.

A thrill of masculine logic stirred uneasily in the old man's disused
brain. "Tell me _one_ thing, Ethelindy," he said, lifting his bleared
eyes as he clasped his tremulous hands more firmly on the head of his
stick--"tell me this--which side air you-uns on, ennyhow, Ethelindy?"

"I'm fur the Union," said Ethelinda, still weeping, and now and then
wiping her sapphire eyes with the back of her hand, hard and tanned, but
small in proportion to her size. "I'm fur the Union--fust an' last an'
all the time."

The old man wagged his head solemnly with a blight of forecast on his
wrinkled, aged face. "That thar sayin' is goin' ter be mighty hard
ter live up to whilst Jerome Ackert's critter company is a-raidin' of
Tanglefoot Cove."

The presence of the "critter company" was indeed calculated to inspire
a most obsequious awe. It was an expression of arbitrary power which one
might ardently wish directed elsewhere. From the moment that the echoes
of the Cove caught the first elusive strain of the trumpet, infinitely
sweet and clear and compelling, yet somehow ethereal, unreal, as if
blown down from the daylight moon, a filmy lunar semblance in the
bland blue sky, the denizens of Tanglefoot began to tremulously confer
together, and to skitter like frightened rabbits from house to house.
Tanglefoot Cove is some four miles long, and its average breadth is
little more than a mile. On all sides the great Smoky Mountains rise
about the cuplike hollow, and their dense gigantic growths of hickory
and poplar, maple and gum, were aglow, red and golden, with the largesse
of the generous October. The underbrush or the jungles of laurel that
covered the steeps rendered outlet through the forests impracticable,
and indeed the only road was invisible save for a vague line among
the dense pines of a precipitous slope, where on approach it would
materialize under one's feet as a wheel track on either side of a line
of frosted weeds, which the infrequent passing of wagon-beds had bent
and stunted, ye