emed destined always to
end in defeat. At dusk, he heard the word of the outer world from the
lips of an old mountaineer at the foot of the Cumberland--the first
heard, except from his mother, for full thirty days--and the word
was--war. He smiled incredulously at the old fellow, but, unconsciously,
he pushed his horse on a little faster up the mountain, pushed him, as
the moon rose, aslant the breast of a mighty hill and, winding at a
gallop about the last downward turn of the snaky path, went at full
speed alongside the big gray wall that, above him, rose sheer a thousand
feet and, straight ahead, broke wildly and crumbled into historic
Cumberland Gap. From a little knoll he saw the railway station in the
shadow of the wall, and, on one prong of a switch, his train panting
lazily; and, with a laugh, he pulled his horse down to a walk and then
to a dead stop--his face grave again and uplifted. Where his eyes rested
and plain in the moonlight was a rocky path winding upward--the old
Wilderness Trail that the Kentucky pioneers had worn with moccasined
feet more than a century before. He had seen it a hundred times
before--moved always; but it thrilled him now, and he rode on slowly,
looking up at it. His forefathers had helped blaze that trail. On one
side of that wall they had fought savage and Briton for a home and a
country, and on the other side they had done it again. Later, they had
fought the Mexican and in time they came to fight each other, for and
against the nation they had done so much to upbuild. It was even true
that a Crittenden had already given his life for the very cause that was
so tardily thrilling the nation now. Thus it had always been with his
people straight down the bloody national highway from Yorktown to
Appomattox, and if there was war, he thought proudly, as he swung from
his horse--thus it would now be with him.

If there was war? He had lain awake in his berth a long while, looking
out the window and wondering. He had been born among the bleeding
memories of one war. The tales of his nursery had been tales of war. And
though there had been talk of war through the land for weeks before he
left home, it had no more seemed possible that in his lifetime could
come another war than that he should live to see any other myth of his
childhood come true.

Now, it was daybreak on the edge of the Bluegrass, and, like a dark
truth from a white light, three tall letters leaped from the paper in
his ha