the house of Lone Stacy on Little Slippery, a
house whose threshold he could not, in the old days, have crossed
without blood-letting; but these were the days of peace.

Arriving, he did not go direct to the door and knock, but discreetly
halting in the highway, lifted his voice and shouted aloud, "Halloo!
I'm Kinnard Towers an' I'm a-comin' in."

The door was thrown promptly open and Lone Stacy appeared, framed
between threshold and lintel, holding a lamp aloft and offering
welcome.

"Gentlemen," said the host in a matter-of-fact voice, "ef you'll excuse
me, I'll rest yore guns."

Then in observance of a quaint and ancient ceremonial, each armed
guardian passed in, surrendering his rifle at the threshold. In
retarded Appalachia so runs the rule. To fail in its fulfilment is to
express distrust for the honesty and ability of the householder to
protect his guests, and such an implication constitutes a grave
discourtesy.

Inside a fire roared on the hearth, for even in June, the mountain
nights are raw.

Henderson, watching the small cavalcade troop in, smiled inwardly. He
was not unmindful of the identity or the power of this modern baron,
and he was not without suspicion that he himself was the cause of the
visit.

"I chanced ter be farin' by, Lone," Kinnard Towers enlightened his host
easily, "an' I 'lowed I'd light down an' rest a little spell."

"Ye're welcome," was the simple reply. "Draw up ter ther fire an' set
ye a cheer."

The talk lingered for a space on neighborhood topics, but the host had
found time, between hearing the shout outside and replying to it, to
say in a low voice to his guest: "I reckon atter Kinnard Towers comes
in we won't talk no more erbout my still--jest stills in gin'ral," and
that caution was religiously observed.

The kitchen tasks had been finished now and while the men sat close to
the smoking hearth the faces of the women looked on from the shadowed
corners of the room, where they sat half obscured upon the huge
four-poster beds.

The man who had crossed Cedar Mountain lighted his pipe from the bed of
coals and then, straightening up, he stood on the hearth where his eyes
could take in the whole semicircle of listening faces. They were eyes
that, for all their seeming of a theorist's engrossment, missed little.

This house might have been a pioneer abode of two hundred years ago,
standing unamended by the whole swelling tide of modernity that had
passed it by untouched