.

The leaping blaze glittered on the metal of polished rifles stacked in
a corner, and on two others hanging against the smoke-dimmed logs of
the walls. Red pods of peppers and brown leaves of tobacco were strung
along the rafters. Hardly defined of shape against one shadowy wall,
stood a spinning wheel.

Henderson knew that the room was pregnant with the conflict of human
elements. He realized that he himself faced possibilities which made
his mission here a thing of delicate manipulation; even of personal
danger.

The blond man with the heavy neck, who sat contemplatively chewing at
the stem of an unlighted pipe, listened in silence. He hardly seemed
interested, but Henderson recognized him for the sponsor and
beneficiary of lawlessness. He more than any other would be the logical
foe to a new order which brought the law in its wake--and the law's
reckonings.

Near to the enemy whom he had heretofore faced in pitched battle, sat
old Lone Stacy, his brogans kicked off and his bare feet thrust out to
the warmth; bearded, shrewd of eye, a professed lover of the law,
asking only the exemption of his illicit still. He, too, in the feud
days had wielded power, but had sought in the main to wield it for
peace.

And there, showing no disposition to draw aside the skirts of his
raiment in disgust, sat the preacher of the hills whose strength lay in
his ability to reconcile antagonisms, while yet he stood staunch,
abating nothing of self-sacrificial effort. It was almost as though
church and crown and commoner were gathered in informal conclave.

But luminous, like fixed stars, gleamed two other pairs of eyes. As he
realized them, Henderson straightened up with such a thrill as comes
from a vision. Here were the eyes of builders of the future--agleam as
they looked on the present! Blossom's were wide and enthralled and
Turner Stacy's burned as might those of a young crusader hearing from
the lips of old and seasoned knights recitals of the wars of the
Sepulchre.

Bear Cat Stacy saw in this stranger the prophet bearing messages for
which he had longed--and waited almost without hope. But Kinnard Towers
saw in him a dangerous and unsettling agitator.

"You said," declared Henderson, when the theme had swung back again to
economic discussion, "that your cornfield was good for a few crops and
then the rains would wash it bare, yet as I came along the road I saw
an out-cropping vein of coal that reached above my head, an