il in Alabama over a
well-broken setter. All other hunting is butchery compared to the
scientific sweetness of this sport.

There was a good-night, martial, daring crow, ringing from the
Hoss-apple tree at the dining-room window. Travis smiled and called
out:

"Lights waked you up, eh, Dick? You're a gay Lothario--go back to
sleep."

Richard Travis had the original stock--the Irish Greys--which his
doughty old grandsire, General Jeremiah Travis, developed to
championship honors, and in a memorable main with his friend, General
Andrew Jackson, ten years after the New Orleans campaign, he had
cleared up the Tennesseans, cock and pocket. It was a big main in
which Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama were pitted against each other,
and in which the Travis cocks of the Emerald Isle strain, as Old
Hickory expressed it, "stood the steel like a stuck she-b'ar,
fightin' for her cubs."

General Travis had been an expert at heeling a cock; and it is said
that his skill on that occasion was worth more than the blood of his
Greys; for by a peculiar turn of the gaffs,--so slight as to escape
the notice of any but an expert--his champion cock had struck the
blow which ended the battle. With the money won, he had added four
thousand acres to his estate, and afterwards called it The Gaffs.

And a strong, brave man had been General Jeremiah Travis,--pioneer,
Indian fighter, Colonel in the Creek war and at New Orleans, and a
General in the war with Mexico.

His love for the Union had been that of a brave man who had gone
through battles and shed his blood for his country.

The Civil War broke his heart.

In his early days his heart had been in his thoroughbred horses and
his fighting cocks, and when he heard that his nephew had died with
Crockett and Bowie at the Alamo, he drew himself proudly up and said:
"A right brave boy, by the Eternal, and he died as becomes one
crossed on an Irish Grey cock."

That had been years before. Now, a new civilization had come on the
stage, and where the grandsire had taken to thoroughbreds, Richard
Travis, the grandson, took to trotters. In the stalls where once
stood the sons of Sir Archie, Boston, and imported Glencoe himself,
now were sons of Mambrino Patchin, and George Wilkes and Harold. And
a splendid lot they were--sires,--brood mares and colts, in the
paddocks of The Gaffs.

Travis took no man's dust in the Tennessee Valley. At county fairs he
had a walk-over.

He had inherited The Ga