y he has done it.

* * * * *

Under a large black head the major's story was printed in the Fourth of
July edition of the Evening Press. It ran full two columns and lapped
over into a third column. It was an exhaustive--and exhausting--account
of the Fall of Vicksburg.

VI

THE EXIT OF ANSE DUGMORE

When a Kentucky mountaineer goes to the penitentiary the chances are
that he gets sore eyes from the white walls that enclose him, or quick
consumption from the thick air that he breathes. It was entirely in
accordance with the run of his luck that Anse Dugmore should get them
both, the sore eyes first and then the consumption.

There is seldom anything that is picturesque about the man-killer of the
mountain country. He is lacking sadly in the romantic aspect and the
delightfully studied vernacular with which an inspired school of fiction
has invested our Western gun-fighter. No alluring jingle of belted
accouterment goes with him, no gift of deadly humor adorns his equally
deadly gun-play. He does his killing in an unemotional, unattractive
kind of way, with absolutely no regard for costume or setting. Rarely is
he a fine figure of a man.

Take Anse Dugmore now. He had a short-waisted, thin body and abnormally
long, thin legs, like the shadow a man casts at sunup. He didn't have
that steel-gray eye of which we so often read. His eyes weren't of any
particular color, and he had a straggly mustache of sandy red and no
chin worth mentioning; but he could shoot off a squirrel's head, or a
man's, at the distance of a considerable number of yards.

Until he was past thirty he played merely an incidental part in the
tribal war that had raged up and down Yellow Banks Creek and its
principal tributary, the Pigeon Roost, since long before the Big War. He
was getting out timber to be floated down the river on the spring rise
when word came to him of an ambuscade that made him the head of his
immediate clan and the upholder of his family's honor.

"Yore paw an' yore two brothers was laywaid this mawnin' comin' 'long
Yaller Banks togither," was the message brought by a breathless bearer
of news. "The wimmenfolks air totin' 'em home now. Talt, he ain't dead
yit."

From a dry spot behind a log Anse lifted his rifle and started over the
ridge with the long, shambling gait of the born hill-climber that eats
up the miles. For this emergency he had been schooled years back when he
sat by a