e people felt it, and became more guarded in their statements. What
no one knew, except Jake and a few in high places, was that a war of no
mean magnitude was impending.

There were three men in the State--and perhaps only three--who
realized from the first that all former political combats would pale
in comparison to this one to come. Similar wars had already started in
other states, and when at length they were fought out another twist
had been given to the tail of a long-suffering Constitution; political
history in the United States had to be written from an entirely new and
unforeseen standpoint, and the unsuspecting people had changed masters.

This was to be a war of extermination of one side or the other. No
quarter would be given or asked, and every weapon hitherto known to
politics would be used. Of the three men who realized this, and all that
would happen if one side or the other were victorious, one was Alexander
Duncan, another Isaac D. Worthington, and the third was Jethro Bass.

Jethro would never have been capable of being master of the state had he
not foreseen the time when the railroads, tired of paying tribute, would
turn and try to exterminate the boss. The really astonishing thing about
Jethro's foresight (known to few only) was that he perceived clearly
that the time would come when the railroads and other aggregations of
capital would exterminate the boss, or at least subserviate him. This
alone, the writer thinks, gives him some right to greatness. And Jethro
Bass made up his mind that the victory of the railroads, in his state
at least, should not come in his day. He would hold and keep what he had
fought all his life to gain.

Jethro knew, when Jake Wheeler failed to bring him a message back
from Clovelly, that the war had begun, and that Isaac D. Worthington,
commander of the railroad forces in the field, had captured his pawn,
the hill-Rajah. By getting through to Harwich, the Truro had made a
sad muddle in railroad affairs. It was now a connecting link; and its
president, the first citizen of Brampton, a man of no small importance
in the state. This fact was not lost upon Jethro, who perceived
clearly enough the fight for consolidation that was coming in the next
Legislature.

Seated on an old haystack on Thousand Acre Hill, that sits in turn on
the lap of Coniston, Jethro smiled as he reflected that the first
trial of strength in this mighty struggle was to be over (what the
unsuspect