, their
heels clear of the ground, all whittling, chewing, and talking the
matter over. All looked up at Bill, and he looked down at them, running
his eye keenly from one to another until he came to one powerful young
fellow loosely bent over a wagon-tongue. Even on him, Bill's eyes stayed
but a moment, and then were lifted higher in anxious thought.

The message had come at last, and the man who brought it had heard it
fall from Black Tom's own lips. The "wild Jay-Hawkers of Kaintuck" were
coming over into Virginia to get Flitter Bill's store, for they were
mountain Unionists and Bill was a valley rebel and lawful prey. It was
past belief. So long had he prospered, and so well, that Bill had come
to feel that he sat safe in the hollow of God's hand. But he now must
have protection--and at once--from the hand of man.

Roaring Fork sang lustily through the rhododendrons. To the north yawned
"the Gap" through the Cumberland Mountains. "Callahan's Nose," a huge
gray rock, showed plain in the clear air, high above the young foliage,
and under it, and on up the rocky chasm, flashed Flitter Bill's keen
mind, reaching out for help.

Now, from Virginia to Alabama the Southern mountaineer was a Yankee,
because the national spirit of 1776, getting fresh impetus in 1812 and
new life from the Mexican War, had never died out in the hills. Most
likely it would never have died out, anyway; for, the world over, any
seed of character, individual or national, that is once dropped between
lofty summits brings forth its kind, with deathless tenacity, year after
year. Only, in the Kentucky mountains, there were more slaveholders than
elsewhere in the mountains in the South. These, naturally, fought for
their slaves, and the division thus made the war personal and terrible
between the slaveholders who dared to stay at home, and the Union,
"Home Guards" who organized to drive them away. In Bill's little
Virginia valley, of course, most of the sturdy farmers had shouldered
Confederate muskets and gone to the war. Those who had stayed at home
were, like Bill, Confederate in sympathy, but they lived in safety down
the valley, while Bill traded and fattened just opposite the Gap,
through which a wild road ran over into the wild Kentucky hills. Therein
Bill's danger lay; for, just at this time, the Harlan Home Guard under
Black Tom, having cleared those hills, were making ready, like the Pict
and Scot of olden days, to descend on the Virginia va