him go. Gordon went back, put on his everyday clothes and got his
billy and his whistle and prepared to see the maid from Lee when his
duty should let him. As a matter of fact, he saw her but once, and then
he was not made happy.

The people had come in rapidly--giants from the Crab Orchard,
mountaineers from through the Gap, and from Cracker's Neck and
Thunderstruck Knob; Valley people from Little Stone-Gap, from the
furnace site and Bum Hollow and Wildcat, and people from Lee, from
Turkey Cove, and from the Pocket--the much-dreaded Pocket--far down in
the river hills.

They came on foot and on horseback, and left their horses in the bushes
and crowded the streets and filled the saloon of one Jack Woods--who had
the cackling laugh of Satan and did not like the Guard, for good
reasons, and whose particular pleasure was to persuade some customer to
stir up a hornet's nest of trouble. From the saloon the crowd moved up
towards the big spring at the foot of Imboden Hill, where, under
beautiful trunk-mottled beeches, was built the speakers' platform.

Precisely at three o'clock the local orator much flurried, rose, ran his
hand through his long hair and looked in silence over the crowd.

"Fellow citizens! There's beauty in the stars, of night and in the
glowin' orb of day. There's beauty in the rollin' meadow and in the
quiet stream. There's beauty in the smilin' valley and in the
everlastin' hills. Therefore, fellow citizens--THEREFORE, fellow
citizens, allow me to introduce to you the future Governor of these
United States--Senator William Bayhone." And he sat down with such a
beatific smile of self-satisfaction that a fiend would not have had the
heart to say he had not won.

Now, there are wandering minstrels yet in the Cumberland Hills. They
play fiddles and go about making up "ballets" that involve local
history. Sometimes they make a pretty good verse--this, for instance,
about a feud:

The death of these two men
Caused great trouble in our land.
Caused men to leave their families
And take the parting hand.
Retaliation, still at war,
May never, never cease.
I would that I could only see
Our land once more at peace.

There was a minstrel out in the crowd, and pretty soon he struck up his
fiddle and his lay, and he did not exactly sing the virtues of Billy
Bayhone. Evidently some partisan thought he ought, for he smote him on
the thigh with the toe of his boot and raised such a stir