the fact that he had no remedy against the
attitude of the men of Hog Mountain chafed him almost beyond endurance.
He was emphatically a man of action--full of the enterprises usually
set in motion by a bright mind, a quick temper, and ready courage; but,
measured by the impassiveness which these men had apparently borrowed
from the vast aggressive silences that give strength and grandeur to
their mountains, how trivial, how contemptible all his activities
seemed to be!

But the frying was over after a while. The Titanic shadows went to
roost in the tops of the trees, and Teague Poteet and his friends,
including ex-Deputy Woodward, took themselves and their fried meat off
up the mountain, and the raid followed shortly after. It was a
carefully-planned raid, and deserved to be called a formidable one.
Like many another similar enterprise it was a failure, so far as the
purposes of the Government were concerned, but fate or circumstance
made it famous in the political annals of that period. Fifteen men,
armed with carbines, rode up the mountain. They were full of the spirit
of adventure. They felt the strong arm of the law behind them. They
knew they were depended upon to make some sort of demonstration, and
this, together with a dram too much here and there, made them a trifle
reckless and noisy. They had been taught to believe that they were in
search of outlaws. They caught from the officers who organised them
something of the irritation which was the natural result of so many
fruitless attempts to bring Hog Mountain to terms. They betrayed a sad
lack of discretion. They brandished their weapons in the frightened
faces of women and children, and made many foolish mistakes which need
not be detailed here.

They rode noisily over the mountain, making a circle of Pullium's
Summit, and found nothing. They peered over the precipitous verge of
Prather's Mill Road, and saw nothing. They paused occasionally to
listen, and heard nothing. They pounced upon a lonely pedlar who was
toiling across the mountain with his pack upon his back, and plied him
with questions concerning the Moonshiners. This pedlar appeared to be a
very ignorant fellow indeed. He knew his name was Jake Cohen, and that
was about all. He had never crossed Hog Mountain before, and, so help
his gracious, he would never cross it again. The roads were all rough
and the ladies were all queer. As for the latter--well, great Jingo!
they would scarcely look at his