and noted
everything with a piteous pain and dry eyes. But she gave no sign that
night, and not until she was in bed did she with covered head give way.
Then the bed shook with her smothered sobs. This is the sad way with
women. After the way of men, Chad proudly marched the old Wilderness
Road that led to a big, bright, beautiful world where one had but to do
and dare to reach the stars. The men who had trod that road had made
that big world beyond, and their life Chad himself had lived so far.
Only, where they had lived he had been born--in a log cabin. Their
weapons--the axe and the rifle--had been his. He had had the same
fight with Nature as they. He knew as well as they what life in the
woods in "a half-faced camp" was. Their rude sports and pastimes, their
log-rollings, house-raisings, quilting parties, corn-huskings, feats of
strength, had been his. He had the same lynx eyes, cool courage,
swiftness of foot, readiness of resource that had been trained into
them. His heart was as stout and his life as simple and pure. He was
taking their path and, in the far West, beyond the Bluegrass world
where he was going, he could, if he pleased, take up the same life at
the precise point where they had left off. At sunset, Chad and the
school-master stood on the summit of the Cumberland foothills and
looked over the rolling land with little less of a thrill, doubtless,
than the first hunters felt when the land before them was as much a
wilderness as the wilds through which they had made their way. Below
them a farmhouse shrank half out of sight into a little hollow, and
toward it they went down.

The outside world had moved swiftly during the two years that they had
been buried in the hills as they learned at the farm-house that night.
Already the national storm was threatening, the air was electrically
charged with alarms, and already here and there the lightning had
flashed. The underground railway was busy with black freight, and John
Brown, fanatic, was boldly lifting his shaggy head. Old Brutus Dean was
even publishing an abolitionist paper at Lexington, the aristocratic
heart of the State. He was making abolition speeches throughout the
Bluegrass with a dagger thrust in the table before him--shaking his
black mane and roaring defiance like a lion. The news thrilled Chad
unaccountably, as did the shadow of any danger, but it threw the
school-master into gloom. There was more. A dark little man by the name
of Dougla