e first sign he was never allowed to go
again. But the poison had gone deep. Whenever he could he went to hear
old Brutus speak. Eagerly he heard stories of the fearless
abolitionist's hand-to-hand fights with men who sought to skewer his
fiery tongue. Deeply he brooded on every word that his retentive ear
had caught from the old man's lips, and on the wrongs he endured in
behalf of his cause and for freedom of speech.

One other hero did he place above him--the great commoner after whom he
had been christened, Henry Clay Dean. He knew how Clay's life had been
devoted to averting the coming war, and how his last days had been
darkly shadowed by the belief that, when he was gone, the war must
come. At times he could hear that clarion voice as it rang through the
Senate with the bold challenge to his own people that paramount was his
duty to the nation--subordinate his duty to his State. Who can tell
what the nation owed, in Kentucky, at least, to the passionate
allegiance that was broadcast through the State to Henry Clay? It was
not in the boy's blood to be driven an inch, and no one tried to drive
him. In his own home he was a spectre of gnawing anguish to his mother
and Margaret, of unspeakable bitterness and disappointment to his
father, and an impenetrable sphinx to Dan. For in Dan there was no
shaking doubt. He was the spirit, incarnate, of the young,
unquestioning, unthinking, generous, reckless, hotheaded, passionate
South.

And Chad? The news reached Major Buford's farm at noon, and Chad went
to the woods and came in at dusk, haggard and spent. Miserably now he
held his tongue and tortured his brain. Purposely, he never opened his
lips to Harry Dean. He tried to make known to the Major the struggle
going on within him, but the iron-willed old man brushed away all
argument with an impatient wave of his hand. With Margaret he talked
once, and straightway the question was dropped like a living coal. So,
Chad withdrew from his fellows. The social life of the town, gayer than
ever now, knew him no more. He kept up his college work, but when he
was not at his books, he walked the fields, and many a moonlit midnight
found him striding along a white turnpike, or sitting motionless on top
of a fence along the border of some woodland, his chin in both hands,
fighting his fight out in the cool stillness alone. He himself little
knew the unmeant significance there was in the old Continental uniform
he had worn to the danc