n his
wrinkled, aged face. "That thar sayin' is goin' ter be mighty hard ter
live up to whilst Jerome Ackert's critter company is a-raidin' of
Tanglefoot Cove."

The presence of the "critter company" was indeed calculated to inspire a
most obsequious awe. It was an expression of arbitrary power which one
might ardently wish directed elsewhere. From the moment that the echoes
of the Cove caught the first elusive strain of the trumpet, infinitely
sweet and clear and compelling, yet somehow ethereal, unreal, as if
blown down from the daylight moon, a filmy lunar semblance in the bland
blue sky, the denizens of Tanglefoot began to tremulously confer
together, and to skitter like frightened rabbits from house to house.
Tanglefoot Cove is some four miles long, and its average breadth is
little more than a mile. On all sides the great Smoky Mountains rise
about the cuplike hollow, and their dense gigantic growths of hickory
and poplar, maple and gum, were aglow, red and golden, with the largesse
of the generous October. The underbrush or the jungles of laurel that
covered the steeps rendered outlet through the forests impracticable,
and indeed the only road was invisible save for a vague line among the
dense pines of a precipitous slope, where on approach it would
materialize under one's feet as a wheel track on either side of a line
of frosted weeds, which the infrequent passing of wagon-beds had bent
and stunted, yet had not sufficed to break.

The blacksmith's shop, the centre of the primitive civilization, had
soon an expectant group in its widely flaring doors, for the smith had
had enough of the war, and had come back to wistfully, hopelessly haunt
his anvil like some uneasy ghost visiting familiar scenes in which he no
more bears a part;--a minie-ball had shattered his stanch hammer-arm,
and his duties were now merely advisory to a clumsy apprentice. This was
a half-witted fellow, a giant in strength, but not to be trusted with
firearms. In these days of makeweights his utility had been discovered,
and now with the smith's hammer in his hand he joined the group, his
bulging eyes all a-stare and his loose lips hanging apart. The old
justice of the peace, whose office was a sinecure, since the war had run
the law out of the Cove, came with a punctilious step, though with a
sense of futility and abated dignity, and at every successive note of
the distant trumpet these wights experienced a tense bracing of the
nerves to a