ness. Go by
yoreself--an' keep away from them others."

* * * * *

On the evening of the twenty-fifth of January Colonel Tom Wallifarro
stepped from the Louisville train at Frankfort and turned his steps
toward the stone-pillared front of the Capitol Hotel. Across the width
of Main Street, behind its iron fence, loomed the ancient pile of the
state house with its twilight frown of gray stone. The three-storied
executive building lay close at its side. Over the place, he fancied,
gloomed a heavy spirit of suspense. The hills that fringed the city were
ragged in their wintriness, and ash-dark with the thickening dusk.

Bearing a somewhat heavy heart, the Colonel registered and went direct
to his room. Like drift on a freshet, elements of irreconcilable
difference were dashing pell-mell toward catastrophe. Colonel
Wallifarro's mission here was a conference with several cool hands of
both political creeds, actuated by an earnest effort to forestall any
such overt act as might end in chaos.

But the spirit of foreboding lay onerously upon him, and he slept so
fitfully that the first gray of dawn found him up and abroad. River
mists still held the town, fog-wrapped and spectral of contour, and the
Colonel strolled aimlessly toward the station. As he drew near, he heard
the whistle of a locomotive beyond the tunnel, and knowing of no train
due of arrival at that hour, he paused in his walk in time to see an
engine thunder through the station without stopping. It carried neither
freight cars nor coaches, but it was followed after a five-minute
interval by a second locomotive, which panted and hissed to a grinding
stop, with the solid curve of a long train strung out behind it--a
special.

Vestibule doors began straightway to vomit a gushing, elbowing multitude
of dark figures to the station platform, where the red and green
lanterns still shone with feeble sickliness, catching the dull glint of
rifles, and the high lights on faces that were fixed and sinister of
expression.

The dark stream of figures flowed along with a grim monotony and an
almost spectral silence across the street and into the state house
grounds.

There was a steadiness in that detraining suggestive of a matter well
rehearsed and completely understood, and as the light grew clearer on
gaunt cheekbones and swinging guns an almost terrified voice exclaimed
from somewhere, "The mountaineers have come!"

CHAPTER IX