acy.

Over there across the world was an army to be shaped, disciplined--but
an army of alien blood, of yellow skins. Here was the less conspicuous
task to which he had set his hand; the shaping of a single life, beset
with hereditary dangers, into a worthy edifice of which the timbers and
masonry were Anglo-Saxon and the pattern Americanism. He had too far
committed himself to that architecture to turn back.

Slowly he shook his head. The struggle had been sharp, but the decision
was final.

"No, MacTavish, old comrade and old friend," he said very seriously;
"no; I've withdrawn from all that. I'll not deny that my hand sometimes
aches for a grip on a sabre-hilt, and my ears are hungry for a
bugle--but that's all past. Go out and make an army there, if you can,
but I stay here. I needs must stay."

CHAPTER XV

One day McCalloway received a paper, several days old, that contained a
piece of news which he was anxious for Boone to see at once, and he
straightway set out to find the boy.

Araminta greeted him at the door of the Gregory cabin with apathetic
eyes. "Booney's done gone out with his rifle-gun atter squirrels," she
said. "I heered him shoot up on ther mountainside thar, not five minutes
back."

Before he followed the boy, McCalloway read to her and construed the
item in the paper, and for the first time in many weeks the hard
wretchedness of her heart softened to tears and a faint ray of hope
stole through her misery.

McCalloway began climbing the hillside, searching the thickets for the
boy, and at last he saw him while he himself remained unseen. Boone was
standing with his gaze turned toward Louisville--and its jail--two
hundred and more miles distant. His face was like that of a fanatic in a
religious trance, and his right hand gripped his rifle so tightly that
the knuckles showed out white splotched against the tanned flesh.

"I failed ye, Asa," came the self-accusing voice in a tight-throated
strain. "I bust out and got sent outen ther co'te room, when ye needed
me in thar ter give ye countenance, but God knows I hain't fergot ye."
He paused there, and his chest heaved convulsively. "An' God, He knows,
too, I aims ter avenge ye," he ended up, with a dedication of savage
sincerity, while his gaze still seemed to be piercing the hills toward
the city where his kinsman lay condemned.

McCalloway came forward then, and while he talked, Boone listened with
attentive patience, but an obdura