imid forecasting of spring. The roads were deep in red mud and
black mud, and men in ill-lighted cabins looked to crowbar and pike-pole
and made ready for the swelling of the "spring tide" that should heft
their rafted logs on its shoulders of water to the markets of a
flattened world.

In the log house which Victor McCalloway had built, Boone Wellver was
making his final preparations to go to Washington again--and, after
that, if God willed, to Russia. Upon his wall calendar once more a date
was marked; the date of a call, come at last, for which through two
years his spirit had fretted.

The President had sent his summons for Congress to gather in
extraordinary session, and that order, given first for April the
sixteenth, had been advanced to April the second. That could carry one
meaning only--that at last the fiction of a national aloofness was to be
cast aside as a garment unworthy of its wearer; that at last the nation
was to take her place at Armageddon!

Ahead lay action; the only medicine for a deep-rooted sorrow which,
after a grim clinging to the fringe of hope, had begun to admit despair.

For almost three years Boone had divided himself between his work and
his search for Anne, and his mission had come to seem as far from
attainment as that of the seekers of the Holy Grail. Now he was to be
one of those whose voices should speak for the nation in its declaration
of war.

That would not be enough. It would be only a beginning of his
self-required service, but since the well-springs of sentiment were
deeper in his nature than he realized, it was important to him that he,
the pioneer type of American, should join with his modern brethren in
committing his country to her forward stride across the Atlantic.

The sun was setting over the "Kaintuck' Ridges" in a blazing glory of
wine red and violet, and his imagination flamed responsively until it
saw in the bristle of crest pine and spruce, the silhouette of
lance-bearing legions marching eastward.

Already his trunk had gone in a neighbour's "jolt wagon," and the horse
that he was to ride across Cedar Mountain was saddled. Other respondents
to that call might motor to their trains. He must make the beginning of
his journey on horseback, with his most immediate needs packed in saddle
bags--as Jefferson had done before him.

Boone paused at the door of the house, where already the fire had been
quenched and the windows barred. Now he turned the key in the