came to the serious
business of the struggle?

And how came that girl on Thornberg's Hill? Cynthia was shoulder to
shoulder with Woodford. We had seen that with our own eyes. Had Patsy
turned traitor to Cynthia?

I looked over at Ump. "What did that little girl mean?" I said.

"I give it up," said he.

"I don't understand women," said I.

"If you did," said he, "they'd have you in a side-show."

CHAPTER VIII

SOME REMARKS OF SAINT PAUL

A great student of men has written somewhere about the fear that hovers
at the threshold of events. And a great essayist, in a dozen lines, as
clean-cut as the work of a gem engraver, marks the idleness of that fear
when above the trembling one are only the gods,--he alone, with them
alone.

The first great man is seeing right, we know. The other may be also
seeing right, but few of us are tall enough to see with him, though we
stand a-tiptoe. We sleep when we have looked upon the face of the
threatening, but we sleep not when it crouches in the closet of the
to-morrow. Men run away before the battle opens, who would charge first
under its booming, and men faint before the surgeon begins to cut, who
never whimper after the knife has gone through the epidermis. It is the
fear of the dark.

It sat with me on the crupper as we rode into Roy's tavern. Marks and
Peppers and the club-footed Malan were all moving somewhere in our
front. Hawk Rufe was not intending to watch six hundred black cattle
filing into his pasture with thirty dollars lost on every one of their
curly heads. Fortune had helped him hugely, or he had helped himself
hugely, and this was all a part of the structure of his plan. Ward out
of the way first! Accident it might have been, design I believed it was.
Yet, upon my life, with my prejudice against him I could not say.

That we could not tell the whims of chance from the plans of Woodford
was the best testimonial to this man's genius. One moved a master when
he used the hands of Providence to lift his pieces. The accident to Ward
was clear accident, to hear it told. At the lower falls of the Gauley,
the road home runs close to the river and is rough and narrow. On the
opposite side the deep laurel thickets reach from the hill-top to the
water. Here, in the roar of the falls, the Black Abbot had fallen
suddenly, throwing Ward down the embankment. It was a thing that might
occur any day in the Hills. The Black Abbot was a bad horse, and the
prediction