around the town and, after a heaving conflict, started the river on one
quivering, majestic sweep to the sea.

Nobody gave heed that the girl rode a mule or that the saddle was not
her own, and both facts she herself quickly forgot. This half log, half
frame house on a corner had stood a siege once. She could yet see bullet
holes about the door. Through this window, a revenue officer from the
Blue Grass had got a bullet in the shoulder from a garden in the rear.
Standing in the post-office door only just one month before, she herself
had seen children scurrying like rabbits through the back-yard fences,
men running silently here and there, men dodging into doorways, fire
flashing in the street and from every house--and not a sound but the
crack of pistol and Winchester; for the mountain men deal death in all
the terrible silence of death. And now a preacher with a long scar
across his forehead had come to the one little church in the place and
the fervor of religion was struggling with feudal hate for possession of
the town. To the girl, who saw a symbol in every mood of the earth, the
passions of these primitive people were like the treacherous streams of
the uplands--now quiet as sunny skies and now clashing together with but
little less fury and with much more noise. And the roar of the flood
above the wind that late afternoon was the wrath of the Father, that
with the peace of the Son so long on earth, such things still could be.
Once more trouble was threatening and that day even she knew that
trouble might come, but she rode without fear, for she went when and
where she pleased as any woman can, throughout the Cumberland, without
insult or harm.

At the end of the street were two houses that seemed to front each other
with unmistakable enmity. In them were two men who had wounded each
other only the day before, and who that day would lead the factions, if