cool courage, swiftness of foot, readiness of resource that had been trained
into them. His heart was as stout and his life as simple and pure. He was
taking their path and, in the far West, beyond the Bluegrass world where he
was going, he could, if he pleased, take up the same life at the precise point
where they had left off. At sunset, Chad and the school-master stood on the
summit of the Cumberland foothills and looked over the rolling land with
little less of a thrill, doubtless, than the first hunters felt when the land
before them was as much a wilderness as the wilds through which they had made
their way. Below them a farmhouse shrank half out of sight into a little
hollow, and toward it they went down.

The outside world had moved swiftly during the two years that they had been
buried in the hills as they learned at the farm-house that night. Already the
national storm was threatening, the air was electrically charged with alarms,
and already here and there the lightning had flashed. The underground railway
was busy with black freight, and John Brown, fanatic, was boldly lifting his
shaggy head. Old Brutus Dean was even publishing an abolitionist paper at
Lexington, the aristocratic heart of the State. He was making abolition
speeches throughout the Bluegrass with a dagger thrust in the table before
him--shaking his black mane and roaring defiance like a lion. The news
thrilled Chad unaccountably, as did the shadow of any danger, but it threw
the school-master into gloom. There was more. A dark little man by the name
of Douglas and a sinewy giant by the name of Lincoln were thrilling the West.
Phillips and Garrison were thundering in Massachusetts, and fiery tongues in
the South were flashing back scornful challenges and threats that would
imperil a nation. An invisible air-line shot suddenly between the North and
the South, destined to drop some day and lie a dead-line on the earth, and on
each side of it two hordes of brothers, who thought themselves two hostile
peoples, were shrinking away from each other with the half-conscious purpose
of making ready for a charge. In no other State in the Union was the