white clouds of peach and of apple blossoms. Amid the ferns about
him shade-loving trilliums showed their many-hued faces, and
every opening was thickly peopled with larkspur seeking the sun.
The giant magnolia and the umbrella-tree spread their great
creamy flowers; the laurel shook out myriads of pink and white
bells, and the queen of mountain flowers was stirring from sleep in
the buds of the rhododendron.

With the spring new forces pulsed the mountain air. The spirit of
the times reached even Hazlan. A railroad was coming up the
river, so the rumor was. When winter broke, surveyors had
appeared; after them, mining experts and purchasers of land. New
ways of bread-making were open to all, and the feudsman began to
see that he could make food and clothes more easily and with less
danger than by sleeping with his rifle in the woods, and by fighting
men who had done him no harm. Many were tired of fighting;
many, forced into the feud, had fought unwillingly. Others had
sold their farms and wild lands, and were moving toward the Blue
Grass or westward. The desperadoes of each faction had fled the
law or were in its clutches. The last Lewallen was dead; the last
Stetson was hidden away in the mountains. There were left
Mareums and Braytons, but only those who felt safest from
indictment; in these a spirit of hostility would live for years, and,
roused by passion or by drink, would do murder now on one side
of the Cumberland and now on the other; but the Stetson-Lewallen
feud, old Gabe believed, was at an end at last.

All these things the miller told Rome Stetson, who well knew what
they meant. He was safe enough from the law while the people
took no part in his capture, but he grew apprehensive when he