from the
hills at Cumberland Gap. Still nobody saw why a hurt to the Lion should
make the Eagle sore and so the American spirit at the other gaps and
all up the Virginia valleys that skirt the Cumberland held faithful
and dauntless--for a while. But in time as the huge steel plants grew
noiseless, and the flaming throats of the furnaces were throttled, a
sympathetic fire of dissolution spread slowly North and South and it was
plain only to the wise outsider as merely a matter of time until, all up
and down the Cumberland, the fox and the coon and the quail could come
back to their old homes on corner lots, marked each by a pathetic little
whitewashed post--a tombstone over the graves of a myriad of buried
human hopes. But it was the gap where Hale was that died last and
hardest--and of the brave spirits there, his was the last and hardest to
die.

In the autumn, while June was in New York, the signs were sure but every
soul refused to see them. Slowly, however, the vexed question of labour
and capital was born again, for slowly each local capitalist went slowly
back to his own trade: the blacksmith to his forge, but the carpenter
not to his plane nor the mason to his brick--there was no more building
going on. The engineer took up his transit, the preacher-politician was
oftener in his pulpit, and the singing teacher started on his round of
raucous do-mi-sol-dos through the mountains again. It was curious to see
how each man slowly, reluctantly and perforce sank back again to his old
occupation--and the town, with the luxuries of electricity, water-works,
bath-tubs and a street railway, was having a hard fight for the plain
necessities of life. The following spring, notes for the second payment
on the lots that had been bought at the great land sale fell due,
and but very few were paid. As no suits were brought by the company,
however, hope did not quite die. June did not come home for the
summer, and Hale did not encourage her to come--she visited some of her
school-mates in the North and took a trip West to see her father who had
gone out there again and bought a farm. In the early autumn, Devil Judd
came back to the mountains and announced his intention to leave them for
good. But that autumn, the effects of the dead boom became perceptible
in the hills. There were no more coal lands bought, logging ceased, the
factions were idle once more, moonshine stills flourished, quarrelling
started, and at the county seat, on