instinct,
inheritance, blood and tradition--pioneer.

One of his forefathers had been with Washington on the Father's first
historic expedition into the wilds of Virginia. His great-grandfather
had accompanied Boone when that hunter first penetrated the "Dark
and Bloody Ground," had gone back to Virginia and come again with a
surveyor's chain and compass to help wrest it from the red men,
among whom there had been an immemorial conflict for possession and a
never-recognized claim of ownership. That compass and that chain his
grandfather had fallen heir to and with that compass and chain his
father had earned his livelihood amid the wrecks of the Civil War. Hale
went to the old Transylvania University at Lexington, the first seat of
learning planted beyond the Alleghanies. He was fond of history, of the
sciences and literature, was unusually adept in Latin and Greek, and had
a passion for mathematics. He was graduated with honours, he taught two
years and got his degree of Master of Arts, but the pioneer spirit in
his blood would still out, and his polite learning he then threw to the
winds.

Other young Kentuckians had gone West in shoals, but he kept his eye on
his own State, and one autumn he added a pick to the old compass and the
ancestral chain, struck the Old Wilderness Trail that his grandfather
had travelled, to look for his own fortune in a land which that old
gentleman had passed over as worthless. At the Cumberland River he took
a canoe and drifted down the river into the wild coal-swollen hills.
Through the winter he froze, starved and prospected, and a year later
he was opening up a region that became famous after his trust and
inexperience had let others worm out of him an interest that would have
made him easy for life.

With the vision of a seer, he was as innocent as Boone. Stripped clean,
he got out his map, such geological reports as he could find and went
into a studious trance for a month, emerging mentally with the freshness
of a snake that has shed its skin. What had happened in Pennsylvania
must happen all along the great Alleghany chain in the mountains of
Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee. Some day the
avalanche must sweep south, it must--it must. That he might be a quarter
of a century too soon in his calculations never crossed his mind. Some
day it must come.

Now there was not an ounce of coal immediately south-east of the
Cumberland Mountains--not an ounce of iron o