ments to make
it the iron centre of the world flowed through it like a torrent.

"Selah! It's a shame to take the money."

He splashed into the creek and his big black horse thrust his nose into
the clear running water. Minnows were playing about him. A hog-fish flew
for shelter under a rock, and below the ripples a two-pound bass shot
like an arrow into deep water.

Above and below him the stream was arched with beech, poplar and water
maple, and the banks were thick with laurel and rhododendron. His eye
had never rested on a lovelier stream, and on the other side of the town
site, which nature had kindly lifted twenty feet above the water level,
the other fork was of equal clearness, swiftness and beauty.

"Such a drainage," murmured his engineering instinct. "Such a drainage!"
It was Saturday. Even if he had forgotten he would have known that it
must be Saturday when he climbed the bank on the other side. Many horses
were hitched under the trees, and here and there was a farm-wagon
with fragments of paper, bits of food and an empty bottle or two lying
around. It was the hour when the alcoholic spirits of the day were
usually most high. Evidently they were running quite high that day and
something distinctly was going on "up town." A few yells--the high,
clear, penetrating yell of a fox-hunter--rent the air, a chorus of
pistol shots rang out, and the thunder of horses' hoofs started beyond
the little slope he was climbing. When he reached the top, a merry
youth, with a red, hatless head was splitting the dirt road toward him,
his reins in his teeth, and a pistol in each hand, which he was letting
off alternately into the inoffensive earth and toward the unrebuking
heavens--that seemed a favourite way in those mountains of defying God
and the devil--and behind him galloped a dozen horsemen to the music of
throat, pistol and iron hoof.

The fiery-headed youth's horse swerved and shot by. Hale hardly knew
that the rider even saw him, but the coming ones saw him afar and they
seemed to be charging him in close array. Hale stopped his horse
a little to the right of the centre of the road, and being equally
helpless against an inherited passion for maintaining his own rights and
a similar disinclination to get out of anybody's way--he sat motionless.
Two of the coming horsemen, side by side, were a little in advance.

"Git out o' the road!" they yelled. Had he made the motion of an arm,
they might have ridden or shot