t attack upon your house and you and your friends?
The clouds had something in them then."

"Merely mountain outlaws taking advantage of unsettled conditions."

Harry had listened closely and he knew that his father was only giving
voice to his hopes, not to his beliefs. But as they ceased to talk of
the great question, his attention wandered to the country through which
they were passing. Spring was now deep and green in Kentucky. They
were running through a land of deep, rich soil, with an outcrop of
white limestone showing here and there above the heavy green grass. A
peaceful country and prosperous. It seemed impossible that it should
be torn by war, by war between those who lived upon it.

Then the train left the grass lands, cut through a narrow but rough
range of hills, entered a gorge and stopped in Frankfort, the little
capital, beside the deep and blue Kentucky.

Frankfort had only a few thousand inhabitants, but Harry found here much
of the feeling that he had seen in Nashville and Charleston, with an
important difference. There it was all Southern, or nearly so, but here
North struggled with South on terms that certainly were not worse than
equal.

Although the place was crowded, he and his father were lucky enough to
secure a room at the chief hotel, which was also the only one of any
importance. The hotel itself swarmed with the opposing factions.
Senator Culver and Judge Kendrick had a room together across the hall
from theirs, and next to them four red hot sympathizers with the Union
slept on cots in one apartment. Further down the hall Harvey Whitridge,
a state senator, huge of stature, much whiskered, and the proud
possessor of a voice that could be heard nearly a mile, occupied a room
with Samuel Fowler, a tall, thin, quiet member of the Lower House.
The two were staunch Unionists.

Everybody knew everybody else in this dissevered gathering. Nearly
everybody was kin by blood to everybody else. In a state affected
little by immigration families were more or less related. If there was
to be a war it would be, so far as they were concerned, a war of cousins
against cousins.

Colonel Kenton and Harry had scarcely bathed their faces and set their
clothing to rights, when there was a sharp knock at the door and the
Colonel admitted Raymond Bertrand, the South Carolinian, dark of
complexion, volatile and wonderfully neat in apparel. He seemed at once
to Harry to be a messenger from that C