out every little cabin pink clouds and
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 learned of the changes
going on in the valley. None but old Gabe knew where he was, to be sure,
but with his own enemies to guide the soldiers he could not hope
to remain hidden long. Still, with that love of the mountains
characteristic of all races born among them, he clung to his own land.
He would rather stay where he was the space of a year and die, he told
old Gabe passionately, than live to old age in another State.

But there was another motive, and he did not hide it. On the other side
he had one enemy left--the last, too, of her race--who was more to him
than his own dead kindred, who hated him, who placed at his door all her
sorrows. For her he was living like a wolf in a