dy had done, or could do, while he was alive. Anyway, he was
reckless, and he cared little if war did come again. Still, the old man
prepared for a fight, and Steve Marcum on the other shore made ready for
Rufe's return.

It was like the breaking of peace in feudal days. The close kin of each
leader were already about him, and now the close friends of each took
sides. Each leader trading in Hazlan had debtors scattered through the
mountains, and these rallied to aid the man who had befriended them.
There was no grudge but served a pretext for partisanship in the coming
war. Political rivalry had wedged apart two strong families, the Marcums
and Braytons; a boundary line in dispute was a chain of bitterness; a
suit in a country court had sown seeds of hatred. Sometimes it was a
horse-trade, a fence left down, or a gate left open, and the trespassing
of cattle; in one instance, through spite, a neighbor had docked the
tail of a neighbor's horse--had "muled his critter," as the owner
phrased the outrage. There was no old sore that was not opened by the
crafty leaders, no slumbering bitterness that they did not wake to life.
"Help us to revenge, and we will help you," was the whispered promise.
So, had one man a grudge against another, he could set his foot on one
or the other shore, sure that his enemy would be fighting for the other.

Others there were, friends of neither leader, who, under stress of
poverty or hatred of work, would fight with either for food and clothes;
and others still, the ne'er-do-wells and outlaws, who fought by the day
or month for hire. Even these were secured by one or the other faction,
for Steve and old Jasper left no resource untried, knowing well that the
fight, if there was one, would be fought to a quick and decisive end.
The day for the leisurely feud, for patient planning, and the slow
picking off of men from one side or the other, was gone. The people in
the Blue Grass, who had no feuds in their own country, were trying
to stop them in the mountain. Over in Breathitt, as everybody knew,
soldiers had come from the "settlemints," had arrested the leaders,
and had taken them to the Blue Grass for the feared and hated ordeal
of trial by a jury of "bigoted furriners." On the heels of the soldiers
came a young preacher up from the Jellico hills, half "citizen," half
"furriner," with long black hair and a scar across his forehead, who was
stirring up the people, it was said, "as though Satan wa