reatest army thou hast ever seen; put forth thy hand then but a
very little and we will whip the earth.' By Jove, you look cosey here," he
added, glancing into the hut where Dan and Pinetop slept in bunks of straw.
"I hope the roads won't dry before you've warmed your house." He shook
hands again, and swung off amid the renewed jeers that issued from the open
doorways.

Dan watched him until he vanished among the distant pines, and then,
turning, went into the little hut where he found Pinetop sitting before a
rude chimney, which he had constructed with much labour. A small book was
open on his knee, over which his yellow head drooped like a child's, and
Dan saw his calm face reddened by the glow of the great log fire.

"Hello! What's that?" he inquired lightly.

The mountaineer started from his abstraction, and the blood swept to his
forehead as he rose from the half of a flour barrel upon which he had been
sitting.

"'Tain't nothin'," he responded, and as he towered to his great height his
fair curls brushed the ceiling of crossed rails. In his awkwardness the
book fell to the floor, and before he could reach it, Dan had stooped, with
a laugh, and picked it up.

"I say, there are no secrets in this shebang," he said smiling. Then the
smile went out, and his face grew suddenly grave, for, as the book fell
open in his hand, he saw that it was the first primer of a child, and on
the thumbed and tattered page the word "RAT" stared at him in capital
letters.

"By George, man!" he exclaimed beneath his breath, as he turned from
Pinetop to the blazing logs.

For the first time in his life he was brought face to face with the tragedy
of hopeless ignorance for an inquiring mind, and the shock stunned him, at
the moment, past the power of speech. Until knowing Pinetop he had, in the
lofty isolation of his class, regarded the plebeian in the light of an
alien to the soil, not as a victim to the kindly society in which he
himself had moved--a society produced by that free labour which had
degraded the white workman to the level of the serf. At the instant the
truth pierced home to him, and he recognized it in all the grimness of its
pathos. Beside that genial plantation life which he had known he saw rising
the wistful figure of the poor man doomed to conditions which he could not
change--born, it may be, like Pinetop, self-poised, yet with an untaught
intellect, grasping, like him, after the primitive knowledge which shou