ging easily over Black Mountain, and
behind them came a big man with wild black hair and a bushy beard. Now
and then he would gnaw at his mustache with his long, yellow teeth, or
would sit down to let his lean horse rest, and would flip meaninglessly
at the bushes with a switch. Sometimes his bushy head would droop over
on his breast, and he would snap it up sharply and start painfully on.
Robber, cattle-thief, outlaw he might have been in another century; for
he filled the figure of any robber hero in life or romance, and yet he
was only the Senator from Bell, as he was known in the little Kentucky
capital; or, as he was known in his mountain home, just the Senator,
who had toiled and schemed and grown rich and grown poor; who had
suffered long and was kind.

Only that Christmas he had gutted every store in town. "Give me
everything you have, brother," he said, across each counter; and next
day every man, woman, and child in the mountain town had a present from
the Senator's hands. He looked like a brigand that day, as he looked
now, but he called every man his brother, and his eye, while black and
lustreless as night, was as brooding and just as kind.

When the boom went down, with it and with everybody else went the
Senator. Slowly he got dusty, ragged, long of hair. He looked
tortured and ever-restless. You never saw him still; always he swept
by you, flapping his legs on his lean horse or his arms in his rickety
buggy here, there, everywhere--turning, twisting, fighting his way back
to freedom--and not a murmur. Still was every man his brother, and if
some forgot his once open hand, he forgot it no more completely than
did the Senator. He went very far to pay his debts. He felt honor
bound, indeed, to ask his sister to give back the farm that he had
given her, which, very properly people said, she declined to do.
Nothing could kill hope in the Senator's breast; he would hand back the
farm in another year, he said; but the sister was firm, and without a
word still, the Senator went other ways and schemed through the nights,
and worked and rode and walked and traded through the days, until now,
when the light was beginning to glimmer, his end was come.

This was the Senator's last trade, and in sight, down in a Kentucky
valley, was home. Strangely enough, the Senator did not care at all,
and he had just enough sanity left to wonder why, and to be worried.
It was the "walking typhoid" that had caught up w