which was a very passion to
learn, was also a thing of which he never spoke outside.

CHAPTER VI

With winter came desolation. The sumac no longer flared vermilion and
the flaming torches of the maples were quenched.

Roads were quagmires where travellers slipped and laboured through
viscid mud and over icy fords. The hills were scowling ranks of slate
gray. A tarnished sun paraded murky skies from its pallid dawn to its
setting in a bed of inflamed and angry clouds.

And as the sullen spirit of winter came to this isolation, another
spirit came with it--equally grim.

The campaign had progressed with torrential bitterness to its inevitable
culmination. Exhausted invective had, like a jaded thing, sought greater
lengths--when already the superlative was reached. Each side shrieked
loud and blatant warnings of an attempt at rape upon the ballot. There
was irresponsible talk of the freeman's final recourse to arms and of
blood-letting in the name of liberty. At last had come the day of
election itself with howls of fraud and claims of victory ringing from
both camps: then a lull, like that in which two bleeding and exhausted
dogs draw off from the clamp of locked jaws to pant at each other with
weltering fangs and blood-shot eyes.

As Saul Fulton had predicted, the gaze of the State turned anxiously to
the hills. There, remote and slow to give its election returns, lay the
Eleventh Congressional District with all its counties solidly
Republican. Already the margin was recognized as narrow enough, perhaps,
to hinge on the "Bloody Eleventh." While the State waited, the Democrats
asseverated that the "Bloody Eleventh" was marking time, awaiting a
response to the query it had wired to its state headquarters:

"How much do you need?"

Those were days of tension and rumblings in the craters, and one day the
rumour was born that the vote of Marlin County was to be counted out.

In an hour after that whisper mysteriously originated, thirty horsemen
were riding faster than road conditions warranted, by every crooked
creek-bed and trail that debouched from the county seat. They made light
of quicksand and flooded ford. They laughed at shelving precipice
brinks. Each of them shouted inflammatory words at every cabin and
dwelling house along his way; each of them kindled signal fires atop the
ridges, and when the first pallid light of dawn crept into the fog reek
of the hillsides an army was on the march to Marlin