Town.

That evening, in a grimly beleaguered court house, the commissioners
certified the ballots as cast, and the cloud of black hats melted as
quietly as it had formed.

In the state courts, on points of legal technicality, with mandamus and
injunction, the fight went on bitterly and slowly. The narrow margin
fluctuated: the outcome wavered.

When Saul Fulton returned to his birthplace in December, his face was
sinister with forebodings. But his object in coming was not ostensibly
political. He meant to drive down, from the creeks and valleys of Marlin
County, a herd of cattle collected from scattered sources for marketing
in the bluegrass. It was an undertaking that a man could hardly manage
single handed, and since a boy would work for small wages he offered to
make Boone his assistant. To Boone, who had never seen a metalled road,
it meant adventuring forth into the world of his dreams.

He would see the theatre where this stupendous political war was being
waged--he would be only a few miles from the state capitol itself, where
these two men, each of whom called himself the Governor of Kentucky,
pulled the wires, directed the forces and shifted the pawns.

Victor McCalloway smiled when Boone told him, in a voice shaken with
emotion, that the day had come when he could go out and see the world.

Boone and Saul slept, that night, in a mining town with the glare of
coke furnaces biting red holes through the surrounding blackness of the
ridges.

To Boone Wellver, this journey was as full of mystifying and alluringly
colourful events as a mandarin's cloak is crusted with the richness of
embroidery. Save for his ingrained sense of a man's obligation to
maintain always an incurious dignity, he would have looked through
widened eyes of amazement from the first miles of his travelling. When
the broken raggedness of peaks began to flatten toward the billowing
bluegrass, his wonder grew. There at home the world stood erect and
lofty. Here it seemed to lie prone. The very air tasted flat in his
nostrils and, missing the screens of forested peaks, he felt a painful
want of privacy--like a turtle deprived of its shell, or a man suddenly
stripped naked.

Upon his ears a thousand sounds seemed to beat in tumult--and
dissonance. Men no longer walked with a soundless footfall, or spoke in
lowered voices.

In the county seat to which they brought their gaunt cattle, his
bewilderment mounted almost to vertigo, for about th