e court house square
were congregated men and beasts--all unfamiliar to the standards of his
experience.

The native beef here was fat, corn-fed stock, and the hogs were rounder
and squatter than the mast-nourished razor-backs he had known at home.
The men, too, who bought and sold them, were fuller nourished and fuller
voiced. It was as if they never whispered and had never had to talk in
soft caution. Upon himself from time to time he felt amused glances, as
though he, like his bony steers, stood branded to the eye with the
ineradicable mark of something strayed in from a land of poverty.

But when eventually the cattle had been sold, Saul took him on to the
capitol of the State, and there, on the twelfth of December, he stood,
with a heart that hammered his ribs, in a great crowd before the state
house and gazed up at the platform upon which the choice of his own
people was being inaugurated as Governor.

Boone was dazzled by the gold-laced uniforms of all the colonels on the
retiring executive's staff, and as he turned away, in the amber light of
the winter afternoon, his soul was all but satiated with the heady
intoxication of full living.

On a brilliantly frosted morning, when the weed stalks by the roadside
were crystal-rimmed, and the sky was an illimitable arch of blue
sparkle, he trudged at Saul's side along a white turnpike between smooth
stone walls and well-kept fences. Yet for all his enthusiasm of
admiration, a new sense of misgiving and vague trouble began to settle
heavily at his heart.

No one, along the way, halted to "meet an' make their manners."
Vehicles, drawn by horses that lifted their hocks and knees high, passed
swiftly and without greeting. The threadbare poorness of his clothes, a
thing of which he had never before been conscious, now uncomfortably
obtruded itself upon realization. At home, where every man was poor,
there had been no sense of inferiority, but here was a regime of
disquieting contrasts.

When they at last turned through a gate with stone pillars, he caught
sight of a long maple and oak-flanked avenue, and at its end a great
brick house. Against the age-tempered facade stood out the trim of white
paint and the dignity of tall, fluted columns. He marvelled that Saul
Fulton had been able in so short a time to buy himself such a palace.

But while he still mulled over his wonderment in silence, Saul led him
by a detour around the mansion and its ivory-white out-buildings