The gathering storm centred and beat about the head of one
man whose ambition for gubernatorial honours was the core and essence of
the strife. He was, in the confident estimate of his admirers, a giant
whose shoulders towered above the heads of his lesser compatriots. An
election law bore his name--and his adversaries gave insistent warning
that it surrendered the state, bound hand and foot, to a triumvirate of
his own choosing.

Into the wolf-like battle-royal of his party's convention he had gone
seemingly the weakest of three aspirants for the Democratic nomination.
Out of it, over disrupted party-elements, he had emerged--triumphant.

Whether one called him righteous crusader or self-seeking demagogue, the
fact stood baldly clear that his name with an "ism" attached had become
the single issue in that State, and that hero-worship and hatred
attended upon its mention.

Back to the people of the inaccessible hills, living apart, aloof and
neglected, came some of the murmurs of the tempest that shook the
lowlands. Here at the edge of a normally Democratic State which had in
earlier times held slaves and established an aristocracy, the hillsmen
living by the moil of their own sweat had hated alike slave and
slave-holder and had remained solidly Republican. For them it was enough
that William Goebel was not of their party. Basing their judgment on
that premise, they passed on with an uncomplicated directness to the
conclusion that the deleterious things said of him by envenomed orators
were assertions of gospel truth.

Now that man was carrying his campaign into the enemy's country.
Realizing without illusion the temper of the audience which would troop
in from creek-bed and cove and the branch-waters "back of beyond," he
was to speak in Marlin Town where the cardinal faith of the mountains
is, "hate thine enemy!"

In the court-house square of Marlin Town, under the shadow of high-flung
hills, had gathered close-packed battalions of listeners. Some there
were who carried with them their rifles and some who looked as foreign
to even these rude streets as nomads ridden in from the desert.

A brass band had come with the candidate's special train and blared out
its stirring message. There was a fluttering of flags and a brave
showing of transparencies, and to Boone Wellver, aged fifteen, as he
hung shadow-close at Asa Gregory's elbow, it all seemed the splendour of
panoply and the height of pageantry.

From the ho