and often too he dropped around inconspicuously to
listen as that administration orator popularly called "The Bull"
exhorted "the pure in heart." He liked the extremes between the edged
satire and nervous force of the young lawyer whose dress and appearance
was always point-device, and whose message was always "_Carthago delenda
est_," and the great sonorous voice of the rougher man who knew the
hearts of the mob and how to reach them.

At the end of a white-hot campaign came an election day that eclipsed in
violence the period of registration, and out of its confusion emerged,
as bruised victors, the forces of the city hall.

But the town was aflame, and the call ran to clamour for a contest in
court. Lawyers volunteered their services without charge, citizens
attended mass meetings to pledge financial support, and the lines drew
for fresh battles. In the interval between events Boone doffed his city
clothing and donned again the corduroys and flannel shirt of the hills
that were now viscid with winter mud and patched with snow between the
gray starkness of the timber. He had gone back to the house of Victor
McCalloway. There, while the hearth roared, they sat long of evenings,
the young man delighting in the narratives of his elder and glowing with
the confidence reposed in him--and the older with a quiet light of
satisfaction in his eyes, born of seeing the rugged cub that he had
taken to his heart developing into a man of whom he was not ashamed.

"How far, my boy," inquired McCalloway on one of these occasions, when
the pipe-smoke wreathed up like altar fires of comradeship, "do you feel
you've progressed along the trend of development that your young country
has followed?"

Boone shook a self-deprecating head. "I should say, sir, that I've about
caught up with the Mexican War."

After a long study of the pictures which fantastically shaped and
refashioned themselves in the glowing embers, the veteran went
reflectively on again:

"Since coming back this time, I've felt it more than ever like a
prophet's dream. Great transitions lie ahead of us--in your own time.
You will live to see the day when men in this country will no longer
talk of this as a land separated by oceans from the eastern hemisphere;
as a land that can continue to live its own untrammelled life. A man,
like myself for instance, may be a hermit, but a great nation
cannot--and I still feel that when that message of merging and common
cause com