Hit's me--Saul Fulton. I wants ter have speech with ye."

As the householder stepped forward, Araminta blocked his way, and spoke
in hurried syllables, with her hands on his two shoulders. "Hit hain't
sca'cely heedful fer ye ter show yoreself in no lighted doorway in ther
night time, Asa. Thet's how yore uncle died! I'll open hit an' hev a
look, first, my own self."

The husband nodded and stood with the cocked rifle extended, while the
wife let down the bar and ushered in a visitor who entered with
something of a swagger and the air of one endowed with a worldly wisdom
beyond the ordinary.

In raw-boned wiriness and in feature, Saul Fulton was typically a
mountaineer, but in dress and affectation of manner he was a nondescript
aping the tawdrily and cheaply urban. His dusty hat sat with an impudent
tilt on crisp curls glossed with pomade and his stale cigar-butt tipped
upward, under a rakish moustache.

Fulton was the sort of mountaineer by whom the outer world misjudges
and condemns his race. He had left the backwoods to dwell among
"furriners" as a tobacco-raising tenant on a Bluegrass farm, and there
he had been mongrelized until he was neither wolf nor house-dog but a
thing characterized by the vices of each and the virtues of neither. In
him highland shrewdness had deteriorated into furtive cunning, and
mountain self-respect had tarnished into the dull discontent of class
hatred. But when he came to the hills, clad in shoddy finery to visit
men in honest homespun, he bore himself with a cocksure dare-deviltry
and malapert condescension. Saul was Asa Gregory's cousin, and since
Asa's family still held to the innate courtesies of the barbarian, they
received him unquestioningly, fed him, and bade him "Set ye a cheer in
front of the chimley-place."

"I heer tell," suggested Asa with casual interest, "thet politics is
waxin' middlin' hot down thar in ther settlemints."

After the mountain fashion the host and Boone had kicked off their heavy
shoes and spread their bare toes to the warmth of the blaze. Saul, as a
man of the world, refrained from this gaucherie.

"Hell's red fire an' Hell's black smoke--hit hain't only ter say
politics this time." The response came with oracular impressiveness
while the speaker twirled his black moustache. "Hit savours a damn sight
more of civil war!"

"I heered ther Democrat candidate speak at Marlin Town," contributed
Asa with tepid interest. "I 'lowed he hed a right hateful