strain was perilously contracting.

In that same instant Asa Gregory and Tom Carr were brought back to
themselves by the feel of emptiness where there should have been the
bulge of concealed weapons--and by all the resolution for which that
disarmament stood.

With a convulsive bracing of his shoulders, Gregory relaxed again,
throwing out his arms wide of his body, and Carr echoed the peace
gesture.

As his deep-held breath came with long exhalation from his chest, Asa
walked steadily down the aisle--while Tom Carr went to meet him half
way.

Standing face to face, the two enemies lifted stubbornly unwilling hands
for the consummation of the peace-pact. Their palms touched and fell
swiftly apart as though each had been scorched. Their faces were the
stoic faces of two men undergoing a necessary torture. But the thing was
done and the rafters rocked with an uproar of applause.

That clamour killed out a lesser sound, as the held breath in Boone
Wellver's chest hissed out between teeth that suddenly fell to
chattering. His body, for just a moment, shook so that he almost lost
his balance on his precarious perch, as the flexed emotions that had
keyed him to the point of homicide burst into relief like a released
spring ... and with shaken but careful fingers he let down the cocked
rifle hammer.

Then with a voice of smooth and quieting satisfaction the orator from
Louisville raised his hands.

"I've just seen a big thing done," he said, "and now I move that you
instruct your chairman to send a telegram of announcement to the next
Governor of Kentucky."

He had to pause there until order could be restored out of a bedlam of
yelling, laughing and handshaking. When there was a possibility of being
heard again he held up a message which he had scribbled during that
noisy interval. "I move you that you say this to our standard-bearer:
'Here in the hills of Marlin we have laid aside feudism to rescue our
State from an even more dangerous thing. Here old enmities have been
buried in an alliance against tyranny.'"

Boone had not recognized the face of Victor McCalloway in the audience,
because that gentleman had been sitting quietly back in the shadows with
the detachment of a looker-on among strangers, but now as the boy stood
outside the door, he saw the Scot shaking hands with the speaker of the
evening and heard him saying:

"General Prince, it has long been my ambition to meet you, Sir. I have
soldiered a bit my