self and I know your record. The committee has paid me
the honour of permitting me to play your host for the night."

There was no moon and the heavens were like a high-hung curtain of
purple-black plush, spangled with the glitter of cold stars. A breeze
harping softly through the tree-tops carried a touch of frost, but Boone
Wellver sat on a rounded hump of rock, well back from the road, with
eyes that were wide and themselves starry under the spell of his
reflections.

Since the coming of McCalloway Boone had been living in a world of
fantasy. He had been seeing himself as no longer an ignorant lad,
sleeping on a husk-pallet, in the cock-loft of a cabin, but as a
personality of greater majesty and spaciousness of being. Tonight he had
heard General Prince speak and under the fanning of oratory his
dream-fires were hotly aglow. As he sat on the rock with the soft
minstrelsy of the wind crooning overhead, a score of hearth-stone
recitals came back to memory; all saga-like stories of the prowess of
Morgan's men. It seemed that he could almost hear the strain of stirrup
leathers and the creak of cavalry-gear; the drum-beat of many hoofs.

This great man who had ridden at the head of that command was even now
on his way to Victor McCalloway's house and there he would remain until
tomorrow morning. What marvellous stories those two veterans would
furnish forth from their own treasuries of reminiscence!

Suddenly Boone rose with an abrupt but fixed resolve. "By Godelmighty!"
he exclaimed. "I reckon I'll jest kinderly sa'anter over thar and stay
all night, too. I'd love ter listen at 'em talk."

Here in the hills where the very meagreness makes a law of hospitality
he had never heard of a traveller who asked a night's lodging being
turned away. Yet when he arrived and lifted his hand to knock he
hesitated for a space, gulping his heart out of his throat, suddenly
stricken with the enormity of intruding himself, unbidden, upon such
notable presences.

Then the door swung open, and the boy found himself stammering with a
tongue that had become painfully and ineptly stiff:

"I've done got belated on ther highway--an' I'm leg-weary," he
prevaricated. "I 'lowed mebby ye'd suffer me ter come in an' tarry till
mornin'."

Over the preoccupation of McCalloway's face broke an amused smile, and
he stepped aside, waving his hand inward with a gesture of welcome.

"General Prince, permit me to present my young friend, Boone Well