ce and
comfort. As it was, we were forced to await the issue without counsel.
Polly Ann and I talked it over many times while Tom sat, morose and
silent, in a corner. He was the pioneer pure and simple, afraid of no
man, red or white, in open combat, but defenceless in such matters as
this.

"'Tis Davy will save us, Tom," said Polly Ann, "with the l'arnin' he's
got while the corn was grindin'."

I had, indeed, been reading at the mill while the hopper emptied itself,
such odd books as drifted into Harrodstown. One of these was called
"Bacon's Abridgment"; it dealt with law and it puzzled me sorely.

"And the children," Polly Ann continued,--"ye'll not make me pick up the
four of 'em, and pack it to Louisiana, because Mr. Colfax wants the land
we've made for ourselves."

There were four of them now, indeed,--the youngest still in the bark
cradle in the corner. He bore a no less illustrious name than that of
the writer of these chronicles.

It would be hard to say which was the more troubled, Tom or I, that windy
morning we set out on the Danville trace. Polly Ann alone had been
serene,--ay, and smiling and hopeful. She had kissed us each good-by
impartially. And we left her, with a future governor of Kentucky on her
shoulder, tripping lightly down to the mill to grind the McGarrys' corn.

When the forest was cleared at Danville, Justice was housed first. She
was not the serene, inexorable dame whom we have seen in pictures holding
her scales above the jars of earth. Justice at Danville was a somewhat
high-spirited, quarrelsome lady who decided matters oftenest with the
stroke of a sword. There was a certain dignity about her temple
withal,--for instance, if a judge wore linen, that linen must not be
soiled. Nor was it etiquette for a judge to lay his own hands in
chastisement on contemptuous persons, though Justice at Danville had more
compassion than her sisters in older communities upon human failings.

There was a temple built to her "of hewed or sawed logs nine inches
thick"--so said the specifications. Within the temple was a rude
platform which served as a bar, and since Justice is supposed to carry a
torch in her hand, there were no windows,--nor any windows in the jail
next door, where some dozen offenders languished on the afternoon that
Tom and I rode into town.

There was nothing auspicious in the appearance of Danville, and no man
might have said then that the place was to be the scene of portentous