jeans.  And now serious troubles were threatening them.  A new man with a new political method had entered the arena and had boldly offered an election bill which, if passed and enforced, would create a State-wide revolution, for it would rob the people of local self-government and centralize power in the hands of a triumvirate that would be the creature of his government and, under the control of no court or jury, the supreme master of the State and absolute master of the people.  And Burnham knew that, in such a crisis, ties of blood, kinship, friendship, religion, business, would count no more in the Blue-grass than they did during the Civil War, and that now, as then, father and son, brother and brother, neighbor and neighbor, would each think and act for himself, though the house divided against itself should fall to rise no more.  Nor was that all.  In the farmer’s fight against the staggering crop of mortgages that had slowly sprung up from the long-ago sowing of the dragon’s teeth Burnham saw with a heavy heart the telling signs of the land’s slow descent from the strength of hemp to the weakness of tobacco—­the ravage of the woodlands, the incoming of the tenant from the river-valley counties, the scars on the beautiful face of the land, the scars on the body social of the region—­and now he knew another deadlier crisis, both social and economic, must some day come.

In the toll-gate war, long over, the law had been merely a little too awkward and slow.  County sentiment had been a little lazy, but it had got active in a hurry, and several gentlemen, among them Gray’s father, had ridden into town and deposited bits of gilt-scrolled paper to be appraised and taken over by the county, and the whole problem had been quickly solved, but the school-master, looking back, could not help wondering what lawless seeds the firebrand had then sowed in the hearts of the people and what weeds might not spring from those seeds even now; for the trust element of the toll-gate troubles had been accidental, unintentional, even unconscious, unrecognized; and now the real spirit of a real trust from the outside world was making itself felt.  Courteous emissaries were smilingly fixing their own price on the Kentuckian’s own tobacco and assuring him that he not only could not get a higher price elsewhere, but that if he declined he would be offered less next time, which he would have to accept or he could not sell at all.  And the incredulous, fiery, independent Kentuckian found his crop mysteriously shadowed on its way to the big town markets, marked with an invisible “noli me tangere” except at the price that he was offered at home.  And so he had to sell it in a rage at just that price, and he went home puzzled and fighting-mad.  If, then, the Blue-grass people had handled with the firebrand corporate aggrandizement of toll-gate owners who were neighbors and friends, how would they treat meddlesome interference from strangers?  Already one courteous emissary in one county had fled the people’s wrath on a swift thoroughbred, and Burnham smiled sadly to himself and shook his head.