he was left with swimming head and trembling knees.  Then the great Nebraskan came, and Jason heard him tell the people to vote against him for President if they pleased—­but to stand by Democracy; and in his paper next morning Jason saw a cartoon of the autocrat driving the great editor and the Nebraskan on a race-track, hitched together, but pulling like oxen apart.  And through the whole campaign he heard the one Republican cry ringing like a bell through the State:  “Elect the ticket by a majority that can’t be counted out.”

Thus the storm went on, the Republicans crying for a free ballot and a fair count, flaunting on a banner the picture of a man stuffing a ballot-box and two men with shot-guns playfully interrupting the performance, and hammering into the head of the State that no man could be trusted with unlimited power over the suffrage of a free people.  Any ex-Confederate who was for the autocrat, any repentant bolter that swung away from the aristocrat, any negro that was against the man from the Pennyroyal, was lifted by the beneficiary to be looked on by the public eye.  The autocrat would cut down a Republican majority by contesting votes and throw the matter into the hands of the legislature—­that was the Republican prophecy and the Republican fear.  Manufacturers, merchants, and ministers pleaded for a fair election.  An anti-autocratic grip became prevalent in the hills.  The Hawns and Honeycutts sent word that they had buried the feud for a while and would fight like brothers for their rights, and from more than one mountain county came the homely threat that if those rights were denied, there would somewhere be “a mighty shovellin’ of dirt.”  And so to the last minute the fight went on.

The boy’s head buzzed and ached with the multifarious interests that filled it, but for all that the autumn was all gold for him and with both hands he gathered it in.  Sometimes he would go home with Gray for Sunday.  With Colonel Pendleton for master, he was initiated into exercises with dirk and fencing-foil, for not yet was the boxing-glove considered meet, by that still old-fashioned courtier, for the hand of a gentleman.  Sometimes he would spend Sunday with John Burnham, and wander with him through the wonders of Morton Sanders’ great farm, and he listened to Burnham and the colonel talk politics and tobacco, and the old days, and the destructive changes that were subtly undermining the glories of those old days.  In the tri-cornered foot-ball fight for the State championship, he had played one game with Central University and one with old Transylvania, and he had learned the joy of victory in one and in the other the heart-sickening depression of defeat.  One never-to-be-forgotten night he had gone coon-hunting with Mavis and Marjorie and Gray—­riding slowly through shadowy woods, or recklessly galloping over the blue-grass fields, and again, as many times before, he felt his heart pounding with emotions that seemed almost to make it burst.