For the first time Jason began to think how lonely her life must be, and, perhaps as the result of his own suffering, his heart suddenly began to ache for her.

“Don’t worry, mammy—­I’ll take ye back some day.”

Mavis came back from the kitchen.  Again she had been crying.  Again the same keen look passed between them and with only that look Jason climbed the stairs to her room.  As his eyes wandered about the familiar touches the hand of civilization had added to the bare little chamber it once was, he saw on the dresser of varnished pine one touch of that hand that he had never noticed before—­the picture of Gray Pendleton.  Evidently Mavis had forgotten to put it away, and Jason looked at it curiously a moment—­the frank face, strong mouth, and winning smile—­but he never noticed that it was placed where she could see it when she kneeled at her bedside, and never guessed that it was the last earthly thing her eyes rested on before darkness closed about her, and that the girl took its image upward with her even in her prayers.

XXIV

The red dawn of the twentieth century was stealing over the frost-white fields, and in the alien house of his fathers John Burnham was watching it through his bedroom window.  There had been little sleep for him that New Year’s night, and even now, when he went back to bed, sleep would not come.

The first contest in the life of the State was going on at the little capital.  That capital was now an armed camp.  The law-makers there themselves were armed, divided, and men of each party were marked by men of the other for the first shot when the crisis should come.  There was a Democratic conspiracy to defraud—­a Republican conspiracy to resist by force to the death.  Even in the placing of the ballots in the box for the drawing of the contest board, fraud was openly charged, and even then pistols almost leaped from their holsters.  Republicans whose seats were contested would be unseated and the autocrat’s triumph would thus be sure—­ that was the plan wrought out by his inflexible will and iron hand.  The governor from the Pennyroyal swore he would leave his post only on a stretcher.  Disfranchisement was on the very eve of taking place, liberty was at stake, and Kentuckians unless aroused to action would be a free people no longer.  The Republican cry was that the autocrat had created his election triumvirate, had stolen his nomination, tried to steal his election, and was now trying to steal the governorship.  There was even a meeting in the big town of the State to determine openly whether there should be resistance to him by force.  Two men from the mountains had met in the lobby of the Capitol Hotel and a few moments later, under the drifting powder smoke, two men lay wounded and three lay dead.  The quarrel was personal, it was said, but the dial-hand of the times was left pointing with sinister prophecy at tragedy yet to come.  And in the dark of the