Hale laughed, but he was to remember those words of the Hon.
Samuel Budd. Other members of that vanguard began to drift in now
by twos and threes from the bluegrass region of Kentucky and from
the tide-water country of Virginia and from New England--strong,
bold young men with the spirit of the pioneer and the birth,
breeding and education of gentlemen, and the war between
civilization and a lawlessness that was the result of isolation,
and consequent ignorance and idleness started in earnest.

"A remarkable array," murmured the Hon. Sam, when he took an
inventory one night with Hale, "I'm proud to be among 'em."

Many times Hale went over to Lonesome Cove and with every visit
his interest grew steadily in the little girl and in the curious
people over there, until he actually began to believe in the Hon.
Sam Budd's anthropological theories. In the cabin on Lonesome Cove
was a crane swinging in the big stone fireplace, and he saw the
old step-mother and June putting the spinning wheel and the loom
to actual use. Sometimes he found a cabin of unhewn logs with a
puncheon floor, clapboards for shingles and wooden pin and auger
holes for nails; a batten wooden shutter, the logs filled with mud
and stones and holes in the roof for the wind and the rain. Over a
pair of buck antlers sometimes lay the long heavy home-made rifle
of the backwoodsman--sometimes even with a flintlock and called by
some pet feminine name. Once he saw the hominy block that the
mountaineers had borrowed from the Indians, and once a handmill
like the one from which the one woman was taken and the other left
in biblical days. He struck communities where the medium of
exchange was still barter, and he found mountaineers drinking