"I don't know--but our ambition is either dying or sinking to a
lower plane, and what a pity, for the capacity is still here to
keep the old giants still alive if the young men could only see,
feel, and try. And if I were as young as one of you two boys, I'd
try to find and make the appeal."

He turned his brilliant eyes to Jason and looked for a moment
silently.

"The death-knell of me and mine has been sounded unless boys like
Gray here keep us alive after death, but the light of your hills
is only dawning. It's a case of the least shall be first, for your
pauper counties are going to be the richest in the State. The
Easterners are buying up our farms as they would buy a yacht or a
motor-car, the tobacco tenants are getting their mites of land
here and there, and even you mountaineers, when you sell your coal
lands, are taking up Blue-grass acres. Don't let the Easterner
swallow you, too. Go home, and, while you are getting rich, enrich
your citizenship, and you and Gray help land-locked, primitive old
Kentucky take her place among the modern sisterhood that is making
the nation. To use a phrase of your own--get busy, boys, get busy
after I am gone."

And then Colonel Pendleton laughed.

"I am hardly the one to say all this, or rather I am just the one
because I am a--failure."

"Father."