When he went back to Louisville, early in September, Boone found the office of Colonel Wallifarro humming with a suppressed excitement, tinctured with indignation. A municipal campaign was on, and on the day of his arrival General Prince and Colonel Wallifarro were deep in its discussion. Seeing the earnest gleam in their eyes, Boone wondered a little at the contrasting indifference in Morgan's manner whenever the political topic was broached. He fancied that the Colonel himself was disappointed, and one morning that gentleman said with a tone as nearly bordering on rebuke as Boone had ever heard him employ with his son, "Morgan, I don't understand how you can remain so unmoved by a situation which makes an imperative demand upon a man's sense of citizenship."

Morgan laughed. "Father," he said easily, "it is law that interests me—not politics. Take it all in all, I don't think it's a very clean business."

The elder man studied his son thoughtfully for a space, and then he said quietly, "General Prince and myself take a different view. We think that at certain times—like the present—citizenship may mean a call to the colours.... A failure to respond to such a summons seems to me a surrender of civil affairs into the hands of avowed despoilers—it seems almost desertion."

"And yet, sir," smiled the unruffled Morgan, "we rarely see permanent reforms result from crusading patriots. The ward heelers are usually the victors, because professionals have the advantage of amateurs."

That same evening Boone stood in a small downtown hall, crowded to the doors, and heard Colonel Wallifarro lay the stinging lash of denunciation across the shoulders of the city hall oligarchy. He heard him charge the police and the fire departments with fostering a perpetuation of machine abuses in the hands of machine hirelings—of maintaining a government by intimidation and force, and he too wondered how, if these charges were tinctured with any colour of truth, a free-hearted man could stand aside from the combat. He knew too that Colonel Wallifarro did not indulge in unconsidered libels.

At the door, when the sweltering meeting ended, he noticed close behind him a man talking to a policeman.

"These here silk-stocking guys buttin' in gives me a pain," announced that heated critic. "They spill out an earful of this Sunday-school guff before election day, but when the strong-arm boys get busy they fade away—believe me, the poor boobs fade out!"

"They ain't practical," agreed the patrolman judicially, and Boone made a mental note of his badge number. "They think one and one make two—but we know that if you fix a couple of ones right it's just as easy to make an eleven with 'em."

Boone and Anne had gone horseback riding one afternoon that September, and it was a different sort of excursion from those that they had taken together in the mountains.

The boy was mounted on Colonel Wallifarro's saddle mare, and the girl on a high-headed four-year-old from the same stable. They were not picking their way now through tangled trails that led upward, but were cantering along the level speedway toward the park set on a hill five miles south of the city. There, at the fringe of a line of knobs, was the only approach to be found in this table-flat land to the heights which they both loved.

These hills were only little brothers to the loftier peaks of the Cumberlands—but the air was full of Indian summer softness, and the horses under them were full of mettle—and they themselves were in love.

"Boone," demanded the girl, drawing down to a sedate pace, after a brisk gallop that had lathered the flanks and withers of their mounts, "what is it that interests you so in this campaign? You can't even vote here, can you?"

The young man shook his head, and now the smile of humour which had once been rare upon his face flashed there—because he had reached a point where his development was beginning to take some account of perspectives and balances.

"No, I can't vote here—but I can get as bitter over their fights as if they were my own. I couldn't explain why I'm interested any more than a hound could tell why he wants to run with the pack. It's just that the game calls a man."

"Morgan calls politics the sport of the great unwashed," observed Anne. "He says it gives the lower class a substitute for mental activity and demagogues a chance to exploit them."

"Does he?" inquired Boone drily.

"Boone"—Anne's eyes filled suddenly with a grave anxiety—"aren't you really working so hard about all this business—because Uncle Tom is so deeply involved in it and because you think he's in some danger?"

Boone leaned forward to right a twisted martingale, and when he straightened up he answered slowly: "I suppose any prominent man in a hard fight may be in—some danger, but he doesn't seem to take it very seriously."

"Why," she demanded, "can't men oppose each other in politics without getting rabid about it?"

"They can—when it's just politics. This is more than that, according to the way we feel about it."

"Why?"

"Because we charge that the city hall is in the hands of plunderers and that for tribute they give criminals a free hand in preying on the citizens."

"And yet," demurred the girl, with puzzled brow, "men like Judge McCabe laugh at all this 'reform hysteria,' as they call it. They aren't criminals."

Boone nodded. "There are good men in the city hall, too, but they belong to the old system that puts the party label above everything else."

They reached the brow of the hill and stood, their horses breathing heavily from the climb, looking off across the country where on the far side other knobs went trooping away to meet the sky.

The bridles hung loose, and the girl sat looking off over leagues of landscape with grave eyes, while Boone of course looked at her. The beauty of the green earth and blue sky was to his adoration only a background for her nearer beauty.

The boy, as he gazed at the delicate modelling of her brow and chin, wondered what was going on in her thoughts, for there was a wistful droop at the corner of her lips; yet presently, even while it lingered there, a twinkle riffled in her eyes.

"I ought to be all wrought up, I suppose, over this crusade on wickedness," she announced, though with no sense of guilt in her voice, "and yet if it weren't for my friends being in it, I doubt whether it would mean much to me—. I've got too much politics of my own to worry about."

"Politics of your own?" he questioned. "Why, Anne, your monarchy is absolute; there isn't a voice of anarchy or rebellion anywhere in your gracious majesty's realm—and your realm is your whole world."

Boone, the bluntly direct of speech, was coming on in the less straitened domain of the figurative. Anne was teaching him the bright lessons of gaiety.

She laughed and drew back her shoulders with a mock hauteur. "Our Viceroy from the Mountain Dominions flatters us. We have, however, the Mother Dowager—and we approach the age for a suitable alliance."

The two horses were standing so close together that the riders were almost knee to knee, and just then they had the hilltop to themselves. The humorous smile that had been on the lips of the young mountaineer vanished as characters on a slate are obliterated under a sponge. His cheeks, still bronzed from a mountain summer, went suddenly pale—and he found nothing to say. What was there to say, he reflected? When the mentor of a man's common sense has forewarned him that he is being shadowed by an inevitable spectre, and when that spectre steps suddenly out into his path, he should not be astonished. Boone only sat there with features branded under the shock of suffering. His fine young shoulders, all at once, seemed to lose something of their straight vigour and to grow tired. His palms rested inertly on his saddle pommel.

But the girl leaned impulsively forward and laid one of her gloved hands over his. Her voice was a caress—touched with only a pardonable trace of reproach.

"Do you doubt me, dear?" she asked. "In those politics that you are playing, I don't see anybody giving up—because there is opposition ahead."

Then the momentary despair altered in his manner to a grim expression of determination.

"Forgive me, Anne," he begged. "It's not that I doubt you—or ever could doubt you; but I know right well what a big word 'suitable' is in your mother's whole plan of life."

"I know it, too," was her grave response. "Mother's life has been an unhappy one, and she has given it all to me. That's why I say I have enough politics of my own. I couldn't bear to break her heart—and her heart is set on Morgan. So you see it's going to take some doing."

"Anne," he spoke firmly, but a tremour of feeling crept into his voice, "Mrs. Masters loves you with such a big and single love that it can't reason. Her own sufferings have come from knowing poverty, after she'd taken wealth for granted—so that is the one danger she'll guard against for you. It's an obsession with her. All the other things that might wreck your life—such as marrying a man you didn't love, for instance—she merely waves aside. If a man's been scarred with a knife, he's apt to forget that others have not only been hurt but killed by bullets. My God, dearest, she'll mean to be kind—but she'll put you on the rack—she'll take you straight through the torture-chamber, in her well-meant and cocksure certainty that she can choose for you better than you can choose for yourself."

"I think, Boone," said Anne, with more than a little pride in the rich softness of her voice, "you wouldn't hang back, because you had to come to me through things like that. I'm not afraid of the torture-chamber—it's just that I want to make it as easy for mother as I can."

On the night before the first day of registration Boone was dining at Colonel Wallifarro's house. Mrs. Masters found it difficult to maintain a total concealment of her distrust of the mountain boy. In her own heart she always thought of him as "that young upstart," but her worldly wisdom safeguarded her against the mistaken attitude of open hostility or even of too patronizing a tolerance. That course, she knew, had driven many high-spirited daughters into open revolt. "Make a martyr of him," she told herself with philosophically shrugged shoulders, "and you can convert an ape into a hero."

So after dinner Boone and the girl sat uninterrupted in the fine old drawing-room where the age-ripened Jouett portraits hung, while Morgan and his father went over some papers in the Colonel's study on the second floor.

"Boone," demanded the girl, "what is all this talk about camera squads and inspection parties? I'm afraid Uncle Tom—and you, too—are going to be running greater risks tomorrow than you admit."

He had risen to say good night, but it is not on record that lovers resent delays in their leave-takings.

"At the registration every qualified voter must be enrolled," he told her. "The camera squads have been formed to make rounds of the precincts and take certain pictures."

"Why?"

"Because we have fairly reliable information that the town will be overrun with flying squadrons of imported repeaters—and that the police who should lock them up mean to protect them."

"What are repeaters?" she naÏvely inquired, and he enlightened her out of the treasury of his newly acquired wisdom.

"We believe that hundreds of floating and disreputable fellows have been brought in from other towns and will be registered here as voters. After registering they will disappear as unostentatiously as they came. But meanwhile they will not satisfy themselves with being enrolled once, as the decent citizens must do. They will go from precinct to precinct, using fake addresses and changing names."

He smiled grimly, and then added with inelegant directness:

"We aim to get pictures of some of those birds—for use in court later."

"And the police will hamper you?"

"We don't expect much help from them."

Anne's eyes clouded with apprehension. She laid her hands on the boy's arms. "Boone," she exclaimed, "you know Uncle Tom. In spite of his gentleness, indignation makes him reckless. Will he be armed tomorrow?"

Boone shook his head. His eyes narrowed a little, and his tone indicated personal disagreement with the decision which he repeated:

"No. They've decided that since they're seeking reform they must keep inside both the letter and the spirit of the law. They've advised every one to go unarmed except for heavy walking sticks. Even that has brought a howl of 'attempted intimidation' from the city hall crowd—but I reckon their gangs won't be unheeled."

"Are you going to be armed?"

Boone hesitated, but finally he answered with a trace of the ironic: "I haven't quite made up my mind yet. You see, I learned my politics in the bloody hills—though I never carried a gun when I was campaigning there. Here, where it's civilized—I'm not so sure."

"Will you be with Uncle Tom, all the time tomorrow? Will you go everywhere that he goes?" The question was put as an interrogation, but it was an earnest plea as well, and Boone took both her hands in his. They stood framed in the hall door, he holding her hands close pressed, and her eyes giving him back look for look.

"I'll be with him every minute he'll let me," he declared. "Of course a soldier must obey orders, and he can't choose his station."

It was standing like that with Boone holding Anne's hands, and their faces close together, that Morgan, whose footsteps were soundless on the carpeted stairway, saw them, and it was not a picture to reassure a rival or to assuage the disdainful anger of a man of Morgan's temperament for one whom he considered an ingrate and a presumptuous upstart.