The blow strikes Andrew gray; but he says never a word. He blames himself for this shipwreck; where his Rachel was involved, he should have made all sure and invited no chances.
The injury is done, however; he must now go about its repair. There is a second marriage, at which the silent Overton and the widow Donelson are the only witnesses, and for the second time a priest congratulates our storm-tossed ones as man and wife. This time there is no mistake.
The young husband sends to Charleston; and presently there come to him over the Blue Ridge, the finest pair of dueling pistols which the Cumberland has ever beheld. They are Galway saw-handles, rifle-barreled; a breath discharges them, and they are sighted to the splitting of a hair.
“What are they for?” asks Overton the taciturn, balancing one in each experienced hand.
In the eyes of Andrew gathers that steel-blue look of doom. “They are to kill the first villain who speaks ill of my wife,” says he.
CHAPTER VI—DEAD-SHOT DICKINSON
THE sandy-haired Andrew now devotes himself to the practice of law and the domestic virtues. In exercising the latter, he has the aid of the blooming Rachel, toward whom he carries himself with a tender chivalry that would have graced a Bayard. Having little of books, he is earnest for the education of others, and becomes a trustee of the Nashville Academy.
About this time the good people of the Cumberland, and of the regions round about, believing they number more than seventy thousand souls, are seized of a hunger for statehood. They call a constitutional convention at Knoxville, and Andrew attends as a delegate from his county of Davidson. Woolsack McNairy, his fellow student in the office of Spruce Mc-Cay, is also a delegate. The woolsack one has-realized that dream of old Salisbury, and is now a judge.