He met Happy in the road a few days later, and she stopped to say that she was sorry. She had heard, of course, of how decisively he had been beaten, but he drew a tepid solace from reading in her eyes that she did not know the part her father had played in his undoing. He hoped that she would never learn of it.
It was early in September when Boone set the log house in order, nailed up its windows and put a padlock on the door. He carried the key over to Aunt Judy's, and then on his return he sat silently on the fence gazing at its square front for a long while in the twilight.
Before him lay new battles in the first large city he had yet seen—a city which until now he had seen only once when he went there to visit its jail. But his preternaturally solemn face at length brightened. Anne was there, and Colonel Wallifarro had said, "A warm welcome awaits you."
In due course Boone presented himself at the office door in Louisville with the three names etched upon its frosted glass, and was conducted by a somewhat supercilious attendant to the Colonel's sanctum.
The Colonel came promptly from his chair with an outstretched hand.
"Well, my boy," he exclaimed heartily, "I'm right glad to see you."
Morgan sat across the desk from his father. Some matter of consultation had brought him there, and the fact that the Colonel had permitted young Wellver's arrival to interrupt it annoyed him.
"So you lost your race up there, didn't you?" Colonel Wallifarro laughed. "I wouldn't take it too seriously if I were you. After all, it's not the only campaign you'll ever make."
But the eyes of the young mountaineer held the sombreness of his humourless race. "Mr. McCalloway was right ambitious for me, sir," he said. "I hate to have to tell him—that the first fight I ever went into was a—Waterloo."
"Still, my boy, it's better to have your Waterloo first and your Austerlitz later—but I know General Prince will want to see you." The lawyer rang a bell and said to the answering boy: "Tell General Prince that Mr. Boone Wellver is in my office."