And as the sullen spirit of winter came to this isolation, another spirit came with it—equally grim.
The campaign had progressed with torrential bitterness to its inevitable culmination. Exhausted invective had, like a jaded thing, sought greater lengths—when already the superlative was reached. Each side shrieked loud and blatant warnings of an attempt at rape upon the ballot. There was irresponsible talk of the freeman's final recourse to arms and of blood-letting in the name of liberty. At last had come the day of election itself with howls of fraud and claims of victory ringing from both camps: then a lull, like that in which two bleeding and exhausted dogs draw off from the clamp of locked jaws to pant at each other with weltering fangs and blood-shot eyes.
As Saul Fulton had predicted, the gaze of the State turned anxiously to the hills. There, remote and slow to give its election returns, lay the Eleventh Congressional District with all its counties solidly Republican. Already the margin was recognized as narrow enough, perhaps, to hinge on the "Bloody Eleventh." While the State waited, the Democrats asseverated that the "Bloody Eleventh" was marking time, awaiting a response to the query it had wired to its state headquarters:
"How much do you need?"
Those were days of tension and rumblings in the craters, and one day the rumour was born that the vote of Marlin County was to be counted out.
In an hour after that whisper mysteriously originated, thirty horsemen were riding faster than road conditions warranted, by every crooked creek-bed and trail that debouched from the county seat. They made light of quicksand and flooded ford. They laughed at shelving precipice brinks. Each of them shouted inflammatory words at every cabin and dwelling house along his way; each of them kindled signal fires atop the ridges, and when the first pallid light of dawn crept into the fog reek of the hillsides an army was on the march to Marlin Town.
That evening, in a grimly beleaguered court house, the commissioners certified the ballots as cast, and the cloud of black hats melted as quietly as it had formed.
In the state courts, on points of legal technicality, with mandamus and injunction, the fight went on bitterly and slowly. The narrow margin fluctuated: the outcome wavered.
When Saul Fulton returned to his birthplace in December, his face was sinister with forebodings. But his object in coming was not ostensibly political. He meant to drive down, from the creeks and valleys of Marlin County, a herd of cattle collected from scattered sources for marketing in the bluegrass. It was an undertaking that a man could hardly manage single handed, and since a boy would work for small wages he offered to make Boone his assistant. To Boone, who had never seen a metalled road, it meant adventuring forth into the world of his dreams.
He would see the theatre where this stupendous political war was being waged—he would be only a few miles from the state capitol itself, where these two men, each of whom called himself the Governor of Kentucky, pulled the wires, directed the forces and shifted the pawns.