“Now, if I agree with you to make you a college, and keep it open—a place where the children of these mountains can come to learn to read and write and cipher, and maybe go higher than that—if I can bring people here from the outside to show you what a big world it is that you don’t know about—tell me, will you promise me to keep the peace ontel I’ve succeeded or failed—ontel I’ve made good or ontel I’ve told you I’m a failure?
“Oh, I haven’t got much,” he went on hurriedly. “I’ve had a hard enough time up there—they laughed at me at first—I was ignorant as a child—I was only a savage, a wild man, ignorant as any nigger in the world—and wild—wild. And I was as big a sinner as any in the world—I had a lot of things to forget—me trying to be a preacher. Oh! haven’t I sinned! But I thought if I would come down here and get you all together and promise you that if you didn’t like what I told you, you could kill me here—it seemed to me it would part way make up for the heap of sinning I’ve done in my life, young as I am.
“I’m a Joslin. You’re Gannts over there—you and your kinpeople. We’re fine men, both families of us here. We can kill fifty fine men here in three minutes. Or we can build a school up yonder on the hill, across the river, inside of a couple of years. Which do you want to do?”
He stood silent for a long time, and all he heard was the heavy, half-panting breathing of the men at his right, at his left. There was not the shuffling of a foot, not the movement of a hand on either side. The eyes of each faction were glued upon the faces of the other. A tenser scene could not have been; nor could aught but starkest courage have evoked and dared it.
There came a movement upon one side of the dimly lighted room. A hundred hands went backward, a hundred pairs of eyes gleamed.
It was old Absalom Gannt who had moved. But his right hand went up above his shoulder, above his head. And it was empty!
He rose slowly now to his full, gnarled height, and stood, his right hand, empty, still above his head.
“Wait, boys!” he said. He turned and looked toward his right. Silently as a cat in his motion, Chan Bullock had also risen. But as he saw Absalom’s hand thrown up thus, he himself paused. The two faced one another, each sternly gazing into the face of his foe.
Joslin himself stood motionless, looking from the one to the other, his own hands dropped empty at his sides. He had spoken. But he knew that the fate of the Cumberlands rested here on the decision of these two men.
One false movement on the part of anyone, and the closed space had been a shambles. But Bullock with a quick gesture threw his own right hand above his head. He advanced toward old Absalom, the latter toward him, steadily, grimly, each with boring eyes that never yet had “flickered.” Then there was heard a strong and calm voice.