TO
JOSEPH FRATER,
LOYAL FRIEND OF MANY YEARS,
TO WHOM MUCH OF THE MATERIAL AND ALL OF THE
ATMOSPHERE OF THE STORY IS OWING
THIS BOOK
IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED,
WITH GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FROM
THE AUTHOR

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Townlander[ 1]
II. The Sow’s Ear[ 16]
III. The Golden Youth[ 30]
IV. In Which Carfax Enlists[ 47]
V. Partly Sentimental[ 59]
VI. Daddy Layne, and Others[ 73]
VII. Company Come[ 82]
VIII. The Stubborn Rock[ 96]
IX. A Bad Night for Rucker[ 114]
X. Blind Alleys[ 125]
XI. Rosemary and Rue[ 148]
XII. Dull Steel[ 164]
XIII. The Burnt Child[ 177]
XIV. The Logic of Fact[ 194]
XV. Mammy Ann’s Grave[ 207]
XVI. A Friend at Need[ 230]
XVII. An Anticlimax[ 248]
XVIII. Evolutionary[ 261]
XIX. The Human Equation[ 278]
XX. Limitations[ 294]
XXI. The Clansmen[ 305]
XXII. Out of a Clear Sky[ 323]
XXIII. At Westwood House[ 334]
XXIV. The Unknown Quantity[ 346]
XXV. The Mangling of Poictiers[ 365]
XXVI. Tryon’s News[ 377]
XXVII. Cloud-Wraiths[ 389]
XXVIII. The Ocoee’s Answer[ 397]
XXIX. Beyond the Gap[ 410]
XXX. A Grounded Wire[ 419]
XXXI. On Pisgah’s Height[ 436]

ILLUSTRATIONS

“Did you really think that some one was shooting at you?”[Frontispiece]
FACING
PAGE
Carfax stopped abruptly and said no more [ 162]
“Poictiers, I’m a ruined man!” [ 328]
“My heavens!” gasped the discoverer; and a voice, apparently at his elbow, said: “Quite so” [ 400]

After the Manner of Men

I
The Townlander

COINCIDENT with a miniature thunderclap shattering the summer afternoon silence of the mountain forest a bullet whipped through the foliage, leaving a half-severed twig to flutter and dangle within easy arm’s reach. Tregarvon had never before been under fire, and he was a product of twentieth-century civilization and the cities. Yet his colonial ancestor, figuring as a seasoned Indian fighter in Braddock’s disaster, could scarcely have picked his sheltering tree with better judgment or dropped behind it with more mechanical celerity.

“Great Peter!” he exclaimed, under his breath, struggling to draw the pocket-entangled weapon which he had persuaded himself to add to his impedimenta before leaving Philadelphia, under the impression that it would be a necessary part of a land-looker’s equipment in the Tennessee mountains; “Great Pete——”