Notwithstanding, at midnight on the same night Ambrose and Miner were riding side by side through the Kentucky woods at the head of a small cavalcade that had come together silently on the outskirts of Pennyroyal. The riders wore masks, excepting Ambrose, who, with face uncovered, squirmed restlessly upon the sunken back of old Liza.
"The men have give their word there ain't nobody goin' to git hurt," he repeated three or four times, until finally Miner turned upon him.
"Mebbe you'd better not have went, Ambrose, ef you haven't the nerve," he remarked testily.
And at this the tall man stiffened. "It ain't nerve, Miner. I just ain't never liked a ten-man-against-one game in my life, and I ain't hidin' my sentiments. No more than the rest of you do I want this Yankee teacher bein' brought into Pennyrile to show us our business, but I'm with this crowd to-night to see he don't get hurt 'cept in his feelin's."
"He's got to git, notwithstandin'!" Miner's attitude was that of a fierce little dog, who even when he couldn't change a situation liked to bark in order to hear the noise.
These men had both fought on the Southern side in the Civil War, but with a difference. Miner had plunged into it at once with pigheadedness and with passion; the full story of why Ambrose had failed to go south when his comrades did has not been told by Mrs. Barrows. At that time most men's hearts were on the one side or the other. Ambrose Thompson's heart was on both sides at once. Indeed, during the first hateful years of the war he had felt like a child whose equally beloved parents were engaged in getting a divorce, and not until after Miner was wounded and the South had showed herself the weaker did he heed her mothering call. And then he was never much of a success as a soldier because of his habit of so frequently misplacing his gun while he helped on a weaker brother, and because of his never having been known to fire at anything in particular. Still his companions did not count him a coward, merely recognizing that his imagination had a longer reach than theirs.
Kentuckians, however, have not the grace of easy forgiveness, and also have a fixed determination to attend to their own affairs. To-night's expedition meant that the teacher sent from the North into the Pennyroyal district to instruct their coloured children must go. Not that Pennyroyal wished her negroes to remain untaught, "seein'," as Ambrose had said, "that readin' and writin' ought to belong to them same as seein' and smellin'," but because they preferred to have time to attend to the matter themselves. Also, the new teacher had been secretly hurried into the county that day, driven through the adjoining town, and finally installed in the Pennyroyal district schoolhouse without Pennyroyal's being allowed a chance to take even a look.
This schoolhouse was an old-fashioned log cabin set in the middle of a clearing in a young papaw grove, and to-night, with a light burning in the front room, the oncoming men could see through a half-opened window the shadow of a figure.
Without waiting for word of command, silently they got down from their horses, forming a line about the house, and then one man, pounding savagely on the closed door, shouted: "Come out from there or we'll drag you out."
There was no answer at first, and when a candle appeared at the opening of the door the wind blew it out so quickly that the person holding it remained in indistinct outline.