LITMIR.BIZ

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it is now that he is made Major General of Militia, an honor for which he has privily panted, even as the worn hart panteth for the water brook.

      When he is a general, the blooming Rachel cuts and bastes and stitches a gorgeous uniform for her Bayard, in which labor of love she exhausts the Nashville supply of gold braid. Once the new General dons that effulgent uniform, which he does upon the instant it is completed, he offers a spectacle of such brilliancy that the bedazzled public talks facetiously of smoked glass. The new General in no wise resents this jest, being blandly tolerant of a backwoods sense of humor which suggests it. Besides, while the public has its joke, he has the uniform and his commission; and these, he opines, give him vastly the better of the situation.

      Many friends, many foes, says the Arab, and now the popular young General finds his path grown up of enemies. There be reasons for the sprouting of these malevolent gentry. The General is the idol of the people. He can call them about him as the huntsman calls his hounds. At word or sign from him, they follow and pull down whatsoever man or measure he points to as his quarry of politics. This does not match with the ambitions of many a pushing gentleman, who is quite as eager for popular preference, and – he thinks – quite as much entitled to it, as is the General.

      These disgruntled ones, baffled in their political advancement by the General, take darkling counsel among themselves. The decision they arrive at is one gloomy enough. They cannot shake the General’s hold upon the people. Nothing short of his death promises a least ray of relief. He is the sun; while he lives he alone will occupy the popular heavens. His destruction would mean the going down of that sun. In the night which followed, those lesser plotting luminaries might win for themselves some twinkling visibility.

      It is the springtime of the malevolent ones’ conspiracy, and the plot they make begins to blossom for the bearing of its lethal fruit. There is in Nashville one Charles Dickinson. By profession he is a lawyer, albeit of practice intermittent and scant. In figure he is tall, handsome, graceful with a feline grace. If there be aught in the old Greek’s theory touching the transmigration of souls, then this Dickinson was aforetime and in another life a tiger. He is sinuous, powerful, vain, narrowly cruel, with a sleek purring gloss of manner over all. Also, he is of “good family” – that defense and final refuge of folk who would else sink from respectable sight in the mire of their own well-earned disrepute.

      Mr. Dickinson has one accomplishment, a physical one. So nicely does his eye match his hand, that he may boast himself the quickest, surest shot in all the world. Knowing his vanity, and the deadly certainty of his pistols, the conspirators work upon him. They point out that to kill the General under circumstances which men approve, will be an easy instant step to greatness. Urged by his vanity, permitted by his cruelty, dead-shot Dickinson rises to the glittering lure.

      Give a man station and fortune, and while his courage is not sapped his prudence is promoted. The poor, obscure man will risk himself more readily than will the eminent rich one, not that he is braver, but he has less to lose. The General – who has been in both Houses of Congress, and was a judge on the bench besides – will not be hurried to the field, as readily as when he was merely Andrew the horse-faced. However, those malignant secret ones are ingenious. They know a name that cannot fail to set him ablaze for blood. They whisper that name to dead-shot Dickinson.

      It is a banner day at the Clover Bottom track. The General’s Truxton is to run – that meteor among race horses, the mighty Truxton! The blooming Rachel, seated in her carriage, is where she can view the finish. The General – one of the Clover Bottom stewards – is in the judge’s stand. Dead-shot Dickinson, as the bell rings on the race, takes his stand at the blooming Rachel’s carriage wheel. He is not there to see a race, but to plant an insult.

      “Go!” cries the starter.

      Away rushes the field, the flying Truxton in the lead! Around they whirl, the little jockeys plying hand and heel! They sweep by the three-quarters post! The great Truxton, eye afire, nostrils wide, comes down the stretch with the swiftness of the thrown lance! Behind, ten generous lengths, trail the beaten ruck! The red mounts to the cheek of the blooming Rachel; her black eyes shine with excitement! She applauds the invincible Truxton with her little hands.

      “He is running away with them!” she cries.

      Dead-shot Dickinson turns to the friend who is conveniently by his side. The chance he waited for has come.

      “Running away with them!” he sneers, repeating the phrase of the blooming Rachel. “To be sure! He takes after his master, who ran away with another man’s wife.”

      CHAPTER VII – HOW THE GENERAL FOUGHT

      THE General seeks the taciturn Over-ton – that wordless one of the uneasy hair triggers.

      “It is a plot,” says the General. “And yet this man shall die.”

      Hair-trigger Overton bears a challenge to dead-shot Dickinson, and is referred to that marksman’s second, Hanson Catlet. Hair-trigger Overton and Mr. Catlet agree on Harrison’s Mills, a long Day’s ride away in Kentucky. There are laws against dueling in Tennessee; wherefore her citizens, when bent on blood, repair to Kentucky. To make all equal, and owning similar laws, the Kentuckians, when blood hungry, take one another to Tennessee. The arrangement is both perfect and polite, not to say urbane, and does much to induce friendly relations between these sister commonwealths.

      Place selected, Mr. Catlet insists upon putting off the fight for a week. His principal is nothing if not artistic. He must send across the Blue Ridge Mountains for a famous brace of pistols. His duel with the General will have its page in history. He insists, therefore, upon making every nice arrangement to attract the admiration of posterity. He will kill the General, of course; and, by way of emphasizing his gallantry, offers wagers to that effect. He bets three thousand dollars that he will kill the General the first fire.

      The General makes no wagers, but holds long pow-wows with hair-trigger Overton over their glasses and pipes. The fight is to be at twelve paces, each man toeing a peg. The word agreed on is: “Fire – one – two – three – stop!” Both are free to kill after the word “Fire,” and before the word “Stop.”

      Hair-trigger Overton and the General give themselves up to a heartfelt study of what advantages and disadvantages are presented by the situation. They decide to let the gifted Dickinson shoot first. He is so quick that the General cannot hope to forestall his fire. Also, any undue haste on the General’s part might spoil his aim. By the pros and cons of it, as weighed between them, it is plain that the General must receive the fire of dead-shot Dickinson. He will be hit; doubtless the wound will bring death. He must, however, bend every iron energy to the task of standing on his feet long enough to kill his adversary.

      “Fear not! I’ll last the time!” says the General. “He shall go with me; for I’ve set my heart on his blood.”

      Those wonderful pistols come over the Blue Ridge, and dead-shot Dickinson with his friends set out for that far-away Kentucky fighting ground. They make gala of the business, and laugh and joke as they ride along. By way of keeping his hand in, and to give the confidence of his admirers a wire edge, dead-shot Dickinson unbends in sinister exhibitions of his pistol skill. At a farmer’s house a gourd is hanging by a string from the bough of a tree. Deadrshot Dickinson, at twenty paces, cuts the string; the gourd falls to the ground.

      “Some gentlemen will be along presently,” he says. “Show them that string, and tell them how it was cut.”

      At a wayside inn he puts four bullets into a mark the size of a silver dollar.

      “When General Jackson arrives,” he observes, tossing a gold piece to the innkeeper, “say that those shots were fired at twenty-four paces.”

      And so with song and shout and jest and pistol firing, the Dickinson party troop forward. They arrive in the early evening and put up at Harrison’s tavern. The fight is for seven o’clock in the morning.

      Behind this gay cavalcade are journeying the General and hair-trigger Overton. The farmer repeats the story of the gourd and its bullet-broken string. A bit farther, and the innkeeper calls attention to that quartette of shots, which took effect within the little circumference of a dollar piece. The stern

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