“For fifteen minutes, or such a matter--though it seemed a moderately long lifetime--my assassin kept busy with the sharpshooting, and I could feel myself growing smaller with every fresh spat of a bullet into my tree. What did I think? I thought of you, my dear Elizabeth, and wondered if you’d keep your promise to marry me in accordance with the terms of Uncle Byrd’s will if I should be obliged to kill a man. Would you? “When it was all over, my assassins--it turned out that there was a bunch of them--proved to be a party of school-teachers from Highmount College shooting at a mark, which the same--though I hadn’t seen it, and didn’t remotely suspect its existence--was affixed to the farther side of my tree. There were five people in the party; three attractive young women, a French lady of uncertain age, and a middle-aged professor in spectacles doing escort duty. Of course, there were explanations and apologies all around: I had slipped out, cocked revolver in hand, with a sort of ‘Now I’ll get you!’ expression on my face, I suppose. “They were all very kind to me, especially the young woman who had been doing the actual shooting. I wish you could hear her laugh. It is the sweetest thing in Tennessee. She has the soft Southern voice, and a face that can be perfectly wooden one minute and a whole insurrectionary passion-stirring volume in the next. No, Miss Wardwell, I didn’t make love to her. How could I, with all the others standing about and looking on and listening in? “I’m to make myself free of the college, they say, and perhaps I shall--later on. Please don’t lift those matchless eyebrows of yours and ask if I’m not going to wait at least until I have met these people properly. If you could see my present surroundings, and realize for one little instant what an elemental ruffian these same surroundings are likely to make of me, you’d urge me to go. “Please write often. You can’t imagine how I hang upon the arrival of your letters--how much they mean to me.” III The Golden Youth It was on the day following Captain Angus Duncan’s visit that the hamlet of Coalville, nestling at the foot of Mount Pisgah, took a fresh start as an industrial centre. Word went out from Tait’s store, which served as a general intelligence exchange for the country roundabout, that Tregarvon wanted laborers and would pay good wages.