Everywhere Aaron is the honored guest at barbecue and banquet. Processions march; balls are given to his glory. There are roasting of oxen, drinking of corn whisky, rosining of bows and scraping of catgut; and all after the hearty fashion of the West, when once it gets a hero in its clutches. To Adair and Smith and the lean Jackson, Aaron lays out his purpose of Southwestern conquest. These stark worthies go with him heart and soul. Each hates the Spaniard with a Saxon’s hate; each is a Francis Drake at bottom. Their hot concern in what he is upon, fairly overruns the verbal pace of Aaron in its telling. Only, he is half-secret, and does not make clear those elements of throne and crown and scepter. It will leave them less over which to hesitate, he thinks; for he perceives that he deals with folk who are congenital republicans. The lean Jackson, even more heartily than do the others, enters into Aaron’s plans. He declares that the best blood of Tennessee shall follow him. In the long talks they have at the Hermitage, Aaron implants in Jackson a Southwestern impulse which, in its deeds, will find victorious culmination thirty years later at San Jacinto. In that day, Jackson himself will occupy the chair now held by Jefferson. Being no prophet, but only a restless, strong, ambitious man, Aaron does not foresee that day of Jackson in the White House, San Jacinto, and Sam Houston--the latter just now a lad of thirteen, and hidden away in his ancestral woods. Full of hope, Aaron goes diligently forward with his sowing, the harvest whereof those others are to reap. He lays the bedplates of an empire truly; but not _his_ empire--not the empire of Aaron I, with Aaron II to follow him. He will be tottering on the grave’s edge in a day of San Jacinto; and yet his age-chilled heart will warm at the news of it, and know it for his work. Aaron leaves Jackson, drifts down the Cumberland to the Ohio, and meets Wilkinson, who--nose as red, with whisky-fuddled soul--is as much in ardent arms as ever. Wilkinson cannot greet him too warmly. The only change perceivable in our corn-soaked warrior is a doubt as to whether, instead of “Wilkinson the Deliverer,” he might not better fill the wondering measure of futurity as “Washington of the West.” Both titles are full of majesty--a thing important to a taste streaked of rum--but the latter possesses the more alliterative roll. The red-nosed Wilkinson says finally that he will keep the question of title in abeyance, committing himself to neither, with a possibility of adopting both. Aaron regains his cabined flatboat, and follows the current eight hundred miles to Natchez. Later he drifts away to New Orleans. The latter city is a bubbling community of nine thousand souls--American, Spanish, French. It runs as socially wild over Aaron as did those ruder, up-the-river regions; although, proving its civilization, it scrapes a more delicate fiddle and declines the greasy barbecue enormities of a whole roast ox.