In two years the Honorable Peter was as extinct, so far as the American Congress, newspapers and people were concerned, as any saurian dead before the Flood. His mother died. Peter had always been an alien to her, a perpetual disquiet. But when he was gone the thorn was out of her flesh. She talked and thought of him as in his babyhood, and left him her blessing at the last. As year after year crept by, the twin-brothers ceased to talk of him. But it was because they had begun to think of him with that strained, tense attention with which we sit and listen for the steps of one who long delays his coming, and who may be dead by the way. He might come back any day, with a crown of glory on his head. Or--was he dead? So many ships went down in that dim outer world--so many cities were burned; legions of men were swept away in battle; in short, the millions of graves which dotted the earth's surface only meant to these Boyers the one possible grave where he might lie. The gray-headed old men went stealthily alone at night sometimes to the big chest and turned over again the poems and essays yellow now with age, and the gilded prize-books. But they never spoke to each other of them. * * * * * About eighty miles from Black Mountains, in a hamlet on the Nantahela range, the whereabouts of Peter Boyer was discussed one July day as a subject of more practical interest. All the men in Sevier--a dozen, all told--were gathered as usual under the great oak which stood by the pump in the middle of the square. It was a grassy, weedy square: one or two cows lay chewing the cud on it, as they did all day long. Why not? There was never enough noise in the little street which ran round its four sides to disturb them. In the evening the women went out and milked them just where they were: occasionally, a meditative sow with her litter, or a slouching boy, passed them; or a canvas-covered wagon drawn by a steer would lumber slowly along, stop, and a woman get out of it with a bag of ginseng or angelica to barter for sugar and shoes; or a farmer in butternut homespun would jog up the street on his mule, his gun and bag of rations strapped behind, on his way to the higher peaks to salt his wild cattle; or a party of Cherokees from Qualla would come in with baskets to sell; or Seth Keen, the dwarf hunter, would bring in a roll of wolf-skins, and stay to tell his old stories over for the hundredth time. But these were rare events: on ordinary days the cows dozed undisturbed in the sleepy, foggy air, and the men lounged on the trough by the pump, and smoked from morning until bed-time, and cracked jokes on each other, and told marvellous stories of the war and its ravages.