Out of the northern lands the tilted waters came, joined by brawling floods of melted snow and rain. Slowly, following the central crevass cracked by the main upheaval, these wore off the mantling sandstone, until it retreated sulkily to east and west,--bared breast-works of grayness, bald and hoary crests whose dull whitening seemed a stooped and withdrawn age. Down the midst of the mountain swirled the flood, until the first widening fissure opened into a long bowl four miles wide; and two cowering hills separated by this gradual bowl-like valley were all that was left of its curving majesty. The stream slowed, narrowed, became a paltry creek, noisy only in wet weather. So was the mountain born. Green scarfed it in the green seasons; but barer months revealed the weathered red outcropping on its summit. Its red stain smudged the valley, and tinted the water that carried its message to the far gulf. The mountain did not know the red and stiffened earth-blood within its heart, or the secret of the red stain. No more did Shadow Mountain know the reason for its grayness. The square sandstones quarried from it and faced to support thin wooden walls, the unconcealing glass fired out of its materials into goblets and vases, could not tell their origin. Nor could the rough red boulders carted away to hungry charcoal-fed furnaces, nor the iron sows and pigs, and the tempered rails and chains that were fashioned of its being, explain their nature, or the hard red substance that was the mountain's heart. But at last its self-conscious children knew the secret, and called it iron. Redness, iron, congealed earth blood,--the name is unimportant. The thing itself was the multiple-veined heart of the mountain, red, cold, and waiting. II THE JUDSONS II Sixty miles southeast of the mountain drowsed the town of Jackson, sinew of the old South as surely as Adamsville was brawn of the new. Gettysburg and even Appomattox had said their words before the earliest Ross had squared the logs for the first shanty over Ross Creek, from which the iron city grew; and at that time Jackson had already counted its half century.