General Travis laughed, and that season one of his horses won the Tennessee Valley Futurity, worth thirty-thousand dollars--and the splendid estate was again free from debt. There was not a negro on the place who did not love the overseer, not one who did not carry that love to the extent of doing his best to please him. He had never been known to punish one, and yet the work done by the Travis hands was proverbial. Among his duties as overseer, the entire charge of the Westmore stable of thoroughbreds fell to his care. This was as much from love as choice, for never was a man born with more innate love of all dumb creatures than the preacher-overseer. "I've allers contended that a man could love God an' raise horses, too," he would say; and it was ludicrous to see him when he went off to the races, filling the tent trunk with religious tracts, which, after the races, he would distribute to all who would read them. And when night came he would regularly hold prayers in his tent--prayer-meetings in which his auditors were touts, stable-boys and gamblers. And woe to the stable-boy who uttered an oath in his presence or dared to strike or maltreat any of his horses! He preached constantly against gambling on the races. "That's the Devil's end of it," he would say--"The Almighty lets us raise good horses as a benefit to mankind, an' the best one wins the purse. It was the Devil's idea that turned 'em into gambling machines." No one ever doubted the honesty of his races. When the Travis horses ran, the racing world knew they ran for blood. Physically, he had been an athlete--a giant, and unconscious of his strength. Incidentally, he had taken to wrestling when a boy, and as a man his fame as a wrestler was coincident with the Tennessee Valley. It was a manly sport which gave him great pleasure, just as would the physical development of one of his race horses. Had he lived in the early days of Greece, he would have won in the Olympian wrestling match. There was in Hillard Watts a trait which is one of the most pronounced of his type of folks,--a sturdy, honest humor. Humor, but of the Cromwell type--and withal, a kind that went with praying and fighting. Possessed, naturally, of a strong mind of great good sense, he had learned to read and write by studying the Bible--the only book he had ever read through and through and which he seemed to know by heart. He was earnest and honest in all things, but in his earnestness and strong fight for right living there was the twinkle of humor. Life, with him, was a serious fight, but ever through the smoke of its battle there gleamed the bright sun of a kindly humor. The overseer's home was a double log hut on the side of the mountain. His plantation, he called it,--for having been General Travis's overseer, he could not imagine any farm being less than a plantation.