In that picture of men marching in ordered ranks, and wearing the uniform which denoted service, she thought she saw a long step toward conversion, and an approach to a better standard, and Minerva, too, felt a flutter of pleasure as she watched the column disappear around the curve of the road with its yellow dust-cloud clinging in its wake. The militia officer from the bluegrass, who had come to act as umpire, masked his smile as he judged that contest. Then the amusement died, and he remembered Napoleon's criterion: "The best soldier is he who can bivouac shelterless, throughout the year." A temporary rifle-range had been established, and in the improvised pit, with a fifty-year-old sergeant acting as target-marker, sat the officer from "down below." The mountaineer squatted like a clay effigy on his heels, and smoked a cob pipe. "Sergeant," suggested the officer in a pause, during the overhead shrieking of rifle-bullets, "in case trouble started down here in the hills--I mean if soldiers were called out--what do you think these men would do? Could they be relied on?" The mountaineer drew a long puff from his pipe, and smiled grimly. "Wall, now, _lew_-tenant," he drawled thoughtfully, "I'll jest tell ye ther truth. Ef thar was ter be trouble _somewhars else_ these-here fellers would be all right; but jest right round hyar--well, I hain't so plumb shore." "Then you think--?" The officer left the question unfinished, and the target-marker again grinned. "I hain't thinkin' nothin' much, but ye kin jedge yerself, _lew_-tenant, thet ef a couple of hundred fellers with these-hyar fur-shootin' guns was ter take ter the brush, thar mout be some hell ter pay fer a spell. I kinder reckon," he added gravely, "thet, ef things bust loose hyar-abouts, hit mout be a right-good idee ter take all these fellers up to Loueyville and lock 'em up in the jail-house thar. It mout be a right-good idea." CHAPTER XV A man whose outlook on life had been broader than Newt's, and whose brain did not receive constant poisoning from within, would have softened that fall and winter, because a new influence was working upon him.