But a new clan has come up from Cairo, Illinois, led by Black Hawk Boone. Many of their young girls look more like young Indian maids from a government reservation school, than people of Caucasian stock. But, for all that, they have their own original ways of delicate manner and address, most disconcerting to the fixed limits of Springfield’s conventionality. They are rather short and heavy-set. Their merry young men and middle-aged men have, most of them, long, curly black lovelocks to the shoulders, not carefully combed, and nearly all defiantly wag big black beards in every argument, when all other men in the modern world are shaved clean. They cheerfully hate the blacksmith clan which they are ousting by a greater talent for fury, preaching, and cursing, and by having just a little more brain at the back of the neck. The town wits say these clans hate each other because, on the whole, they are so much alike, and always vote the same way at a crisis. The locks of both the Boone men and women stream back over their shoulders, and their left hands are dyed crimson as a proud perpetual reminder to themselves and all the world that among their ancestors were aborigines. But America has not suffered the regime of nigh two hundred years of baseball umpires:—and presidential elections accepted by November 15 by the defeated party, without a disposition to be good sports on the part of self-respecting clans like these. And so it comes about to stir the romantic soul of the town that the Avanel Blade of the “Iron Gentleman” of 1920 has become a woman in 2018, but a woman no kin to the Michaels. In 2018 Horse Shoe Brotherhood and Michael Amazons are under one commander, the lovely Lady Avanel Boone, and, though they be armed with the Avanel Blade indeed, she scores a point in family pride and makes them swear fealty on Daniel Boone’s old hunting knife, which she carries in her belt as a token of her Kentucky forbears. And now, as the son of the “Iron Gentleman” tells the story, it comes as a clouded vision before me, as though I were half in the vision and beginning a destiny of my own.