Once more, on his way for his last year at college, Jason Hawn had stepped into the chill morning air at the railway junction, on the edge of the Blue-grass. Again a faint light was showing in the east, and cocks were crowing from a low sea of mist that lay motionless over the land, but this time the darky porter reached without hesitation for his bag and led him to the porch of the hotel, where he sat waiting for breakfast. Once more at sunrise he sped through the breaking mist and high over the yellow Kentucky River, but there was no pang of homesickness when he looked down upon it now. Again fields of grass and gram, grazing horses and cattle, fences, houses, barns reeled past his window, and once more Steve Hawn met him at the station in the same old rattletrap buggy, and again stared at him long and hard. "Ain't much like the leetle feller I met here three year ago--air ye?" Steve was unshaven and his stubbly, thick, black beard emphasized the sickly touch of prison pallor that was still on his face. His eyes had a new, wild, furtive look, and his mouth was cruel and bitter. Again each side of the street was lined with big wagons loaded with tobacco and covered with cotton cloth. Steve pointed to them. "Rickolect whut I tol' you about hell a-comin' about that terbaccer?" Jason nodded. "Well, hit's come." His tone was ominous, personal, and disturbed the boy. "Look here, Steve," he said earnestly, "haven't you had enough now? Ain't you goin' to settle down and behave yourself?" The man's face took on the snarl of a vicious dog. "No, by God!--I hain't. The trouble's on me right now. Colonel Pendleton hain't treated me right--he cheated me out--" Steve got no further; the boy turned squarely in the buggy and his eyes blazed. "That's a lie. I don't know anything about it, but I know it's a lie." Steve, too, turned furious, but he had gone too far, and had counted too much on kinship, so he controlled himself, and with vicious cunning whipped about. "Well," he said in an injured tone, "I mought be mistaken. We'll see--we'll see." Jason had not asked about his mother, and he did not ask now, for Steve's manner worried him and made him apprehensive. He answered the man's questions about the mountains shortly, and with diabolical keenness Steve began to probe old wounds. "I reckon," he said sympathetically, "you hain't found no way yit o' gittin' yo' land back?" "No." "Ner who shot yo' pap?" "No." "Well, I hear as how Colonel Pendleton owns a lot in that company that's diggin' out yo' coal. Mebbe you might git it back from him."