A thrill of masculine logic stirred uneasily in the old man's disused brain. "Tell me _one_ thing, Ethelindy," he said, lifting his bleared eyes as he clasped his tremulous hands more firmly on the head of his stick--"tell me this--which side air you-uns on, ennyhow, Ethelindy?" "I'm fur the Union," said Ethelinda, still weeping, and now and then wiping her sapphire eyes with the back of her hand, hard and tanned, but small in proportion to her size. "I'm fur the Union--fust an' last an' all the time." The old man wagged his head solemnly with a blight of forecast on his wrinkled, aged face. "That thar sayin' is goin' ter be mighty hard ter live up to whilst Jerome Ackert's critter company is a-raidin' of Tanglefoot Cove." The presence of the "critter company" was indeed calculated to inspire a most obsequious awe. It was an expression of arbitrary power which one might ardently wish directed elsewhere. From the moment that the echoes of the Cove caught the first elusive strain of the trumpet, infinitely sweet and clear and compelling, yet somehow ethereal, unreal, as if blown down from the daylight moon, a filmy lunar semblance in the bland blue sky, the denizens of Tanglefoot began to tremulously confer together, and to skitter like frightened rabbits from house to house. Tanglefoot Cove is some four miles long, and its average breadth is little more than a mile. On all sides the great Smoky Mountains rise about the cuplike hollow, and their dense gigantic growths of hickory and poplar, maple and gum, were aglow, red and golden, with the largesse of the generous October. The underbrush or the jungles of laurel that covered the steeps rendered outlet through the forests impracticable, and indeed the only road was invisible save for a vague line among the dense pines of a precipitous slope, where on approach it would materialize under one's feet as a wheel track on either side of a line of frosted weeds, which the infrequent passing of wagon-beds had bent and stunted, yet had not sufficed to break.