But the old friend, who had become the new enemy, looked him balefully in the eye and to the words of civil greeting gave back a bitter response: "I don't want ye ter speak ter me--never ergin," he declared. "But I'm glad I met up with ye this oncet, though. I promised ye my vote one day--an' I'm not a man thet breaks a pledge. I kain't vote fer ye, now, with a clean conscience, though, and I wants ye ter give me back thet promise." Boone knew without delusion that this public repudiation of him by the neighbour who had expected to be his father-in-law had sealed his doom. He knew that all men would reason, as he had done, that Cyrus would give no corroboration to belittling gossip concerning his daughter, unless the wound were deep beyond healing and the resentment righteous beyond concealment. "Of course," responded the young candidate gravely, "I give back your promise. I don't want any vote that isn't a willing one." But he mounted his horse with a sickened heart, and it was no surprise to him, when the results of the primaries were tallied, to find that he was not only a beaten man but so badly beaten that, as one commiserating friend mournfully observed to him, "Ye mout jest as well hev run on ther demmycrat ticket." Boone went back to McCalloway's house that afternoon and sat uncomforted for hours before the dead hearth. His eyes went to the closet wherein was locked the sword which Victor McCalloway had entrusted to his keeping, but he did not take it out. In the black dejection of his mood he seemed to himself to have no business with a blade that gallant hands had wielded. He could see only that he had messed things and proven recreant to the strong faith of a chivalrous gentleman and the love of two girls. On the mantle-shelf was a small bust of Napoleon Bonaparte in marble--the trifle that Anne had brought across the "ocean-sea" to be an altar-effigy in his conquest of life! Boone looked at it, and laughed bitterly. "That's my pattern--Napoleon!" he said, under his breath. "I'm a right fine and handsome imitation of _him_. The first fight I get into is my Waterloo!" He met Happy in the road a few days later, and she stopped to say that she was sorry. She had heard, of course, of how decisively he had been beaten, but he drew a tepid solace from reading in her eyes that she did not know the part her father had played in his undoing. He hoped that she would never learn of it. It was early in September when Boone set the log house in order, nailed up its windows and put a padlock on the door. He carried the key over to Aunt Judy's, and then on his return he sat silently on the fence gazing at its square front for a long while in the twilight. Before him lay new battles in the first large city he had yet seen--a city which until now he had seen only once when he went there to visit its jail. But his preternaturally solemn face at length brightened. Anne was there, and Colonel Wallifarro had said, "A warm welcome awaits you."