But the town was aflame, and the call ran to clamour for a contest in court. Lawyers volunteered their services without charge, citizens attended mass meetings to pledge financial support, and the lines drew for fresh battles. In the interval between events Boone doffed his city clothing and donned again the corduroys and flannel shirt of the hills that were now viscid with winter mud and patched with snow between the gray starkness of the timber. He had gone back to the house of Victor McCalloway. There, while the hearth roared, they sat long of evenings, the young man delighting in the narratives of his elder and glowing with the confidence reposed in him--and the older with a quiet light of satisfaction in his eyes, born of seeing the rugged cub that he had taken to his heart developing into a man of whom he was not ashamed. "How far, my boy," inquired McCalloway on one of these occasions, when the pipe-smoke wreathed up like altar fires of comradeship, "do you feel you've progressed along the trend of development that your young country has followed?" Boone shook a self-deprecating head. "I should say, sir, that I've about caught up with the Mexican War." After a long study of the pictures which fantastically shaped and refashioned themselves in the glowing embers, the veteran went reflectively on again: "Since coming back this time, I've felt it more than ever like a prophet's dream. Great transitions lie ahead of us--in your own time. You will live to see the day when men in this country will no longer talk of this as a land separated by oceans from the eastern hemisphere; as a land that can continue to live its own untrammelled life. A man, like myself for instance, may be a hermit, but a great nation cannot--and I still feel that when that message of merging and common cause comes, it will come not on the wings of the peace dove but belched from the mouths of guns--riding the gales of war." CHAPTER XXXI Boone Wellver walked into the office of the police chief one spring morning when the trees along the streets were youthfully green. Somewhere outside a band, parading with transparencies, was summoning all horse-lovers and devotees of chance to the track and paddocks of Churchill Downs. Inside the office of the chief sat Morgan Wallifarro, point-device as ever, and over his desk the chief bent, listening with an attitude of deference to what he said. It was a new department head who occupied that swivel chair. New officials occupied every office under that clock-towered roof, and behind each placarded door the suggestions of Morgan Wallifarro held some degree of authoritative force and sanction.