But as the man's face relaxed and he reached toward the biscuit plate his posture froze into an unmoving one--for just an instant. From the darkness outside came a long-drawn halloo, and the poised hand swept smoothly sidewise until it had grasped the rifle and swung it clear of the floor. The eye could hardly have followed Asa's rise from his chair. It seemed only that one moment found him seated and the next standing with his body warily inclined and his eyes fixed on the door, while his voice demanded: "Who's out thar?" "Hit's me--Saul Fulton. I wants ter have speech with ye." As the householder stepped forward, Araminta blocked his way, and spoke in hurried syllables, with her hands on his two shoulders. "Hit hain't sca'cely heedful fer ye ter show yoreself in no lighted doorway in ther night time, Asa. Thet's how yore uncle died! I'll open hit an' hev a look, first, my own self." The husband nodded and stood with the cocked rifle extended, while the wife let down the bar and ushered in a visitor who entered with something of a swagger and the air of one endowed with a worldly wisdom beyond the ordinary. In raw-boned wiriness and in feature, Saul Fulton was typically a mountaineer, but in dress and affectation of manner he was a nondescript aping the tawdrily and cheaply urban. His dusty hat sat with an impudent tilt on crisp curls glossed with pomade and his stale cigar-butt tipped upward, under a rakish moustache. Fulton was the sort of mountaineer by whom the outer world misjudges and condemns his race. He had left the backwoods to dwell among "furriners" as a tobacco-raising tenant on a Bluegrass farm, and there he had been mongrelized until he was neither wolf nor house-dog but a thing characterized by the vices of each and the virtues of neither. In him highland shrewdness had deteriorated into furtive cunning, and mountain self-respect had tarnished into the dull discontent of class hatred. But when he came to the hills, clad in shoddy finery to visit men in honest homespun, he bore himself with a cocksure dare-deviltry and malapert condescension. Saul was Asa Gregory's cousin, and since Asa's family still held to the innate courtesies of the barbarian, they received him unquestioningly, fed him, and bade him "Set ye a cheer in front of the chimley-place." "I heer tell," suggested Asa with casual interest, "thet politics is waxin' middlin' hot down thar in ther settlemints." After the mountain fashion the host and Boone had kicked off their heavy shoes and spread their bare toes to the warmth of the blaze. Saul, as a man of the world, refrained from this gaucherie. "Hell's red fire an' Hell's black smoke--hit hain't only ter say politics this time." The response came with oracular impressiveness while the speaker twirled his black moustache. "Hit savours a damn sight more of civil war!"