“Wait!” said David Joslin. “Don’t make any move. I know why you’re here as well as you do, maybe a good deal better. I sent word in for you all to come. I’ve asked you to come here myself—I arranged this meeting with some of my friends here at the Forks. I wanted every moonshiner and feudist in the mountains to be right here to-night, where I could look him in the eye, and he could look me in the eye, and we could have it out together. “No! I don’t mean to have it out in the old way. I want to tell you those times are past I see you sitting there, Absalom Gannt—I know you’re not a-scared of me, and I’m not a-scared of you. You’re fighting men, every one of you. And you’ve come here to fight each other once more—to kill each other, just like you and I and our fathers have been doing here in these mountains farther back than any of us can remember. You don’t know why you do that, but you think you ought to do it. It’s a sort of religion with us, just to kill each other. We don’t know no better—we never have. “You thought I was a coward because I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I didn’t tell any of my own people. In a way, I just sneaked out of this country, that’s true, because I wasn’t yet sure about it all. I went down the river. I got to the railroad. I went up North. After a while I got so that I could go to school. That’s what taken me out of the mountains. “Before I left these hills I had resolved to learn how to read and write and to cipher a little bit. I didn’t know then how much there was to be learned in the world. I didn’t know how hard it was to start—nor how easy once you get started. “I’ve been at school less than a quarter of the time any boy of these hills ought to have been there. I’ve learned more than I thought there was to be learned anywhere. And this is the first thing I’ve learned—that it’s time we mountaineers stopped raising our children for the slaughter. “I’ve learned that the only way to stop that sort of thing is by way of schools. You know how my own father died, and he was a preacher. I’m a-going to be a preacher myself some time—I’ve preached once or twice—they made me, up North there. But I don’t want to preach now. I just want to talk to my neighbors. “Now, I didn’t run away. You know I won’t flicker. If it’s war, I’m here for war—but I don’t want it to be war. “Outside, in the Old World, where our great-grandpaps came from once, maybe, they’re having war. It’s worse than any of you dream. But they’re all fighting for a principle, as they think. We’re fighting for nothing down here. “Now, I want to see peace in the Cumberlands. I’m telling you, I want to start a college right here, on the hill yonder. I’m going to do that some time. Don’t you believe me?” He was looking straight at old Absalom Gannt, and the old man, his eyes fixed steadily upon the speaker, answered him now.