“What law have we got to believe ye? Ye’ve got no money to start a school. Ye couldn’t keep a teacher thar if ye did.” Thus old Absalom. “That’s true,” replied David Joslin quietly. “That’s the Gospel truth! As I stand here now I haven’t got two dollars in my pockets. It’s plumb taken all the money I’ve got to keep the soul alive in my body so I could study hard as I had to. But when I do get through up there, I promise you I’ll come here and start a college. Money or no money—help or no help—I’ll come and start that college! If I do, will you promise me that between now and that time you’ll not start any trouble here?” The grizzled old man—leader of his people, therefore leader by strength of mind as well as body—sat silent now, looking him straight in the face, and Joslin returned his gaze with equal fearlessness. “You know I never flickered, Absalom Gannt! You know my people won’t run away, not one of them. You know I won’t run away. You all know why I left; and now you know why I’ve come back. “I’ve come here to do a mighty work, you’ll have to admit that fair. It’s a terrible task for all of us. We’ve got to change the ways we’ve been living here for more than a hundred years. We’ve got to break a hole in this wall that shuts us out of the world where we belong, that makes us children and paupers where we ought to be men and citizens. We’ve got to make our own way out. “Now, if I agree with you to make you a college, and keep it open—a place where the children of these mountains can come to learn to read and write and cipher, and maybe go higher than that—if I can bring people here from the outside to show you what a big world it is that you don’t know about—tell me, will you promise me to keep the peace ontel I’ve succeeded or failed—ontel I’ve made good or ontel I’ve told you I’m a failure? “Oh, I haven’t got much,” he went on hurriedly. “I’ve had a hard enough time up there—they laughed at me at first—I was ignorant as a child—I was only a savage, a wild man, ignorant as any nigger in the world—and wild—wild. And I was as big a sinner as any in the world—I had a lot of things to forget—me trying to be a preacher. Oh! haven’t I sinned! But I thought if I would come down here and get you all together and promise you that if you didn’t like what I told you, you could kill me here—it seemed to me it would part way make up for the heap of sinning I’ve done in my life, young as I am. “I’m a Joslin. You’re Gannts over there—you and your kinpeople. We’re fine men, both families of us here. We can kill fifty fine men here in three minutes. Or we can build a school up yonder on the hill, across the river, inside of a couple of years. Which do you want to do?”