youth. He lounged over the road in a careless manner
that concealed his agile strength, his tireless
endurance. This indolent carriage and his seemingly
slight build had, on more than one occasion,
been disastrously misleading to importunate or beery
strangers. He could, and did, fight whenever
chance offered, with a cold passion, a destructive
abandon, that had won him, throughout the turbulent
confines of Greenstream, a flattering measure of
peace.

In this manner his father, just such another, had
fought before him, and his grandfather before that.
Nothing further back was known in Greenstream.
It was well known that the first George Gordon MacKimmon
-- the "Mac" had been speedily debauched by
the slurring, local speech -- had made his way to
Virginia from Scotland, upon the final collapse of
a Lost Cause. The instinct of the highlander had
led him deep into the rugged ranges, where he had
lived to see the town and county of Greenstream
crystallize about his log walls and stony patch.

There, finally breaking down the resistance of a
heroic constitution, he had succeeded in drinking
himself to death. His son had grown up imbued
with local tradition and ideas, and was settling seriously
to a repetition of the elder's fate, when the
Civil War offered him a wide, recognized field for
the family belligerent spirit. He was improving

[[20]]

p019 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p020w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p021

v?