News from the outside world percolates slowly into the quarantine of the beleaguered hills. A fever that rushes hotly through the arteries of the nation from sea to sea, is hardly a flush to the country that leads its own isolated life. From Washington to 'Frisco, men were gathering at bulletin boards and clinging with hot excitement to the latest word of tidings. In city armories, militiamen were inspecting kits and drilling overtime. The _Maine_ had been blown up in Havana harbor. The war fever was burning thousands into fitful patriotism, but back there in the Cumberland mountains, where men scarcely knew who was President of the United States, life was going more placidly than usual. The war which this country knew most about had waned into a two-years' truce. Less than for two decades was there thought of fighting and blood-letting. One day, Newt met a trader riding a spent mule through the mired roads with a newspaper protruding from his splattered saddle-bags.
"I reckon you soldiers'll get a chance ter sashay out an' show what's in ye now," said the trader with a grin, as though he found the idea highly humorous.
"What does ye mean?" demanded the boy, resting on his grounded rifle and fixing the other with steady, incurious eyes. "Hes the Falkinses busted the truce?"
"Wuss then thet. This country's a-goin' ter declare war on Spain." He made the announcement with the superior air of one in touch with large and distant affairs.
"Who's Spain?" Newt Spooner put the question gravely and with no sense of betraying untoward ignorance. In the log school-house years ago he might have been told the answer to that question, but such matters had since then escaped his attention.
"Spain," enlightened the trader, whose geographical ideas had also until recently been vague, "is a country in ther other world--you has to go acrost the ocean ter git thar."
Newt stood for a moment gazing across the dreary wastes of broken ridges.
"Well," he said calmly, "I reckon we kin go over thar an' lick 'em, ef need be."
But, if the fever came slowly to the hills, it infected the men of the two new companies thoroughly enough when it did come. So far, each organization was drilling in its own territory, and, when the boy thought of Henry Falkins, it was not in connection with the war with Spain, but as the principal enemy in another war. On the lintel of the cabin door was a series of notches cut by his pocket-knife. Each month he added a fresh one at the end of the line. When he had cut twelve, he would have complied with his promise to the Deacon, and would once more tramp across the mountains on the mission which had been too often thwarted. Already there were seven of these cryptic reminders, and in a few days more the eighth would be added.