The spirit of his great ancestor, the famous Henry Ware, who had been the sword of the border, was strong upon him.

The Kentucky was to him the most romantic of all rivers, clustered thick with the facts and legends of the great days, when the first of the pioneers came and built homes along its banks.

It flowed out of mountains still mysterious, and, for a few moments, Harry's thoughts floated from the strife of the present to a time far back when the slightest noise in the canebrake might mean to the hunter the coming of his quarry.
A faint musical sound, not more than the sigh of a stray breeze, came from a point far up the stream.

He listened and the sound pleased him.
The lone, weird note was in full accord with the night and his mood, and presently he knew it.

It was some mountaineer on a raft singing a plaintive song of his own distant hills.