Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Mary Meehan, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
1910
War and Peace had swapped corners that morning in the village of FortCanibas. War was muttering at the end where two meeting-houses placidlyfaced each other across the street. Peace brooded over the ancientblockhouse, relic of the "Bloodless War," and upon the structure thatThelismer Thornton had converted from officers' barracks to his own usesas a dwelling.
At dawn a telegraph messenger jangled the bell in the dim hall of "TheBarracks." It was an urgent cry from the chairman of the RepublicanState Committee. It announced his coming, and warned the autocrat of theNorth Country of the plot. The chairman knew. The plotters had beenbetrayed to him, and from his distance he enjoyed a perspective which ishelpful in making political estimates. But Thelismer Thornton onlychuckled over Luke Presson's fears. He went back to bed for another nap.
When he came down and ate breakfast alone in the big mess-room, which hehad not allowed the carpenters to narrow by an inch, he was still amusedby the chairman's panic. As a politician older than any of them, a manwho had served his district fifty years in the legislature, he refusedto believe—intrenched there in his fortress in the north—that therewas danger abroad in the State.
"Reformers, eh?" He sneered the word aloud in the big room of echoes.
"Well, I can show them one up here. There's Ivus Niles!"
And at that moment Ivus Niles was marching into the village from the JoQuacca hills, torch for the tin