Into the distance on four sides belonged to Gerald o'Hara--were

all his because he had an unbefuddled Irish head and the courage

to stake everything on a hand of cards.

Gerald closed his eyes and, in the stillness of the unworked

acres, he felt that he had come home. Here under his feet would

rise a house of whitewashed brick. Across the road would be new

rail fences, inclosing fat cattle and blooded horses, and the red

earth that rolled down the hillside to the rich river bottom land

would gleam white as eiderdown in the sun--cotton, acres and acres

of cotton! The fortunes of the O'Haras would rise again.

With his own small stake, what he could borrow from his

unenthusiastic brothers and a neat sum from mortgaging the land,

Gerald bought his first field hands and came to Tara to live in

bachelor solitude in the four-room overseer's house, till such a

time as the white walls of Tara should rise.

He cleared the fields and planted cotton and borrowed more money

from James and Andrew to buy more slaves. The O'Haras were a

clannish tribe, clinging to one another in prosperity as well as

in adversity, not for any overweening family affection but because

they had learned through grim years that to survive a family must

present an unbroken front to the world. They lent Gerald the

money and, in the years that followed, the money came back to them

with interest. Gradually the plantation widened out, as Gerald

bought more acres lying near him, and in time the white house

became a reality instead of a dream.

It was built by slave labor, a clumsy sprawling building that

crowned the rise of ground overlooking the green incline of

pasture land running down to the river; and it pleased Gerald

greatly, for, even when new, it wore a look of mellowed years.

The old oaks, which had seen Indians pass under their limbs,

hugged the house closely with their great trunks and towered their

branches over the roof in dense shade. The lawn, reclaimed from

weeds, grew thick with clover and Bermuda grass, and Gerald saw to

it that it was well kept. From the avenue of cedars to the row of

white cabins in the slave quarters, there was an air of solidness,

of stability and permanence about Tara, and whenever Gerald

galloped around the bend in the road and saw his own roof rising

through green branches, his heart swelled with pride as though

each sight of it were the first sight.

He had done it all, little, hard-headed, blustering Gerald.

Gerald was on excellent terms with all his neighbors in the

County, except the MacIntoshes whose land adjoined his on the left

and the Slatterys whose meager three acres stretched on his right

along the swamp bottoms between the river and John Wilkes'

plantation.

The MacIntoshes were Scotch-Irish and Orangemen and, had they

possessed all the saintly qualities of the Catholic calendar, this

ancestry would have damned them forever in Gerald's eyes. True,

they had lived in Georgia for seventy years and, before that, had

spent a generation in the Carolinas; but the first of the family

who set foot on American shores had come from Ulster, and that was

enough for Gerald.

They were a close-mouthed and stiff-necked family, who kept

strictly to themselves and intermarried with their Carolina

relatives, and Gerald was not alone in disliking them, for the

County people were neighborly and sociable and none too tolerant

of anyone lacking in those same qualities. Rumors of Abolitionist

sympathies did not enhance the popularity of the MacIntoshes. Old

Angus had never manumitted a single slave and had committed the

unpardonable social breach of selling some of his negroes to

passing slave traders en route to the cane fields of Louisiana,

but the rumors persisted.

"He's an Abolitionist, no doubt," observed Gerald to John Wilkes.

"But, in an Orangeman, when a principle comes up against Scotch

tightness, the principle fares ill."

The Slatterys were another affair. Being poor white, they were

not even accorded the grudging respect that Angus MacIntosh's dour