ent on ahead of them.

At first the puffing, steam-spitting, fire-spouting locomotive with its
deafening exhaust and strident whistle, clanging bell and glowing
fire-box actually frightened him. As he stood close by the track and it
came on threateningly, he backed away, his rifle held in his crooked
arm, ready for some great emergency, he knew not what. A laborer laughed
at him, and his hands instinctively took firmer grip upon the rifle. The
laborer stopped laughing.

Some lessons of the temper of the mountaineers already had been learned
along the line of that new railroad, and, driven from his wrath by the
appearance of new marvels, Joe, at greater distance, sat upon a stump
and watched, wide-eyed, and undisturbed, unridiculed.

For a long time his resentment wholly drowned itself in wonder at the
puzzle of the engines, the mechanism of the dump-cars, the wondrous
working of the small steam crane which lifted rails from flat-cars, and,
as a strong man guided them, dropped them with precision at the time and
place decided on beforehand. He noted how the men worked in great gangs,
subject to the orders of one "boss," a phenomenon of organization he had
never seen before, with unwilling admiration.

But presently, from a point well in advance of that where rails already
had been laid and upon which his attention had been concentrated because
of the machinery there, there came a mighty boom of dynamite. It
startled him so greatly that he sprang up, bewildered, ready for
whatever might be coming, but wholly at a loss as to just what the
threatening danger might be. His fright gave rise to jeering laughter
from the men who had been watching with a covert eye the rough,
determined looking mountaineer, squatting on the stump with rifle on
his arm. He turned on them so fiercely that they shrank back, terrified
by the look they saw in his grey eyes.

Then, noting that the noise had not appalled them in the least and
assuming that what was surely safe for them was safe enough for him, he
sauntered down the line, attempting to seem careless in his walk, until
he reached the gang which was busy at destruction of a high, obstructive
cropping of grey granite.

For hours he sat there watching them with curiosity. He saw them pierce
the rocks with hammered drills; he saw them then put in a small, round,
harmless looking paper cylinder which, of course, he knew held something
like gunpowder; he saw them tamp it down with infini