he train would stop
at the end of the crude ballasting.

Lorey sat there on his stump, apparently impassive, watching all this
flurry with resentful, discontented eyes. He himself was infinitely
curious about the coming train; but he could not bring himself to go to
see it. He had never seen a railway train, but it somehow seemed to him
that if he hurried with the rest to meet this one it would mean a
certain sacrifice of dignity in the face of the invading conqueror. He
sat there, grimly wondering what it might be like, what the people whom
it brought were like, until, suddenly, he discovered that he was alone.
The last workman yielding to temptation, free from supervision for the
moment, had run down the bank to meet the train, get mail, see who had
come. Lying not a dozen feet away from Joe on their grey blanket were
the sticks of dynamite.

Lithe, quick and silent as one of the mountain wild-cats he had so often
trailed through his domain, he slipped down from his stump, caught up a
stick of the explosive, tucked it carefully into his game-bag, took his
place again upon the stump, impassive, calm, apparently quite unexcited.

When the men came trooping back, opening letters, tearing wrappers from
their newspapers, gossipping, he still sat on the stump as they had left
him. Not one of them suspected that he once had left it.

"Bright and lively as a cigar-store Indian," he heard one care-free
youth exclaim as he went by him.

He did not know what the man meant; he had never seen a cigar-store
Indian; but he knew a jibe was meant. It did not anger him, as it would
have done, a few moments earlier. Now he had exacted his small tribute.
They could stare at him and jibe, if they were so inclined. Hidden
carefully there in his game-bag was one of their own weapons for their
fight against the wilderness, which, in course of time, might be a
weapon of the wilderness in fighting against some of them.

Presently he climbed down from the stump and strolled back along the raw
embankment toward the little group still standing near the train which
had arrived.

CHAPTER VII

The young moonshiner stiffened instantly as he neared the group of newly
arrived travellers, for the first word he heard from them was the name
of him whom, among all foreigners, he hated with most bitterness. An old
darky, plainly the servant of the party, and such a darky as the
mountain country had never seen before, was inquiring of a byst