he property owners. In the
meantime, nothing would be gained by making the contest a personal fight
on individuals.

So counseled Caleb Gordon, sure, always, of his own standing-ground in
any conflict. But from the last of the conferences the Major had ridden
home through the fields; and Thomas Jefferson, with an alert eye for
windstraws of conduct, had seen him dismount now and then to pull up and
fling away the locating stakes driven by the railroad engineers.

In such a contention, in an age wholly given over to progress, there
could be, one would say, no possible doubt of the outcome.

Giving the Major a second and a third chance to refuse to grant an
easement, the railroad company pushed its grading and track-laying
around the mountain and up to the stone wall marking the Dabney
boundary, quietly accumulated the necessary material, and on a summer
Sunday morning--Sunday by preference because no restraining writ could
be served for at least twenty-four hours--a construction train, black
with laborers, whisked around the nose of the mountain and dropped
gently down the grade to the temporary end of track.

It was Thomas Jefferson who gave the alarm. Little Zoar, unable to
support a settled pastor, was closed for the summer, but Martha Gordon
kept the fire spiritual alight by teaching her son at home. One of the
boy's Sunday privileges, earned by a faultless recitation of a
prescribed number of Bible verses, was forest freedom for the remainder
of the forenoon. It was while he was in the midst of the Beatitudes that
he heard the low rumble of the coming train, and it was only by
resolutely ignoring the sense of hearing that he was enabled to get
through, letter-perfect.

"'Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you and persecute you,'" he
chanted monotonously, with roving eyes bent on finding his cap with the
loss of the fewest possible seconds--"'and shall say all manner of evil
against you falsely, for my sake,'--and that's all." And he was off like
a shot.

"Mind, now, Thomas Jefferson; you are not to go near that railroad!" his
mother called to him as he raced down the path to the gate.

Oh, no; he would not go near the railroad! He would only run up the pike
and cut across through the Dabney pasture to see if the train were
really there.

It was there, as he could tell by the noise of hissing steam when the
cross-cut was reached. But the parked wooding of the pasture still
screened it. How near could he