rawn from the life of his father, struggle to keep the
value or the land unknown to the "natives." Squire Hawkins confides to
his wife that the "black stuff that crops out on the bank of the branch"
was coal, and tells of his effort to keep a neighbor from building a
chimney out of it.

"Why it might have caught fire and told everything. I showed him it was
too crumbly. Then he was going to build it of copper ore--splendid
yellow forty per-cent ore. There's fortunes upon fortunes upon our land!
It scared me to death. The idea of this fool starting a smelting furnace
in his house without knowing it and getting his dull eyes opened. And
then he was going to build it out of iron ore! There's mountains of iron
here, Nancy, whole mountains of it. I wouldn't take any chance, I just
stuck by him--I haunted him--I never let him alone until he built it of
mud and sticks, like all the rest of the chimneys in this dismal
country."

Again "Squire Hawkins'" appreciation of the speculative value of his
lands is shown in a talk with his wife:

"The whole tract would not sell for even over a third of a cent an acre
now, but some day people will be glad to get it for twenty dollars,
fifty dollars, a hundred dollars an acre." (Here he dropped his voice to
a whisper and looked anxiously around to see there were no
eavesdroppers--"a thousand dollars an acre!")

To-day many of the acres owned by Coonrod Pile and John M. Clemens have
passed the hundred-dollar mark and are climbing toward that whispered
and seemingly fabulous figure. And this, too, before the coming of the
railroad for which "Squire Hawkins" could not wait.

Twain delighted to have "Squire Hawkins" sit upon "the pyramid of large
blocks called the stile, in front of his home, contemplating the
morning." But John M. Clemens had his practical side, and the
specifications for the first jail for Fentress county, drawn by Clemens
and in his own handwriting made part of the county's records in 1827,
show a very substantial strain:

"To wit, for a jail, a house of logs hewed a foot square, twelve feet in
the clear, two stories high, and this surrounded by another wall
precisely of the same description, with a space between the two walls of
about eight or ten inches, and that space filled completely with skinned
hickory poles, the ground floor to be formed of sills hewed about a foot
square and laid closely .... the logs to extend through the inner wall
of the building"--etc.