st these men who
came, with steam and pick and shovel, dynamite and railroad iron,
invading his domain.

He thought about his secret still, hidden in its mountain fastness, and
realized that this new stage of settlement's inexorable march meant
danger to it; he thought about the game which roamed the hills and
realized that with the coming of the crowd it would soon scatter, never
to return; he thought about the girl up there, his companion in
adversity, his fellow sufferer from mutual wrong, the one thing which he
had had to love, the shining prize which it had been his sole ambition
to possess for life; he thought of her and then about the man, who
(product of the same advantages which made these men before him clever
with their blue-prints and their puffling monsters) had come there
searching profit from the land which he had never loved or lived on,
and, seeing Madge, had, Joe thoroughly believed, exerted every wile of a
superior experience to win her from him by fair means or foul. He
thought of them and hated all of them!

He was a most unhappy mountaineer who sat there on the stump, impassive
and morose as the sun progressed upon its journey toward the western
horizon. All the organized activity in the scene about him filled him
with resentment and despair. In the hills he ever felt his strength:
they had presented in his whole lifetime few problems which he could not
cope with, conquer; but here in that construction camp he felt weak,
incompetent, saw full many a puzzling matter which he could not
understand. He watched the scene with bitter but with almost hopeless
eyes. These new forces working here at railroad building, working in the
hills to rob him of the girl he loved, seemed pitilessly strong and
terribly mysterious. He never had felt helpless in all his life, before.
It made him grind his teeth with rage.

But, though it angered him, the tense activity of the construction camp
was fascinating, too. Especially was his attention held spellbound by
the ruthless work of the advancing blasting gangs. What power lay hidden
in those tiny sticks of dynamite! How lightly one of them had tossed
that poor unfortunate in air and left him lying mangled, broken,
helpless on the ground when it had spent its fury! _What a weapon one of
them would make, upon occasion_!

This thought grew rapidly in his depressed and agitated mind. What a
weapon, what a weapon! Presently the blasting gangs and what they did
absorbed