loved better than he loved his life. Surely it would be no sin, no
act of real dishonesty for him to slip down from his stump when none was
looking and secure a stick or two of the explosive!

Speciously he argued this out in his mind and reached the wrong
conclusion which he wished to reach.

If he could but get one of those sticks of dynamite! When progress came,
as, now, he felt convinced it would, to drive him from his mountains and
the still which made life possible to him, he could meet it, at the
start, with one of its own weapons. That, even though he had a hundred
such, he could fight the fight successfully, could, in the end, find
triumph, he did not for an instant think. The might of the encroaching
army had impressed him, and he knew that, soon or late, he would be
forced to yield to it; but he coveted those sticks of dynamite. One of
them would give him some slight power, at least. He acknowledged to
himself that he would steal one if he got the chance, despite his innate
hatred of all pilferers. Such theft would merely be the taking of an
unimportant tribute from the power which would, eventually, claim much,
indeed, from him.

From the distance came the screaming whistle of a locomotive pulling in
along the newly built roadway to eastward. It was followed by a flurry
of excitement among all the men at work around about him.

"There comes the mail," he heard one handsome young chap shout.

He wore a suit like that which Joe had learned to hate because Frank
Layson wore it.

This youth started running down the track, bright-eyed, expectant, and a
dozen others ran to follow him, leaving blue-prints, their surveyors'
instruments and other tokens of their mysterious might of education,
lying unheeded on the ground behind them. There was much excitement.
Even the rough laborers stopped delving at their tasks for a few
minutes, to straighten from their work and stand, with curious eyes
agaze down-track.

In the distance Joe saw smoke arise above the tops of the invaded
forest-trees. Then he heard the growing clangor of a locomotive's bell,
then other whistling and the approaching rumble of steel wheels upon
steel rails, the groan of brake shoes gripping, the rattle of contracted
couplings, the impact of car-bumpers.

The excitement grew among the working gangs. Even the laborers left
their tasks and started down the rough surface of the new embankment
toward the place, a quarter-of-a-mile away, where t