community, his pretensions in
the dust, his pitiful imposture unmasked. And beyond these aesthetic
misfortunes, the substantial emoluments of "keepin' store," with a
gallant sufficiency of arithmetic to regulate prices and profits, were
vanishing like the elusive matutinal haze before the noontide sun.
Nehemiah Yerby groaned aloud, for the financial stress upon his
spirit was very like physical pain. And in this inauspicious moment he
bethought himself of the penalties of violating the Internal Revenue
Laws of the United States.

Now it has been held by those initiated into such mysteries that there
is scant affinity between whiskey and water. Nevertheless, in this
connection, Nehemiah Yerby developed an absorbing interest in the
watercourses of the coves and adjacent mountains, especially their more
remote and sequestered tributaries. He shortly made occasion to meet the
county surveyor and ply him with questions touching the topography of
the vicinity, cloaking the real motive under the pretence of an interest
in water-power sufficient and permanent enough for the sawing of lumber,
and professing to contemplate the erection of a saw-mill at the most
eligible point. The surveyor had his especial vanity, and it was
expressed in his frequent boast that he carried a complete map of
the county graven upon his brain; he was wont to esteem it a gracious
opportunity when a casual question in a group of loungers enabled him to
display his familiarity with every portion of his rugged and mountainous
region, which was indeed astonishing, even taking into consideration his
incumbency for a number of terms, aided by a strong head for locality.
Nehemiah Yerby's scheme was incalculably favored by this circumstance,
but he found it unexpectedly difficult to support the figment which he
had propounded as to his intentions. Fiction is one of the fine arts,
and a mere amateur like Nehemiah is apt to fail in point of consistency.
He was inattentive while the surveyor dilated on the probable value,
the accessibility, and the relative height of the "fall" of the various
sites, and their available water-power, and he put irrelevant queries
concerning ineligible streams in other localities. No man comfortably
mounted upon his hobby relishes an interruption. The surveyor would stop
with a sort of bovine surprise, and break out in irritable parenthesis.

"That branch on the t'other side o' Panther Ridge? Why, man alive, that
thread o' water w