y averted. Purdee often glanced toward
him gloweringly, his head held, nevertheless, a little askance, as if he
rejected the very sight. There was the fire of a desperate intention
in his eyes. Looking at his face, shaded by his broad-brimmed hat, one
could hardly have doubted now whether it expressed most ferocity or
force. His breath came quick--the bated breath of a man who watches and
waits for a supreme moment. His blue jeans coat was buttoned close about
his sun-burned throat, where the stained red handkerchief was knotted.
He wore a belt with his powder-horn and bullet-pouch, and carried his
rifle on his shoulder; the hand that held it trembled, and he tried to
quell the quiver. "I'll prove it fust, an' kill him arterward--kill him
arterward," he muttered.

In the other hand he held a yellowed old paper. Now and then he bent his
earnest dark eyes upon the grant, made many a year ago by the State
of Tennessee to his grandfather; for there had been no subsequent
conveyances.

The blacksmith had come begirt with his leather apron, his shirt-sleeves
rolled up, and with his hammer in his hand, an inopportune customer
having jeopardized his chance of sharing in the sensation of the day.
The other neighbors all wore their coats closely buttoned. Blinks
carried his violin hung upon his back; the sharp timbre of the wind,
cutting through the leafless boughs of the stunted woods, had a kindred
fibrous resonance. Clouds hung low far beneath them; here and there, as
they looked, the trees on the slopes showed above and again below the
masses of clinging vapors. Sometimes close at hand a peak would reveal
itself, asserting the solemn vicinage of the place, then draw its
veil slowly about it, and stand invisible and in austere silence. The
surveyor, a stalwart figure, his closely buttoned coat giving him a
military aspect, looked disconsolately downward.

"I hoped I'd die before this," he remarked. "I'm equal to getting over
anything in nature that's flat or oblique, but the vertical beats me."

He bent to take sight for a moment, the group silently watching him.
Suddenly he came to the perpendicular, and strode off down the rugged
slope over gullies and bowlders, through rills and briery tangles, his
eyes distended and eager as if he were led into the sylvan depths by the
lure of a vision. The chain-bearers followed, continually bending and
rising, the recurrent genuflections resembling the fervors of some
religious rite.