“Come in to court! Come in to court!” and the motley loiterers below began to clatter up the broad stairs and fall into the seats. Joe Bartell, a short, thick-set man in the neighborhood of fifty, with a florid face and a shock of reddish hair, led about twenty men up the aisle to the jury-benches at the right of the stand. They were the land-owners whose consent to grant the right of way was asked. Stern opposition was clearly written on the leader's brow and more or less distinctly reflected on the varying faces of his followers. “Ef we needed it, it ud be a different matter,” Miller overheard him say in a sudden lull, as the big room settled down into sudden quiet, “but we kin do without it. We've got along so fur an' we kin furder. All of us has got good teams.” Wilson, in his crisp, brusque way, made the opening speech. He told his hearers just what his company proposed to do and in much the same cold-blooded way as he would have dictated a letter to his stenographer, correctly punctuating the text by pauses, and yet, in his own way, endeavoring to be eloquent. He and his capital were going to dispel darkness where it had reigned since the dawn of civilization; people living there now would not recognize the spot ten years from the day the first whistle of a locomotive shrilled through those rocky gorges and rebounded from those lofty peaks--silent fingers pointing to God and speaking of a past dead and gone. All that was needed, he finished, was the consent of the property-owners appealed to; who, he felt confident, would not stand in their own light. They looked like intelligent men, and he believed they did not deceive appearances. He had hardly taken his seat when Joe Bartell stood up. Alan and Miller exchanged ominous glances. They had at once recognized the inappropriateness of Wilson's speech, and did not like the white, twitching sneer on Bartell's smooth-shaven face. It was as if Bartell had been for a long time seeking just such an opportunity to make himself felt in the community, and there was no doubt that Wilson's almost dictatorial speech had made a fine opening for him.