"I doubt if I shall come, but Mr. Cornwall, who is to be our local attorney at Harlan, must return in a week or so to supervise the Brock and Helton surveys and will be making occasional trips to Pineville. After he becomes a better horseman you may see him occasionally riding on his own saddle horse, comfortably seated on a hard saddle and carrying his clothing and papers in a pair of saddle bags. Now he finds the trip tiresome, later he will find the ride exhilarating and your house a convenient resting place; am I right Cornwall?" "I desire to express my thanks and shall be glad of any opportunity to stop and see you again." "Here we are at the Salt Trace road; you follow it over the mountain to the river, then up the river valley to Poor Fork which you cross almost within sight of the town. Goodbye to both and good luck to Judge Cornwall; come again." Their road after crossing the mountains was up the Cumberland Valley, hemmed in on the north by the gracefully sloping spurs of Pine Mountain and flanked on the south by the more rugged and closely encroaching Cumberland mountains. The river gurgles and murmurs and surges along over a bottom of boulders or lies restfully placid over a bottom of sand. In these pool-like reaches many large rocks, shaken from the mountain tops in ages past, lift their gray heads high above the water and give to the scene a touch of rugged grandeur. The water is so clear that the natives climb into the overhanging elms or sycamores, or lie peering down from a jutting rock and do their fishing with a Winchester. About ten o'clock the travelers crossed the Poor Fork and fifteen minutes later rode into Harlan Town; and to the office of the company; a three-story red brick building fronting the court house square. CHAPTER III. CORNWALL LOCATES IN HARLAN. With the exception of a few counties in western Kentucky, no official survey was ever made of the state. In the unsurveyed portion grants for land issued by the Commonwealth varied in size from a few acres to as many as two hundred thousand; and called for natural objects as beginning and boundary corners. The result of such a lax system was that often the same boundary was covered by several grants; and the senior grant held the land. Many grants were so indefinite of description, the beginning corner calling for certain timber or a large stone in a heavily timbered and, in sections, rocky country, as to be impossible of identification or location. Other grants were so poorly surveyed as to be void for uncertainty and yet other boundaries were claimed by squatters who held by adverse possession against any paper title. A person owning the paper title to a thousand acre boundary traceable to the Commonwealth without break or flaw, might not be the owner in fact of a single acre of land; as the whole boundary might be covered by senior grants or the natural objects called for, impossible to find.