The grizzly old surveyor saw naught of this,--not even when, in advance of all the company, he threaded the sun-glinted green glade, and strode almost in the midst of a bevy of white gauze-draped fleeing figures. Nor his chain-bearers, young though they were, and presumably impressionable,--not even when they rose from their alternate genuflections, and their sudden call "Out!" resounded on the air, though they stood idle and looked about them while the surveyor paused to mark the "out." Nor Cap'n Lucy, as light and swift on his feet as the youngest, fierce, jaunty, with his clear, defiant eye. Nor Rodolphus Ross, finding great opportunity for mirth behind Cap'n Lucy's back as he scuffled along amongst the knot of spectators, keeping up as best they might, skirting the barriers that the surveyor and his chain-bearers, constrained by duty, went over, and tumbling, pulling, and struggling with each other now and then for the best and foremost place. "Look at old Cap'n Tems!" cried Ross. "Ain't he the very model of a game rooster? He ain't big, an' he ain't strong, an' he ain't heavy, but Lord! how he thinks he is!" Nor Kenneth Kenniston, beginning to pause now and again,--albeit he did not flag, despite the hard pull over the impracticable ground, for he was a man of stalwart physique and a practiced pedestrian,--to look instead at the memorandum of the calls of the title-deed, which original paper the surveyor held in his hand, in doubt at first, in growing dismay, then in hot and mounting anger. At the next "out," when the surveyor set down his Jacob's staff, Kenniston strode over and tapped him somewhat imperatively on the shoulder. "My good friend," he said, with an evident effort at self-repression, "are you not making some mistake? You surely are not following the calls as they are set forth in these papers?" To the professor of an exact science the suggestion of mistake is an imputation of incapacity. The claims of the quid of tobacco were disregarded for the nonce. The surveyor spoke, albeit with his mouth full, and spoke to the point:-- "I reckon I know what I'm about, Mr. Kenn'ston. If you don't like the way I'm runnin' this line, run it yerse'f." "The blazes on those trees on the side of the mountain, that you called my attention to, indicating the old line, are away over yonder on that sharp ridge." Kenniston waved his hand with the paper in it toward a high rocky crest to the left; then he fixed insistent eyes on the surveyor, and stroked his full brown whiskers mechanically with the other hand. The surveyor followed with perplexed eyes the direction pointed out. He gave a little puzzled sniff, as if he sought to smell the line. Then he reverted to that prop of common sense, his Jacob's staff.