These thoughts were significant enough. He had seen this vast property of his only once before in all the years that it had been in his possession. It had descended to him in due course, with the rest of the paternal estate, at the death of his father, who had been a successful merchant of Bretonville. He had had some little but well-restrained inclination for speculation, and these miles of mountain fastnesses were a single instance of it, looking to the future development of mineral resources. The abandoned mine in the gorge expressed the failure of hopes of silver and lead, which had led him only for a little while and only a short distance. He himself had never laid eyes on his purchase; but once, in a college vacation, the son, on a pedestrian tour, had explored to some purpose the woods up and down these steeps and across the line. Kenniston remembered now for the first time how the face of the country had impressed him then, for the fire-scald had so altered its aspect. The slope where the quaint little ante-Revolutionary house was perched had then seemed high and steep. In building anew, Luther Tems had selected a site on more level ground, considerably removed from the area of the burnt district. Possibly the fear of disaster when those blackened and decaying trees should finally complete their doom and fall, or the vicinage of springs for the essential water supply for man and beast, had served to influence his decision; but he had certainly made a very considerable journey from his former situation, and cut a large cantle out of the Cove in his present settlement. Kenniston's mind was hard upon the trail of the boundary lines, as his absorbed eyes dwelt on the red fire. They were ill defined in his memory, for when the great body of a man's land, numbering thousands of acres, bears a merely nominal price, a few furlongs amiss here or there in the wild jungle of the laurel are hardly worth the counting. In this particular instance the accuracy of metes and bounds made a difference all apart from actual values. It was his recollection that his lines included all those slopes to the "backbone," a high craggy ridge that ran like a spinal column adown the mountain mass. If this were the case, old Tems had inadvertently set up his staff of rest on his neighbor's land, was himself a mere trespasser, and might be ejected without difficulty in due process of law.