Kenniston lingered for a few minutes, still sweeping with the field-glass the rugged ravine where Wild Duck Falls gleamed white, swift, amidst the deep, dusky green shadows: disappearing beneath the approaching gray cloud as its filmy gauzes expanded and floated into the larger spaces of the ravine, then piercing its draperies with a keen, glimmering shaft of white light, and vanishing again as the cloud thickened and condensed in its passage through the narrowing limits of the gorge. He turned away at last, the glass still in his hand, following hard on the steps of the surveyor, marking all the successive stages of the proceedings with a keen, alert, inimical observation. He wore a grim, set face, and his manner expressed a sustained abeyance, watchfulness, and a dangerous readiness. The landmarks were such as were easily common to any line. When the deed had called for four hundred and fifteen poles northwest to a white oak-tree, the chain-bearers had brought up, without a link amiss, at the gnarled foot of one of a cluster of such trees. A half-obliterated indentation upon it the surveyor accepted as the specific mark of identification, although others considered it an old "blaze" indicating an ancient trail, and Kenniston declared it merely a "cat-face." Again, the line, diverging, ran due north eight hundred poles to a stake in the middle of Panther Creek. The chain found the middle easily enough, though not the stake, which was, of course, in the nature of things, a temporary mark, and liable to be carried away in a freshet, or broken down by floating logs or other obstruction. The stream, however, kept an almost perfectly straight line--barring the slight sinuous meandering inherent to a natural channel which did not affect the general direction--for more than a mile through a grassy glade almost free of undergrowth, purling along under the shadow of the great trees and rocks. Thus, if the previous markings were correct, this of necessity depended upon them. The surveyor had a stub driven down, in place of the missing stake, in the middle of the stream, re-marking the line according to the law. Once more the chain-bearers, dripping like spaniels from their excursions into the water, began their series of genuflections and their ringing outcry, "Stick!" "Stuck!"