But what, alack, had befallen Cap'n Lucy? Did ever a gamecock, that had never so much as felt his adversary's gaff, drop his feathers so suddenly? He was all at once old, tired, anxious, troubled. He tugged along at the rear of the party, lagging and flagging as he had never done on certain forced marches that had seemed a miracle of endurance. For Cap'n Lucy's frame had been upborne by his spirit in those ordeals, and now that ethereal valiance had deserted him. For what mystery was this? The moving of the monument of boundary "known as the Big Hollow Boulder"--he thought of it thus for the first time without the sneer of inscrutable offense which the rotund phrasing had occasioned--had, instead of stripping him of his possessions, resulted in throwing much land, which he doubted not belonged to his neighbor, within his own lines. That Kenniston had himself moved the corner landmark or connived at the commission of this felony, if not otherwise preposterous, was thus rendered absolutely incredible. But who, then, could have moved it? When? How? For what unimaginable reason? How strange that he should have discovered the change! And what mad freak of fate was it that it should be he, he himself, who should profit by it, acquiring the legal title to hundreds of acres at Kenniston's expense? Cap'n Lucy was an honest man, and the thought made him gasp. Had it been possible, he would at that moment have flung all the Great Smoky Mountains at Kenniston's feet. No recantation was too bitter, no renunciation was too complete, rather than be suspected, with any show of reason, as he had suspected Kenniston. Not that he cared for the groundless suspicion, but for its justification. This consideration summoned his tardy policy. He must needs have time to think. Were he bluntly to declare the corner-stone to have been moved, it might seem to criminate himself; for albeit the line was running to his advantage here, who could say how its divergences might affect his possessions lower down on the mountain? "Windin' an' a-twistin' like the plumb old tarnation sarpient o' hell!" Cap'n Lucy vigorously described it in a mutter to his beard. Moreover, even if the later results were also to his benefit, as it had been notoriously contrary to his wishes that the land should be processioned at all, it might seem that moving the boulder had been his scheme to thus thwart any definite establishment of the line of boundary,--and this was a felony.