Cap'n Lucy experienced a sudden affection of the spine which seemed to him abnormal, and, at the moment, possibly fatal, so curious, so undreamed of heretofore, were its symptoms. A cold chill trembled along its fibres; responsive cold drops bedewed his forehead. His hand had lost its normal temperature, and was cold to the touch. For the first time in all his life Cap'n Lucy's nerves were made acquainted with the shock of fear. He did not identify it; he could not recognize it. He was spared this acute mortification. He only felt strangely ill and undecided and tremulous, and he doubted his survival. He began to wonder if Kenniston suspected aught. He no longer questioned the genuineness of his enemy's demeanor earlier in the day, when each unexpected divergence of the line had seemed by turns to perturb and to anger him. Cap'n Lucy noted the cessation of the protestations, the grimly set jaw, the smouldering fire of the eye, the attitude of tense expectancy and waiting. He wondered if Kenniston were "laying for" him now as he had been "laying for" Kenniston. He thought of the intention deferred from "out" to "out" to loudly proclaim his discovery of the removal of the corner landmark, of his relish of his enemy's fancied security in outwitting him. He had only given Kenniston a little line, a little more, as it were, that he might hang himself with it, and now, forsooth, this noose was at his own service. He felt a moderate and tempered gratulation that he had not been precipitate in the matter, that as yet no one knew of his discovery; but suddenly he remembered his ill-starred confidence to Luther. For the first time he marked his son's furtive, skulking, downcast manner. "Like a sheep-killin' dog!" said Cap'n Lucy to himself, in a towering rage. "What ef he do know it's been moved: did I move it?" He remembered, too, his reiterated allusions to the perambulatory boulder, and Kenniston's amazement, which then he had thought affectation, but which he now believed to be quite genuine. Were they the exciting cause, so to speak, of that grim air of abeyance and biding his time? "The boulder can't be put back," said Cap'n Lucy to himself, suddenly on the defensive. "Nobody could make out whar it kem from fust, 'kase it never lef' a trace on the rock; an' a dozen horse couldn't haul it up sech a steep slope. It mus' hev been blowed down by dam-i-nite." It was a fine illustration of a moral descent, impossible to be retraced; but Cap'n Lucy did not think of that. His mind was full of the complications of his position, the dangers of disclosure, and the impossibility to him of accepting the boundary line, thus taking possession of another man's land, even if the owner would compose himself to sleep upon his rights. Judging from Kenniston's looks, it was easily to be argued that he would prove very wide awake in this emergency.