Dannie was tired and disheartened. He looked away toward the gap and wished, with all his heart, that he might see Gran’pap coming up the road toward home. Some one, indeed, was coming from out the shadows of the rocks, but it was not Gran’pap. It was a small, black-whiskered man, carrying an engineer’s transit. When he was well out from the mouth of the gap he set up his instrument and adjusted it, and peered through the telescope, first back into the shadows of the cañon, and then ahead toward the graveyard, into the sacred enclosure of which the flagman, with his signal pole, was already advancing. “Look, Gabriel!” exclaimed Dannie, “look! What are they doing?” Gabriel gave a quick glance toward the gap. “It’s the new railroad,” he said. “Sure as eternity, it’s the new railroad!” The chainmen were now in sight, measuring off the distances. The flagman, standing in the very centre of the graveyard and looking back to the transitman, was holding his pole on the ground and balancing it with his hands to keep it plumb. Gabriel had dropped his hoe, Dannie had thrust his hands savagely into his trousers pockets, and both stood gazing with wide eyes on the animated scene. “W’at under the canopy Abner Pickett’ll say to that is more’n I’d like to wager on!” exclaimed Gabriel. “Think of it, Dan! A railroad right up through yer gran’pap’s gap; right up through yer gran’pap’s road an’ crick; right up through--bust my bellus ef ’tain’t a comin’ right up through yer gran’pap’s graveyard!” Dannie set his teeth tight and jammed his fists deeper into his trousers pockets as he saw an engineer’s assistant drive a stake on the graveyard eminence halfway between the fluted column and the roadside wall. He had learned to hold the burial plot in scarcely less reverence than did the old man himself; and to see it trespassed on in this fashion roused all his ire. But the trespass was so audacious that, looking on it as he did, he could neither move nor speak. The engineers were evidently in some haste. They were setting their line of stakes along the narrow strip of land between the creek and the public road. Already the leveller and the rodman were in sight, following up the location, and the transitman had advanced along the road to a point opposite the potato field where the valley widened and the land began to slope more gently to the north and west. He leaped the fence lightly and came to within twenty feet of where Dannie and Gabriel were standing. “Hello!” said Gabriel. “Hello!” replied the stranger. “Runnin’ a railroad?” “Yes. Do you own the place?” “No; but I work fer the man ’at does, an’ I’m thinkin’ it wouldn’t be right healthy fer ye ef he was in sight.” The stranger laughed a little, showing a row of very white teeth. “Don’t he want a railroad through his place?” “Not ef the court knows herself, he don’t, nor through his gap nuther.” “Does he own that gap?” “Ain’t nobody else owned it fer forty year.”