But he did not stop here. He had no thought of doing so. He was flushed with his triumph, and the spirit of destruction was aflame in his breast. Following down the line of survey, he drew stake after stake from the yielding soil, and consigned them all to the mercy of the stream. Already he had entered the gap. The full moon that shone down between the precipitous walls of the gorge made the road that wound along the base of the northerly cliff almost as light as day. For half a mile there was scarcely room for the road and the brook to pass through, so narrow was the space between the towering heights on either side. Some of the stakes indeed were set in the bed of the stream, while others encroached on the travelled track of the highway. Some of them, in the shadow of rock or tree or bush, Dannie had to search to find. But not one escaped his vigilance--not one. And when, at last, he emerged from the gap and came out on the eastern face of the ridge that flanked the Delaware, he had not left a mark or a monument behind him to indicate that a corps of engineers had ever passed that way. Here the road forks; one branch going to the north and reaching Port Lenox, the up-river town, the other descending rapidly to the village of Fisher’s Eddy on the south. But the brook, unchecked, goes straight on, down the rugged hillside, churned into foam, dashed into spray, leaping from rock to rock, losing itself at last in the slow-moving flood of the Delaware. Dannie stood for a moment looking out over the broad valley and the shining river, and down at the few twinkling lights of the village to the south. Then he turned again to his yet uncompleted task. The line of survey followed the public road to the north, keeping somewhat above it in its descent, and for nearly half a mile farther the boy had no trouble in finding the stakes, tearing them from their beds and flinging them down the steep declivity into the tangle of rocks and brushwood below. When he had gone to the limit of his grandfather’s land, he stopped and turned back. He was tired. He did not know how late it might be. He felt that he must hurry home. So he hastened up the road, along the easterly face of the hillside now falling into shadow, and entered the mouth of the gorge. Between the great rock faces, now bright in the moonlight, now dark in the shade, he trudged wearily. When he was halfway through the glen, he heard the sound of voices ahead of him. He stood still and listened. Men were talking in subdued tones. There was a splash in the water, the crackling of dry brush, the tapping of wood as though some one were driving stakes, the clinking of steel as though a chain were being dragged along the ground. Then, from behind a projecting ledge, a man advanced into the moonlight, and, before Dannie, in his surprise and fear, could either speak or run, the light of a lantern was flashed into his face. CHAPTER IV