As Henry approached, this young soldier motioned him away, jauntily, with the butt of an Army Colt. Henry burst into a shrill, cackling invective. The young soldier laughed. Henry retreated, presently, a long procession of cats trailing after. But for once he was too troubled, too tremulous with fury to heed the purring friendliness of his yellow-eyed family. The cats lingered in astonishment, but Henry, sagged forward on his doorstep, his eyes fixed on that tall, sulphur-hued intruder with the red and green eye in his garden, paid no attention to them. For once a pampered tribe of feline pensioners went supperless, offended and aloof. Half the night, while the spring frogs came out and fiddled and the switch-engines hooted up and down, unheard, Henry Hornbone sat at his back door smoldering. Then a reckless idea leaped at him out of the dark, making his slow blood tingle by its very audacity. The sight of the switch engine, panting idly like a fat old hippopotamus with one eye, on the siding beyond his outraged fence inspired a wild scheme for vengeance which drove every vestige of sleep from his tired brain. "I'll learn 'em," he said aloud. "I'll learn 'em so they'll stay learnt! I got to get me a chain. I got to have a long chain and a wire cable. And I've got to get that feller away from there. I've got to--if I have to knock him in the head." He remembered then where he had seen a tangled length of cable--down at Hodges where the bridge had been destroyed. It would be risky business getting it; there would be guards and they were touchy and apt to shoot. But somehow he'd work it. A stout wire cable, fastened swiftly around that block tower, a chain reaching to the tender of the switch engine--and the B. & A. would move that offending building from his land themselves! It was a wild, fantastic plan, but the very difficulties it involved served to rouse old Henry from his lethargy of shocked rage. He pulled his hat low over his ears and slipped out the front way, following the right of way toward Hodges. He knew where the cable lay, tangled in the bottom of a ravine, where it was dark and propitious. Getting the young soldier away from the tower would be the problem. Henry considered various expedients, from setting his own house on fire to cold-blooded murder. He neared the scene of the wreck, where he could see the dangling ruin of the bridge bristling like a ship with lanterns. He could feel the down thud of hammers, as the hastily drafted maintenance crews attacked the wreckage. He crept close through a damp tangle of last year's grass, and it was then that he discovered the two men who, like himself approached cautiously. They kept just ahead of him, heads down, bodies low in the weeds.