The young general manager of the new Unaka Lumber Company began immediately the building of his toy railroad. Before twilight of the next day, more than a dozen tents had been staked on a level spot near where Wolfes Creek flowed under the C. C. & O., and the mountain air was filled with the songs of weary negro laborers. Early on the following morning, under the supervision of a young foreman named Weaver, the narrow roadbed began to creep toward the basin. The hills everlastingly rang with the staccato of the axe, the keen tenor of the saw, and the low bass thunder of exploding dynamite as tree after tree and ledge after ledge of stone fell victims of the hand of progress. Late in the afternoon of the day following, Wolfe left the work entirely in charge of his foreman, and started to Johnsville for news. No person had passed by way of the trail that led down the creek from Devil's Gate, but those for whom he had been watching might possibly have taken another trail. He found no news awaiting him in Johnsville. Nothing more had been seen or heard of the Singletons or of Mayfield. Wolfe feared that some evil had befallen Tot. Before he went to bed that night, he decided that he would be in the hills at daybreak on a search for her. Colonel Mason wished to accompany his foster-son, but he awoke too late. Whereupon he gallantly wagered his wife a silk dress against a peach pie that he would overtake Arnold before he reached Devil's Gate--and he won the peach pie. VIII A slender, barefooted feminine figure in a torn and bedraggled, blue-dotted calico dress stood motionless behind the twisted body of a wind-swept jackpine on the crest of a baby mountain miles from Wolfe's Basin. Her face was thin from starving, and her coppery hair matted and tangled, but in the depths of her blue eyes there was fire. An Army-type revolver hung heavily from her right hand. Over her heart shone an officer's shield. She was slyly watching the side of another baby mountain, on the crest of which lay lightly the dying, golden summer sun. The yellow disc sank out of sight, and shadows began to thicken in the valley before her. Still she stood motionless behind the wind-swept pine, too full of her purpose to sit down and rest. Darkness came on out of the east, and a little brown owl somewhere below her cried a mournful welcome to it. A nighthawk cut the air over her head with its knife-sharp wings; its shriek was like the dying note of a steamer's siren. From far across the other mountain came the shrill sound of a panther's scream, imitating the call of a woman in mortal distress. Then there was silence, a deep and awesome silence. The earth, the sky, and all between, formed one vast and hollow loneliness. But Tot did not feel it. She herself was loneliness.