Wolfe and his foreman walked ahead to the lower edge of the Gate, entrance to the forbidden land. They stopped near a slender young poplar that had been felled squarely across the trail during the night just gone; it reached from one side of the pass to the other, and it was strong testimony to the nice calculation of the person who had cut it. Weaver looked puzzled, then he faced Wolfe. "Who did this?" "This," Wolfe answered correctly, turning to his companion, "is the deadline." "You mean your father----?" "Nothing else." Wolfe picked up a leaf of transparent yellow, and began to tear it to pieces without even seeing it. Weaver suddenly wheeled and looked off down the creek. "I wonder what's wrong back there?" he grumbled. "The boys have quit singing, and they don't do that when everything is moving along smoothly. Suppose we see if anything's happened; eh?" He retraced his steps of a few minutes before, with Wolfe following at his heels. They found the crew, even to the engineer, standing grouped under a crooked water-oak; all their jaws were sagging, and all their eyes were staring upward. Suspended by a white cord, some twenty feet from the ground, was a foot-square piece of cardboard which bore in pencil this crudely-printed warning: BLACK MAN DON'T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YE HEAR "Say, Boss Weaver, suh," inquired a dozen uneasy voices at once, "what do that mean, suh?" Weaver did not answer the question. He looked toward Wolfe. It was Wolfe's place to answer. But there was only silence. The driver of the locomotive approached the foreman then. "What them mountain people gwine do to us black men effen the sun go down on us heah, Boss Weaver, suh?" he asked frightenedly. [Illustration] Before Weaver could utter the "I don't know" that was on his tongue, there came from a point a few rods above in the laurel the keen report of a rifle. The white cord parted, and the piece of lettered cardboard fluttered to the ground. It was a forceful answer to the negro engineer's question. "Good marksman, all right," Weaver observed. "Stay right here until I come back, boys," ordered Wolfe. He hurried up the rugged steep, searched the laurel and the rocks, and saw no sign of any one. He climbed to the top of a huge boulder, and looked in all directions from that point of vantage. Then he saw a huge, gaunt man with a rifle under his arm step from the underbrush below and walk rapidly toward the settlement of the Wolfes. It was his iron-hearted father. "I thought so," he muttered. He went back to Weaver and the negroes. "I'll answer for your safety, boys, until the middle of the afternoon," he told the crew. It would require that long, he figured, to build the railroad to the deadline. "You know very well that you can trust me to keep my promises. Double pay from now on. Go to it."