“I heard Mr. Scribner telling, the other day,” said Dimond, “how the boss run up against a farmer with a shotgun when he was running the line for the M. T. S. Mr. Scribner was a boy then, carrying stakes for him. There was quite a bunch of ’em, but nobody had a gun. They come out of a piece of woods on to the road, and there they see the farmer standing just inside his stump fence with the two barrels of his shotgun resting on the top of one of the stumps. Mr. Scribner says the old fellow was that excited he hollered so they could ‘a’ heard ’im half a mile off. ‘Don’t you dare cross the line of my property!’ he yells. ‘The first man that crosses the line of my property’s a dead man!’ They all stopped, Mr. Scribner says, for they didn’t any of ’em feel particularly like taking in a barrel or so of buckshot. But Mr. Carhart wasn’t ever very easy to stop. He just looked at the fellow a minute, and then he went right for him. ‘Look out!’ the man yells. ‘You cross the line of my property and you’re a dead man!’ But Mr. Carhart went right on over the fence. ‘That’s all right,’ says he, ‘but you can’t get away with more’n one or two of us, and there’ll be enough left to hang you up to that tree over there.’ And the next thing they knew, Mr. Scribner says, Mr. Carhart had took the shotgun right out of the farmer’s hands.” Dimond had other stories. “I guess there ain’t nobody ever found it easy to get around him. Once when he was a kid surveyor, before he went North, they sent him over into southern Texas to look up an old piece of property. There was a fellow claimed a lot of land that really run over on to this property. Mr. Carhart figured it out that the fellow was lying, but he knew it was going to be hard to prove it. The old marks of the corners were all gone--there wasn’t a soul living who had ever seen ’em. It was an old Spanish grant, Mr. Scribner says, and the Spanish surveyors had just blazed trees to mark the lines. Well, sir, would you believe it, Mr. Carhart worked out the place where this corner ought ‘o be, cut down an old cedar tree that stood there, sawed it up into lengths before witnesses, found the blaze mark all grown over with bark, and took the piece of log right into court and proved it. No, I guess it wouldn’t be so infernal easy to get ahead o’ Mr. Carhart.” “That’s all right,” observed one of the laborers, “if you’re working for Mr. Carhart. But s’pose you ain’t--s’pose you’re workin’ for Mr. Vandervelt?” “Oh, well, of course,” Dimond replied, “Mr. Vandervelt’s different. He ain’t nowhere near the man Mr. Carhart is.” Charlie took in this comment quietly, but with less than the usual good nature in his blue eyes. “I don’t care how decent the boss is,” continued the laborer, “if I have to have a mean old he-devil cussin’ at me from six to six, and half the night besides, sometimes.”