He was a most unhappy mountaineer who sat there on the stump, impassive
and morose as the sun progressed upon its journey toward the western
horizon. All the organized activity in the scene about him filled him
with resentment and despair. In the hills he ever felt his strength:
they had presented in his whole lifetime few problems which he could not
cope with, conquer; but here in that construction camp he felt weak,
incompetent, saw full many a puzzling matter which he could not
understand. He watched the scene with bitter but with almost hopeless
eyes. These new forces working here at railroad building, working in the
hills to rob him of the girl he loved, seemed pitilessly strong and
terribly mysterious. He never had felt helpless in all his life, before.
It made him grind his teeth with rage.

But, though it angered him, the tense activity of the construction camp
was fascinating, too. Especially was his attention held spellbound by
the ruthless work of the advancing blasting gangs. What power lay hidden
in those tiny sticks of dynamite! How lightly one of them had tossed
that poor unfortunate in air and left him lying mangled, broken,
helpless on the ground when it had spent its fury! _What a weapon one of
them would make, upon occasion_!

This thought grew rapidly in his depressed and agitated mind. What a
weapon, what a weapon! Presently the blasting gangs and what they did
absorbed his whole attention. He no longer paid the slightest heed to
the puffing locomotives, busy with their dump-cars, to the mysterious
steam-shovel, to the hand cars with their pumping, flying passengers.
The dynamite was greater than the greatest of them. One stick of it, if
properly applied, would blow a locomotive into junk, would tear a
dump-car, with its massive iron-work and grinding wheels, apart and