leave mere splinters!

His thoughts roamed back to his home mountains and pondered on the
probable effect of this incursion on his personal affairs. Not satisfied
with tearing up the placid valley, these foreigners would, presently,
invade the very mountains in their turn. He saw the doom of that small,
hidden still which had been his father's secret, years ago, was now his
secret from the prying eyes of law and progress. That the "revenuers,"
soon or late, would get it, now that their allies were building steel
highways to swarm on, was inevitable. His heart beat fast with a new
anger, anticipatory of their coming to his fastness.

Lying not six feet from him as he sat there thinking bitterly of all
these things, the foreman of the blasting gang had gingerly deposited a
dozen sticks of dynamite upon a soft cushion of grey blankets. Joe
looked at them as they lay there, innocent and unimpressive. If he had
some of them in the hills and the revenuers came to raid his still--

The thought sprang into being in his mind with lightning quickness and
grew there with mushroom growth. Never in his life had Lorey stolen
anything, although the government would have classed him as a criminal
because he owned that hidden still. His standards, in some things, were
different from yours and mine, but he had never stolen anything and
scorned as low beyond the power of words to tell a man who would. But
now temptation came to him. He wanted some of that explosive. Should he
buy it, its purchase by a mountaineer would certainly attract attention
and might thus precipitate the very thing he wished to ward away--a
watch of him, and, through that espionage, discovery of his secret place
among the hills. And were not the railroad and the men who owned it
robbing him by their progression into his own country? They were robbing