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 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 him of peace and quiet, of the possibility of living on the life he had been born to and had learned to love!  One of the class which fostered him was robbing him, he feared with a great fear, of the sweet girl whom he loved better than he loved his life.  Surely it would be no sin, no act of real dishonesty for him to slip down from his stump when none was looking and secure a stick or two of the explosive!