“Yon’s my reason, Mon,” says he solemn.  “Yon wee white stone.  Three bairns and the good wife lay under it.  I’m no sae youthful mysel’.  And when it’s time for me to go I’d be sleepin’ peaceful, with none o’ your rattlin’ trolley cars comin’ near.  That’s why, Mon.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ross,” says Percey J.  “I can appreciate your sentiments.  However, our line would run through the opposite side of your farm, away over there.  All we ask is a fifty-foot strip across your——­”

“You canna have it,” says Ross decided, insertin’ the pipe once more.

Which is where most of us would have weakened, I expect.  Not Mr. Sturgis.

“Just a moment, Friend Ross,” says he.  “I suppose you know I have the P., B. & R. back of me, and it’s more than likely that your neighbors have said things about us.  There is some ground for prejudice too.  Our recent stock deals look rather bad from the outside.  There have been other circumstances that are not in our favor.  But I want to assure you that this enterprise is a genuine, honest attempt to benefit you and your community.  It is my own.  It is part of the general policy of the road for which I am quite willing to be held largely responsible.  Why, I’ve had this project for a Palisades trolley road in mind ever since I came on here a poor boy, twenty-odd years ago, and took my first trip down the Hudson.  This ought to be a rich, prosperous country here.  It isn’t.  A good electric line, such as I propose to build, equipped with heavy passenger cars and running a cheap freight service, would develop this section.  It would open to the public a hundred-mile trip that for scenic grandeur could be equaled nowhere in this country.  Are you going to stand in the way, Mr. Ross, of an enterprise such as that?”

Yep, he was.  He puffs away just as mulish as ever.

“Of course,” goes on Percey, “it’s nothing to you; but the one ambition of my life has been to build this road.  I want to do for this district what some of our great railroad builders did for the big West.  I’m not a city-bred theorist, nor a Wall Street stock manipulator.  I was born in a one-story log house on a Minnesota farm, and when I was a boy we hauled our corn and potatoes thirty miles to a river steamboat.  Then the railroad came through.  Now my brothers sack their crops almost within sight of a grain elevator.  They live in comfortable houses, send their children to good schools.  So do their neighbors.  The railroad has turned a wilderness into a civilized community.  On a smaller scale here is a like opportunity.  If you will let us have that fifty-foot strip——­”

“Na, Mon, not an inch!” breaks in Ross.

How he could stick to it against that smooth line of talk I couldn’t see.  Why, say, it was the most convincin’, heart-throbby stuff I’d ever listened to, and if it had been me I’d made Percey J. a present of the whole shootin’ match.