I am sure she began to realize, almost at the first, that she must rise superior to the Dabney weakness, which, as exemplified by the Major, was ungoverned, and perhaps ungovernable, temper.  At all events, she never forgot a summer day soon after her arrival when she first saw her grandfather transformed into a frenzied madman.

He was sitting on the wide portico, smoking his long-stemmed pipe and directing Japheth Pettigrass, who was training the great crimson-rambler rose that ran well up to the eaves.  Ardea, herself, was on the lawn, playing with her grandfather’s latest gift, a huge, solemn-eyed Great Dane, so she did not see the man who had dismounted at the gate and walked up the driveway until he was handing his card to her grandfather.

When she did see him, she looked twice at him; not because he was trigly clad in brown duck and tightly-buttoned service leggings, but because he wore his beard trimmed to a point, after the manner of the students in the Latin Quarter, and so was reminiscent of things freshly forsaken.

She had succeeded in making the Great Dane carry her on his back quite all the way around the circular coleus bed when the explosion took place.  There was a startling thunderclap of fierce words from the portico, and she slipped from the dog’s back and stared wide-eyed.  Her grandfather was on his feet, towering above the visitor as if he were about to fall on and crush him.

“Bring youh damned Yankee railroad through my fields and pastchuhs, suh?  Foul the pure, God-given ai-ah of this peaceful Gyarden of Eden with youh dust-flingin’, smoke-pot locomotives?  Not a rod, suh! not a foot or an inch oveh the Dabney lands!  Do I make it plain to you, suh?”

“But Major Dabney—­one moment; this is purely a matter of business; there is nothing personal about it.  Our company is able and willing to pay liberally for its right of way; and you must remember that the coming of the railroad will treble and quadruple your land values.  I am only asking you to consider the matter in a business way, and to name your own price.”

Thus the smooth-spoken young locating engineer in brown duck, serving as plowman for his company.  But there be tough old roots in some soils, roots stout enough to snap the colter of the commercializing plow,—­as, for example, in Paradise Valley, owned, in broken areas, principally by an unreconciled Major Dabney.

“Not anotheh word, or by Heaven, suh, you’ll make me lose my tempah!  You add insult to injury, suh, when you offeh me youh contemptible Yankee gold.  When I desiah to sell my birthright for youh beggahly mess of pottage, I’ll send a black boy in town to infawm you, suh!”

It is conceivable that the locating engineer of the Great Southwestern Railway Company was younger than he looked; or, at all events, that his experience hitherto had not brought him in contact with fire-eating gentlemen of the old school.  Else he would hardly have said what he did.