"They blew the bridge at Alapaha last night," she told him, as he rubbed melted resin on the blisters. Henry could understand much that she said by this time, if she spoke slowly and distinctly. He nodded.
"You keep this here and use it," he ordered, oiling the cylinder and loading it deftly. "Gun ain't no good if you're scart of it. And if that soldier down there gives you any sass you pop him over, too. I don't like the look of him, no time—he's too blame' smart."
A slow color crept over Mary Hill's face at this, and with it a crawling chill was communicated to old Henry's heart. There was a rift—tiny, almost imperceptible, yet appalling to the lonely old man to whom the friendship of this girl had come to be such a tremendous thing. Her eyes avoided his for an instant, then the dancing laughter came into them again. She laid the grim gun down on the back steps and snatched at the old man's hand. Henry knew what she wanted—to see that cherry tree. She had bought it for him from a fruit tree peddler and they had watched the opening of every bud. It ought to be in bloom today—every flower open. They hurried past the pie-plant row and the humming beehives. At the fence old Henry Hornbone halted, aghast. He wavered a bit, and then black, militant wrath darkened his face.
The little cherry tree was bent sideways, half stripped of its bark, wilted, trampled. And beside it, driven grimly into the ground was a very new white post, very blatantly lettered in black—"B. & A. RAILROAD. RIGHT OF WAY."
Henry had not sworn an oath since his closing ears had shut from him the sound of his own voice. But now he swore, shrilly, horribly. He sprang at the white post, wrenching and tugging at it, but it had been sledged into the soil by strong men. It did not budge a fraction. The girl's face was a pained mask of wretchedness. She had known that they were condemning a new right of way; that eventually, when the menace of the strike was removed, that the division was to be double-tracked, but she had not thought that it would mean this—the destruction of an old man's pitiful little interest, the ruthless slaughtering of the few simple things that made up life to old Henry, who was denied so much of life.
"Oh—shame! Shame!" she cried aloud. But old Henry did not hear. He was fairly dancing in his rage, he shook his fist at the blinking lines of track, he breathed dreadful threats. War was on again—relentless war against the B. & A. He hardly saw Mary Hill. He scarcely knew when she went away. He was busy with mallet and sledge battering that intruding post out of the ground. By dark he had loosened it and flung it over the fence on the right of way. And next morning he did not go down to the station. He worked doggedly all day, building a high barrier of barbed wire across the back of his place.
The road's lawyer battered at his front door in vain. The postman brought a letter containing a condemnation notice and a check, but the letter lay under the front door for three days before Henry found it. Then he dropped it in the kitchen stove without opening it, and renewed his grim vendetta.
The night the bridge at Hodges was destroyed he felt a gleeful satisfaction, as though he himself had planted the charge under the pillars. He tramped out to the wrecked bridge in the morning, avoiding the right of way cannily, gloating over every twisted rail and fallen cross-tie, grinning his grin which had taken on a warped and sinister grimness. When he came back the fence he had built so laboriously was down, flung carelessly over the beehives and against the shed. In his garden—what little the road had left to him—stood a tall, narrow, yellow building.
It was a block signal tower—two stories high, flashing red and green target lights from its gables, looped about with wires, with glass windows and a locked door and about its base a wide area of piled cinders.