Breakfast was eaten as heartily as though no one expected anything out of the ordinary that day—and no one did, except for Weaver and Wolfe; the laborers had sensed nothing of the barrier that awaited the little railroad at the basin's mouth.
Less than an hour later, the slow but powerful locomotive drew its string of lumber flats to a halt at a point near where the rails ended; it was a short distance below the Gate. The crew sprang to the ground, each man of it with a pick or a shovel, a spike-driving hammer or a crowbar, an ax or a saw. The work began forthwith.
Wolfe and his foreman walked ahead to the lower edge of the Gate, entrance to the forbidden land. They stopped near a slender young poplar that had been felled squarely across the trail during the night just gone; it reached from one side of the pass to the other, and it was strong testimony to the nice calculation of the person who had cut it. Weaver looked puzzled, then he faced Wolfe.
"Who did this?"
"This," Wolfe answered correctly, turning to his companion, "is the deadline."
"You mean your father——?"
"Nothing else." Wolfe picked up a leaf of transparent yellow, and began to tear it to pieces without even seeing it.
Weaver suddenly wheeled and looked off down the creek. "I wonder what's wrong back there?" he grumbled. "The boys have quit singing, and they don't do that when everything is moving along smoothly. Suppose we see if anything's happened; eh?"
He retraced his steps of a few minutes before, with Wolfe following at his heels. They found the crew, even to the engineer, standing grouped under a crooked water-oak; all their jaws were sagging, and all their eyes were staring upward.
Suspended by a white cord, some twenty feet from the ground, was a foot-square piece of cardboard which bore in pencil this crudely-printed warning: