The Right of Way

• Watchlist

James Phillips' heart and soul are centered in the little graveyard adjoining his home, where he had laid to rest his beloved wife. Every morning and evening, with his daughter, Rosemary, he would go to the little cemetery and weed and water the little plot of ground he held so sacred. He hears one day that a railroad is to be built through Fairfield, and the road-bed is to take in the graveyard. The old man swears that while he lives a railroad will never cover that spot. The pathfinders for the great steelway arrive, and when Phillips hears they have come, gets his shotgun and stands guard over the grave. He sees the engineers with their surveying instruments enter the burying ground and aims at them, but Rosemary, who has followed her father, prevents the shot from hitting either of the men by her quick action in pulling aside her father's arm. The next morning the surveyors find all their stakes have been pulled up during the night and at first suspect Phillips, but they learn that they have another adversary when Rosemary says, "It wasn't daddy, it was I," when they attempt to arrest him. The surveyors realizing they are up against a hard proposition, send for the supervising engineer to come and straighten up matters. The young chief engineer, Robertson, arrives at the railroad station and is met by a friend, who tells him that he is five miles from where the surveyors are working and offers to send him out in his automobile, Robertson accepts his friend's offer. The chauffeur had been drinking heavily all day and the ride out to the railroad camp is a vivid and perilous one. Robertson saves himself by jumping over the back seat of the car just as the drunken chauffeur drives headlong over a high cliff and is dashed upon the rocks below. The engineer has fallen unconscious at the edge of the precipice and is found there by Rosemary, who calls her father and some of the neighbors to the young man's assistance. They carry him to Phillips' house, where he is taken care of by Rosemary and her father. When he regains consciousness the girl learns that she has played the good Samaritan to the man who is going to eject them. While passing through a neighbor's yard, she sees a box marked dynamite and forms a plan to beat the railroad. Taking the box, she mines the fields with the sticks, and when Robertson is ready to put his men to work, the girl tells him what she has done. The laborers refuse to stay, and no persuasion or threat on Robertson's part can induce them to return to work. He afterwards discovers that the "dynamite" sticks are only pieces of arc light carbon. The staunch fight that father and daughter have put up appeals to the heart of the engineer, and he wires the company advising a slight detour. The next day he receives an answer saying the road is willing to make the detour. He takes the message to Phillips and Rosemary, who are rejoiced at the news. Robertson is ready to go back, but is unwilling to leave without Rosemary, whose kindness to him while he was laid up, and the plucky spirit shown during her father's fight, have made her dear to him.