m the cliff edge,
so we must needs fetch a compass through the pine groves before we could
win out to any commanding point of view.

The old borderer took his bearings by the sun and laid the course
quartering to bring us out as near as might be on the heights above the
gorge. But when we had gone a little way, a thinning of the wood ahead
warned us that we were approaching some nearer break in the table-land.

Five minutes later we four stood on the brink of a precipice, looking
abroad upon one of nature's most singular caprices. Conceive if you can
a segment of the table-land, in shape like a broad-bilged man o' war,
sunk to a depth of, mayhap, six or seven hundred feet below the general
level of the plateau. Give this ship-shaped chasm a longer dimension of
two miles or more, and a breadth of somewhat less than half its length;
bound it with a wall-like line of cliffs falling sheer to steep,
forested slopes below; prick out a silver ribbon of a stream winding
through grassy savannas and well-set groves of lordly trees from end to
end of the sunken valley; and you will have some picture of the scene we
looked upon.

But what concerned us most was a sight to make us crouch quickly lest
sharp eyes below should descry us on the sky-line of the cliff. Pitched
on one of the grassy savannas by the stream, so fairly beneath us that
the smallest cannon planted on our cliff could have dropped a shot into
it, was the camp of the powder train.

XXV

HOW UNCANOOLA TRAPPED THE GREAT BEAR

'Twas Richard Jennifer who first broke the noontide silence of the
mountain top, voicing the query which was thrusting sharp at all of us.

"Now how in the name of all the fiends did they make shift to burrow
from yonder bag-bottom into this?" he would say.

"Ez I allow, that's jest what the good Lord fotched us here for--to find
out," was Yeates's rejoinder. "Do you and the chief, Cap'n John,
circumambylate this here pitfall yon way, whilst Cap'n Dick and I go
t'other way 'round. By time we've made the circuit and j'ined company
again, I reckon we'll know for sartain whether 'r no they climm' the
mounting to get in."

So when we had breathed us a little the circuiting was begun, Ephraim
Yeates and Jennifer going toward the lower end of the sink, and the
Catawba and I in the opposite direction.

Since we must examine closely every rift and crevice in the boundary
cliff, it was a most tedious undertaking; and I do remember how