ome upon his
features. He had reached the place sly, cunning, and, withal,
triumphant, as if he had accomplished, that day, through securing the
small stones, some secret thing of a great import. His countenance, as,
at length, he went away, was not triumphant but half terrified. It was
as if some long-forgotten scene of horror had been brought before his
gaze again, to terrify and astonish him.

His footsteps had been slow and leisurely, the footsteps of a
contemplative, if a surreptitious sightseer, but now they quickened
almost into running, and the intensely disagreeable effect of the
mysterious episode had not left him wholly, when, twenty minutes
afterward, he had mounted the rocky hill path by a precipitous climb and
found himself within a little, cupped inclosure in the rocks, secluded
enough and beautiful enough to be a fairies' dancing-floor. There,
again, he seemed to recognize old landmarks, but with fewer of
unpleasant memories connected with them. Plain curiosity glowed, now, in
his narrow, crafty eyes.

"I wonder," he exclaimed, "if it's here yet."

As he spoke his glance flashed swiftly to the far side of the little
glade, where, on the face of a dense thicket, a trained eye, such as
his, might mark a spot where bushes had been often parted with extreme
care not to do them injury and thus reveal the fact that through them
lay a thoroughfare. Noting this with a wry smile of malicious
satisfaction, he started slowly toward the spot.

The caution of his movements was redoubled, now. While he had worked,
back in the clearing, cooking his simple noonday meal and chipping off
the little specimens of rock, he had shown that he wished not to have
his strange activities observed. On the mountain paths he had plainly
been most anxious not to run across chance wayfarers who might ask
questions, or (the possibility was most remote, but still a possibility)
remember him of old. He had been merely cautious, though, not definitely
fearful.

Now, however, actual and obsessive dread showed plainly on his face and
in his movements. Such a fear would have induced most men to abandon any
enterprise which was not fraught with compelling necessity; with him
insistent curiosity seemed to counterbalance it. The man's face, rough,
hard, cruel, was, withal, unusually expressive; its deep lines were more
than ordinarily mobile, and every one of them, as he proceeded,
soft-footed as a cat, amazingly lithe and supple for his y