up both
his hands in token of complete submission. And then for a moment he knew
no more. He was still leaning motionless against the wall of rock when
he became aware that the man was sternly beckoning to him to continue
his approach. His dumb lips moved mechanically in response, but any
sound must needs have been futile indeed in the pervasive roar of the
waters. He felt that he had hardly strength for another step along
the precipitous way, but there is much tonic influence in a beckoning
revolver, and few men are so weak as to be unable to obey its behests.
Poor Nehemiah tottered along as behooved him, leaving all the world,
liberty, volition, behind him as the descending sheet of water fell
between him and the rest of life and shut him off.

"That's it, my leetle man! I thought you could make it!" were the first
words he could distinguish as he joined the mountaineer beneath the
crag.

Nehemiah Yerby had never before seen this man. That in itself was
alarming, since in the scanty population of the region few of its
denizens are unknown to each other, at least by sight. The tone of
satire, the gleam of enjoyment in his keen blue eye, were not reassuring
to the object of his ridicule. He was tall and somewhat portly, and he
had a bluff and offhand manner, which, however, served not so much
to intimate his good-will toward you as his abounding good-humor with
himself. He was a man of most arbitrary temper, one could readily judge,
not only from his own aspect and manner, but from the docile, reliant,
approving cast of countenance of his reserve force--a half-dozen men,
who were somewhat in the background, lounging on the rocks about a huge
copper still. They wore an attentive aspect, but offered to take no
active part in the scene enacted before them. One of them--even at this
crucial moment Yerby noticed it with a pang of regretful despair--held
noiseless on his knee a violin, and more than once addressed himself
seriously to rubbing rosin over the bow. There was scant music in
his face--a square physiognomy, with thick features, and a shock of
hay-colored hair striped somewhat with an effect of darker shades like
a weathering stack. He handled the bow with a blunt, clumsy hand that
augured little of delicate skill, and he seemed from his diligence to
think that rosin is what makes a fiddle play. He was evidently one of
those unhappy creatures furnished with some vague inner attraction to
the charms of music, with