of us 'll
pack."

Soon the gang was on the move, heading toward the height of land, and
swerving from it only to find soft and grassy ground that would not
leave any tracks.

They did not travel more than a dozen miles during the afternoon, but
they climbed bench after bench until they reached the timbered plateau
that stretched in sheer black slope up to the peaks. Here rose the great
and gloomy forest of firs and pines, with the spruce overshadowed and
thinned out. The last hour of travel was tedious and toilsome, a zigzag,
winding, breaking, climbing hunt for the kind of camp-site suited
to Anson's fancy. He seemed to be growing strangely irrational about
selecting places to camp. At last, for no reason that could have been
manifest to a good woodsman, he chose a gloomy bowl in the center of the
densest forest that had been traversed. The opening, if such it could
have been called, was not a park or even a glade. A dark cliff, with
strange holes, rose to one side, but not so high as the lofty pines that
brushed it. Along its base babbled a brook, running over such formation
of rock that from different points near at hand it gave forth different
sounds, some singing, others melodious, and one at least of a hollow,
weird, deep sound, not loud, but strangely penetrating.

"Sure spooky I say," observed Shady, sentiently.

The little uplift of mood, coincident with the rifling of Riggs's
person, had not worn over to this evening camp. What talk the outlaws
indulged in was necessary and conducted in low tones. The place enjoined
silence.

Wilson performed for the girl very much the same service as he had the
night before. Only he advised her not to starve herself; she must eat
to keep up her strength. She complied at the expense of considerable
effort.

As it had been a back-breaking day, in which all of them, except the
girl, had climbed miles on foot, they did not linger awake long enough
after supper to learn what a wild, weird, and pitch-black spot the
outlaw leader had chosen. The little spaces of open ground between the
huge-trunked pine-trees had no counterpart up in the lofty spreading
foliage. Not a star could blink a wan ray of light into that Stygian
pit. The wind, cutting down over abrupt heights farther up, sang in the
pine-needles as if they were strings vibrant with chords. Dismal creaks
were audible. They were the forest sounds of branch or tree rubbing one
another, but which needed the correctiv