the
gap of a desolate hill and looked into the hollow before me that--added
to the dirt no skunk could stand--had earned the place its name. It was
all stones: gravel stones, little stones, stones as big as cabs and as
big as houses; and, hunched up among them like lean-tos, hidden away
among the rocks and the pine trees growing up from among the rocks
wherever they could find root-hold, were the houses of the Skunk's
Misery people. There was no pretense of a street or a village: there
were just houses,--if they deserved even that name. How many there were
I could not tell. I had never had the curiosity to explore the place.
But if it sounds as though a narrow, stone-choked valley were no citadel
for a man or men to have hidden themselves, or for any one to conduct an
industry like making a secret scent to attract wolves, the person who
said so would be mistaken. There was never in the world a better place
for secret dwelling and villainy and all the rest than Skunk's Misery.

In the first place, you could not see the houses among the rocks. The
valley was just like a porcupine warren. No rock stood out alone: they
were all jumbled up together, big and little, with pine trees growing on
the tops of them and in between them, up from the earth that was twelve,
twenty, or sometimes forty feet below. The whole hollow was a maze of
narrow, winding tracks, between rocks and under them, sometimes a foot
wide and sometimes six, that Skunk's Misery used for roads. What its
citizens lived on, I had never been able to guess. Caraquet said it was
on wolf bounties,--which was another thing that had set me thinking
about the bottle I had spilt on my clothes. If Collins or Dunn had got a
similar bottle there I meant to find out about it: and I had the more
heart for doing it since Paulette Brown knew nothing of Skunk's Misery.
You can tell when a girl has never heard of a place, and I knew she had
never heard of that one. I settled down the revolver I had filled up at
Billy Jones's, and trod softly down the nearest of the winding alleys,
over the worn pine needles, in the dark.

There were just twenty houses, when I had counted all I could find.
There might have been twenty more, under rocks and behind rocks I could
not make my way around; but I was no porcupine, and in the dark I could
not stumble on them. There was not a sign of a stranger in the place, or
a soul about. And judging from the darkness and the quiet, all the
fat-face