solve that he would say nothing about what he had
seen,--not even to Barney. He thought his safety lay in his silence.
Still, he did not want his silence to be to the advantage of wicked men,
so he tried to persuade himself that the burglars would soon be traced
and captured without the information which he knew it was his duty to
give. "Ter be sartain, the officers will kem on this place arter a
while," he said meditatively.

Then he shook his head doubtfully. The crag was far from any house, and
except the dwellers on Goliath Mountain, few people knew of this great
niche in it. "They war sly foxes what stowed away thar plunder hyar!" he
exclaimed in despair.

Often, when Nick had before stood in the Conscripts' Hollow, he had
imagined that he would make a good soldier. But his idea of a soldier
was a fine uniform, and the ra-ta-ta of martial music. He had no
conception of that high sense of duty which nerves a man to face danger;
even now he did not know that he was a coward as he faltered and feared
in the cause of right to encounter suspicion.

Courage!--Nick thought that meant to crack away at a bear, if you were
lucky enough to have the chance; or to kill a rattlesnake, if you had a
big heavy stone close at hand; or to scramble about among crags and
precipices, if you felt certain of the steadiness of your head and the
strength of your muscles. But he did not realize that "courage" could
mean the nerve to speak one little word for duty's sake.

He would not speak the word,--he had determined on that,--for might they
not think that _he_ was the boy who had robbed the store?

He was quivering with excitement when he turned and began to walk along
the ledge toward those roughly hewn natural steps by which he had
descended. He knew that his agitation rendered his footing insecure. He
was afraid of falling into the depths beneath, and he pressed close
against the cliff.

On the narrow ledge, hardly two yards distant from the Conscripts'
Hollow, a clump of blackberry bushes was growing from a crevice in the
rock. They had never before given him trouble; but now, as he brushed
hastily past, they seemed to clutch at him with their thorny branches.

As he tore away from them roughly, he did not observe that he had left a
fragment of his brown jeans clothing hanging upon the thorns, as a
witness to his presence here close to the Conscripts' Hollow, where the
stolen goods lay hidden. There was a coarse, dark-colored h