done,
to go on a camp-hunt with some other boys. She would not grow uneasy for
a week, at least.

He was deep in the heart of the forest, distant from any dwelling. No
one, as far as he knew, came to this spot, except himself and Barney,
and their errand here was for the sake of the exhilaration and the
hazard of climbing the crag. It was so lonely that on the Old Man's
Chimney the eagles built instead of the swallows. His hope--his only
hope--was that some hunter might chance to pass before he should die of
hunger.

The shadow of the great obelisk shifted as the day wore on, and left him
in the broad, hot glare of the sun. His broken arm was fevered and gave
him great pain. Now and then he raised himself on the other, and looked
down wistfully at the cool, dusky depths of the woods. He heard
continually the impetuous rushing of a mountain torrent near at hand;
sometimes, when the wind stirred the foliage, he caught a glimpse of the
water, rioting from rock to rock, and he was oppressed by an intolerable
thirst.

Thus the hours lagged wearily on.

CHAPTER IV

When the wagon was rolling along the road in the valley, Barney at first
kept his eyes persistently fastened upon the craggy heights and the red
and gold autumnal woods of Goliath Mountain, as the mighty range
stretched across the plain.

But presently the two men began to talk to him, and he turned around in
order to face them. They were urging him to confess his own guilt and
tell who were the other burglars, and where they were. But Barney had
nothing to tell. He could only protest again and again his innocence.
The men, however, shook their heads incredulously, and after a while
they left him to himself and smoked their pipes in silence.

When Barney looked back at the mountains once more, a startling change
seemed to have been wrought in the landscape. Instead of the frowning
sandstone cliffs he loved so well, and the gloomy recesses of the woods,
there was only a succession of lines of a delicate blue color drawn
along the horizon. This was the way the distant ranges looked from the
crags of his own home; he knew that they were the mountains, but which
was Goliath?

Suddenly he struck his hands together, and broke out with a bitter cry.

"I hev los' G'liath!" he exclaimed. "I dunno whar I live! An' whar _is_
Melissy?"

A difficult undertaking, certainly, to determine where among all those
great spurs and outliers, stretching so far on either