ll Goliath Mountain should know it and despise
him for it.

"I'll fetch an' kerry that word to an' fro fur a thousand mile!" Barney
declared between his set teeth.

Now and then a wagoner overtook him and gave him a ride, thus greatly
helping him on his way. As he went, there was a gradual change in the
blue and misty range that seemed to encircle the west, and which he
knew, by one deep indentation in the horizontal line of its summit, was
Goliath Mountain. It became first an intenser blue. As he drew nearer
still, it turned a bronzed green. It had purpled with the sunset before
he could distinguish the crimson and gold of its foliage and its
beetling crags. Night had fallen when he reached the base of the
mountain.

There was no moon; heavy clouds were rolling up from the horizon, and
they hid the stars. Nick Gregory, lying on the ledge of the "Old Man's
Chimney," thirty feet above the black earth, could not see his hand
before his face. The darkness was dreadful to him. It had closed upon a
dreadful day. The seconds were measured by the throbs and dartings of
pain in his arm. He was almost exhausted by hunger and thirst. He
thought, however, that he could have borne it all cheerfully, but for
the sharp remorse that tortured him for the wrong he had done to his
friend, and his wild anxiety about Barney's fate. Nick felt that he,
himself, was on trial here, imprisoned on this tower of stone, cut off
from the world, from everything but his sternly accusing conscience and
his guilty heart.

For hours he had heard nothing but the monotonous rushing of the water
close at hand, or now and then the shrill, quavering cry of a distant
screech-owl, or the almost noiseless flapping of a bat's wings as they
swept by him.

He had hardly a hope of deliverance, when suddenly there came a new
sound, vague and indistinguishable. He lifted himself upon his left
elbow and listened again. He could hear nothing for a moment except his
own panting breath and the loud beating of his heart. But there--the
sound came once more. What was it? a dropping leaf? the falling of a
fragment of stone from the "Chimney"? a distant step?

It grew more distinct as it drew nearer; presently he recognized
it,--the regular footfall of some man or boy plodding along the path.
That path!--a recollection flashed through his mind. No one knew that
short cut up the mountain but him and Barney; they had worn the path
with their trampings back and forth fr