self to study like
the rest of us.

"He has paid his tuition," said my aunt, smiling. "We'll let him stay."

So Jean Pahusca was established in our school.

CHAPTER III

THE HERMIT'S CAVE

The secret which the mountains kept
The river never told.

The bluff was our continual delight. It was so difficult, so full of
surprises, so enchanting in its dangers. All manner of creeping things
in general, and centipedes and rattlesnakes in particular, made their
homes in its crevices. Its footing was perilous to the climber, and its
hiding-places had held outlaws and worse. Then it had its haunted spots,
where tradition told of cruel tragedies in days long gone by; and of the
unknown who had found here secret retreat, who came and went, leaving
never a name to tell whom they were nor what their story might be. All
these the old cliff had in its keeping for the sturdy boys and girls of
parents who had come here to conquer the West.

Just below the town where the Neosho swings away to the right, the
bottom lands narrow down until the stream sweeps deep and swift against
a stone wall almost two hundred feet in height. From the top of the
cliff here the wall drops down nearly another hundred feet, leaving an
inaccessible heap of rough cavernous rocks in the middle stratum.

Had the river been less deep and dangerous we could not have gotten up
from below; while to come down from above might mean a fall of three
hundred feet or more to the foam-torn waters and the jagged rocks
beneath them. Here a stranger hermit had hidden himself years before.
Nobody knew his story, nor how he had found his way hither, for he spoke
in a strange tongue that nobody could interpret. That this inaccessible
place was his home was certain. Boys bathing in the shallows up-stream
sometimes caught a glimpse of him moving about among the bushes. And
sometimes at night from far to the east a light could be seen twinkling
half way up the dark cliff-side. Every boy in Springvale had an ambition
to climb to the Hermit's Cave and explore its mysteries; for the old man
died as he had lived, unknown. One winter day his body was found on the
sand bar below the rapids where the waters had carried him after his
fall from the point of rock above the deep pool. There was no mark on
his coarse clothing to tell a word of his story, and the Neosho kept his
secret always.

What boy after that would not have braved any danger to explore the
depths of