es
bewildering in their multitude.

"They air bloomin' bodaciously all over the mounting," he remarked
rancorously, as he leaned heavily on a pickaxe; "but we uns hed better
try it ter-night ennyhows."

It was late in August; a moon of exceeding lustre was in the sky, while
still the sun was going down. All the western clouds were aflare with
gorgeous reflections; the long reaches of the Great Smoky range had
grown densely purple; and those dim Cumberland heights that, viewed from
this precipice of Chilhowee, were wont to show so softly blue in the
distance, had now a variant amethystine hue, hard and translucent of
effect as the jewel itself.

The face of one of his companions expressed an adverse doubt, as he,
too, gazed at the illuminated wilderness, all solitary, silent, remote.

"'Pears like ter me it mought be powerful public," Pete Swofford
objected. He had a tall, heavy, lumpish, frame, a lackluster eye, a
broad, dimpled, babyish face incongruously decorated with a tuft of dark
beard at the chin. The suit of brown jeans which he wore bore token
variously of the storms it had weathered, and his coarse cow-hide boots
were drawn over the trousers to the knee. His attention was now and
again diverted from the conversation by the necessity of aiding a young
bear, which he led by a chain, to repel the unwelcome demonstrations of
two hounds belonging to one of his interlocutors. Snuffling and nosing
about in an affectation of curiosity the dogs could not forbear growling
outright, as their muzzles approached their shrinking hereditary enemy,
while the cub nestled close to his master and whimpered like a child.

"Jes' so, jes' so, Honey. I'll make 'em cl'ar out!" Swofford replied to
the animal's appeal with ready sympathy. Then, "I wish ter Gawd, Rufe,
ye'd call yer dogs off," he added in a sort of aside to the youngest of
the three mountaineers, who stood among the already reddening sumac
fringing the road, beside his horse, athwart which lay a buck all gray
and antlered, his recently cut throat still dripping blood. The party
had been here long enough for it to collect in a tiny pool in a crevice
in the rocky road, and the hounds constrained to cease their harassments
of the bear now began to eagerly lap it up. The rifle with which Rufe
Kinnicutt had killed the deer was still in his hands and he leaned upon
it; he was a tall, finely formed, athletic young fellow with dark hair,
keen, darkly greenish eyes, full of