es. If their mutual concession of
manner was not balanced to exact nicety--if either Tom or Asa seemed to
hold back and throw upon the other the brunt of the difficult
conciliation by so much as a faltering stride--there would be
chaos--and Boone meant to be there in time.

In this pocketed bit of wilderness, the incline had been built years
ago, and it had been a challenge to Nature's mandate of isolation.

As the crow flew, the railroad that might afford an outlet to market was
not so many miles away, but it might as well have been ten times as
distant. Between lay a wall of hills interposing its grim prohibition
with a timbered cornice lifted twenty-five hundred feet towards the sky
and more than a day's journey separated those gaps where wheels could
scale and cross. Long ago local and visionary enthusiasts had built a
huge warehouse on a towering pinnacle with an incline of track dropping
dizzily down from it to the creek far below. Its crazy little cars had
been hauled up by a cable wound on a drum with the motive force of a
straining donkey-engine. But so ambitious an enterprise had not survived
the vicissitudes of hard times. Its simple machinery had rusted; its
tracks ran askew with decay upon their warped underpinning of teetering
struts.

Now the warehouse stood dry-rotting and unkempt, its spaces regularly
tenanted only by the owl and bat. Through its unpatched roof one caught,
at night, the peep of stars and its hulking sides leaned under the
buffet of the winds which raced, screaming, around the shoulder of the
mountain.

Towards this goal Boone was hurrying, forgetful now of any divided
standards of thought, thinking only of the kinsman whom his boyhood had
exalted with ardent hero-worship--and of that kinsman's danger. A
rowelling pressure of haste drove him, while snares of trailing
creepers, pitfalls blotted into darkness and the thickness of
jungle-like undergrowth handicapped him with many stubborn difficulties.

Sometimes he fell and scrambled up again, bruised and growling but
undiscouraged. Sometimes he forsook even the steep grade of the foot
trail for shorter cut-offs where he pulled himself up semi-perpendicular
walls of cliff, trusting to a hand-grip on hanging root or branch and a
foothold on almost nothing.

But when he was still a long way off he saw a pale flare against the sky
which he knew was a bonfire outside the warehouse, and by the
brightening of that beacon from pallor to cr