t of the way he had had the help
of a man whose feet had long before done with walking the paths of
earth.

The forest, for it was a forest then, was full of heavy underwood and
brush, and he had no choice but to dodge his way between the clumps.
But when he got out to the broad open space on the brow of the hill,
where no trees had ever grown, he found an almost tropical growth of
wild grass and azalea, with bull-brier twining over everything in every
direction. He found it worse than the dense woods.

[Illustration]

"Drat the pesky stuff," he said to himself; "ain't there no way through
it?" Then as he looked about he spied a line no broader than his hand at
the bottom, that opened clean through the bull-brier and the bushes
across the open to where the trees began again on the down-slope of the
hill. Grass was growing in it, but he knew it for an old trail.

"'Twas Pelatiah Jinks made that, I'll bet a shilling," he said to
himself, remembering the lonely old trapper who had dwelt on that
mountain in his father's time. He had once seen old man Jinks's
powder-horn, with its elaborate carving, done in the long solitary hours
when the old man sat weather-bound in his lofty hermitage.

"Jest like the old critter to make a bee-line track like that. But what
in thunder did he want to go that way across the clearing for? I'm much
obleeged to him for his trail, but it ain't headed right for town."

[Illustration]

No, it was not. But young Dodd did not remember that the trees whose
tops he saw just peeping over the hill were young things of forty years'
growth that had taken the place of a line of ninety-year-old chestnuts
that had died down from the top and been broken down by the wind shortly
after old Pelatiah died. The line that the old man had made for himself
took him straight to the one little hillock where he could look over
this tall screen and get his bearings afresh by the glint of the
Passaic's water in the woody valley below, for at no other spot along
that ridge was the Passaic visible.

Now in this one act of Reuben Levi Dodd you can see the human nature
that lies at the bottom of all path-making. He turned aside from his
straight course to walk in the easy way made by another man, and then
fetched a compass, as they used to say in the Apostle Paul's time, to
get back to his straight bearings. Old Pelatiah had a good reason for
deviating from his straight line to the town; young Dodd had none,
except