d quickly, catching up the gun. To his immense relief he saw Pomp,
approaching with a smile.

"I thought you were with Mr. Villars!"

"Cudjo has gone with him. I am going with you."

"O Pomp!" cried Penn, with a joyful sense of reliance upon his powerful
and sagacious black friend. "But is Mr. Villars safe?"

"Cudjo is faithful," said Pomp. "He believes the old man is your friend,
and a friend of the slave. Besides, I promised, if he would take him to
the cave, that my next shot, if I have a chance, should be at his old
acquaintance, Sile Ropes."

Pomp took the lead, guiding Penn through hollows and among thickets to a
ledge crowned with shrubs of savin, whose summit commanded a view of all
that mountain-side.

They crept among the bushes to the edge of the cliff. There they paused.
Neither friend nor foe was in sight. No sound of fire-arms was
heard,--only the birds were singing.

Penn never forgot that scene. How fresh, and beautiful, and still the
morning was! The sunlight flushed the craggy and wooded slopes. Far off,
dim with early mist, lay the lovely hills and valleys of East Tennessee.
On the north the peaks of the mountain range soared away, purple, rosy,
glorious, in soft suffusing light. In the south-west other peaks
receded, billowy and blue. And God's pure, deep sky was over all.

Touched by the divine beauty of the day, Penn lay thinking with shame of
the scenes of human folly and violence with which it had been
desecrated, when the negro drew him softly by the sleeve.

"Look yonder! down in the edge of that little grove!"

Peering through an opening in the savins through which Pomp had thrust
his rifle, Penn saw, stealing cautiously out of the grove, a man.

"It is Stackridge! He is reconnoitring."

"It is a retreat," said Pomp. "See, there they all come!"

"Carl with the rest, showing them the way!" added Penn.

He was watching with intense interest the movements of his friends, and
rejoicing that no foe was in sight, when suddenly Pomp uttered a warning
whisper.

"Where? what?" said Penn, eagerly looking in the direction in which the
negro pointed.

Down at their left was a long line of dark thickets which marked the
edge of a ravine; out of which he now saw emerging, one by one, a file
of armed men. They climbed up a narrow and difficult pass, and halted on
the skirts of the thicket. Ten--twelve--fifteen, Penn counted. It was
the other party that had been sent out simultaneously with