But not even his continual alarms, his constant watchfulness, could keep
his mind away from the rough bits of rock which he had chipped from the
outcropping in the clearing. More than once, as he found convenient and
safe places--leafy nooks in rocky clefts, glades in dense, impenetrable
thickets--he took out the little specimens, turned them over in his
hands with loving touches, and gazed at them with an expression of
picturesquely avaricious joy. Had any witnessed this procedure they
would have found it vastly puzzling, for the specimens seemed merely
small, black stones and valueless. But once, while looking at them
lovingly, he burst into a harsh and hearty laugh as of great triumph,
quite involuntarily; but hushed it quickly, looking, then, about him
with an apprehensive glance. Each step he made was, in the main, a
cautious one, each pause he made was plainly to look at some familiar,
if some slightly altered, vista.

It was quite clear that with the finding of the little bits of rock he
had achieved the errand which had brought him to the mountains, and that
now he roamed to satisfy his memory's curiosity. Smiles of recognition
constantly played upon his grim and grizzled face at sight of some old
path, some distant, mist-enshrouded crag, even some mighty pine or oak
which had for years withstood the buffeting of tempestuous storms; now
and then a little puzzled frown, added its wrinkles to the many which
already creased his brow, when, at some spot which he had thought to
find as he had left it, long ago, he discovered that time's changes had
been notable.

Once only did the man become confused among the woods-paths (where a
stranger might have lost himself quite hopelessly in twenty minutes) and
that was at a point not far from where Madge Brierly and Layson had, on
their way up from the clearing, paused while she told her youthful