"Very well. Take this to the manager." He addressed the letter, and,
scrawling a few hieroglyphics on a memorandum-tag, tore it off, and
handed it with the letter to the boy.

An hour later he stood in the manager's office. "The next number is
pretty well made up," he said, carelessly, "and I think of taking a day
or two off."

"Certainly," said the manager. "It will do you good. Where do you think
you'll go?"

"I haven't quite made up my mind."


CHAPTER II


"Hullo!" said Jack Hamlin.

He had halted his mare at the edge of an abrupt chasm. It did not appear
to be fifty feet across, yet its depth must have been nearly two
hundred to where the hidden mountain-stream, of which it was the banks,
alternately slipped, tumbled, and fell with murmuring and monotonous
regularity. One or two pine-trees growing on the opposite edge, loosened
at the roots, had tilted their straight shafts like spears over the
abyss, and the top of one, resting on the upper branches of a sycamore a
few yards from him, served as an aerial bridge for the passage of a boy
of fourteen to whom Mr. Hamlin's challenge was addressed.