above the barricade of rocks. The Stew-Kettle was what Jolly Roger
had called it, and when the sun was straight above, or descending
with the last half of the day, the name fitted.

It was a hot place, so hot that at a distance its piled-up masses
of white rock seemed to simmer and broil in the blazing heat of
the July sun. Neither man nor beast would look into the heart of
it, Jolly Roger had assured Peter, unless the one was half-witted
and the other a fool. Looking at it from the meadowy green plain
that lay between the Ridge and the forest their temporary retreat
was anything but a temptation to the eye. Something had happened
there a few thousand centuries before, and in a moment of evident
spleen and vexation the earth had vomited up that pile of rock
debris, and Jolly Roger good humoredly told himself and Peter that
it was an act of Providence especially intended for them, though
planned and erupted some years before they were born.

The third afternoon of their hiding, Jolly Roger decided upon
action.

This afternoon all of the caloric guns of an unclouded sun had
seemed to concentrate themselves on the gigantic rock-pile. Though
it was now almost sunset, a swirling and dizzying incandescence
still hovered about it. The huge masses of stone were like baked
things to the touch of hand and foot, and one breathed a
smoldering air in between their gray and white walls.

Thus forbidding looked the Stew-Kettle, when viewed from the
plain. But from the top-most crag of the mass, which rose a
hundred feet high at the end of the Ridge, one might find his