difficult name of any of the muscles that so alertly exercised
themselves on this occasion.

Birt rose at last to his feet and looked with a pallid face over the
underbrush. "Now, ain't ye lackin' fur head-stuffin'," he faltered,
"a-steppin' along a deer-path ez nat'ral ez ef ye war a big fat
buck? I kem mighty nigh shootin' ye."

The old gentleman recovered his equilibrium, mental and physical,
with marvelous rapidity.

"Ah, my young friend,"--he motioned to Birt to come nearer,--"I want
to speak to you."

Birt stared. One might have inferred, from the tone, that the
gentleman had expected to meet him here, whereas Birt had just had
the best evidence of his senses that the encounter was a great
surprise.

The boy observed his interlocutor more carefully than he had yet
been able to do. He remembered all at once Rufe's queer story of
meeting, down the ravine, an eccentric old man whom he was disposed
to identify as Satan. As the stranger stood there in the deer-path,
he looked precisely as Rufe had described him, even to the baffling
glitter of his spectacles, his gray whiskers, and the curiously
shaped hammer in his hand.

Birt, although bewildered and still tremulous from the shock to his
nerves, was not so superstitious as Rufe, and he shouldered his gun,
and, pushing out from the tangled underbrush, joined the old man in