To breathe the balsamic, sunlit air was luxury, happiness; it was a
wonder that Rufe got on as fast as he did. How fragrant and cool
and dark was the shadowy valley! A silver cloud lay deep in the
waters of the "lick." Why Rufe made up his mind to go down there,
he could hardly have said--sheer curiosity, perhaps. He knew he had
plenty of time to get to Nate's house and back before dark. People
who sent Rufe on errands usually reckoned for two hours' waste in
each direction. He had no idea of descending the cliffs as Birt had
done. He stolidly retraced his way until he was nearly home; then
scrambling down rocky slopes he came presently upon a deer-path.
All at once, he noticed the footprint of a man in a dank, marshy
spot. He stopped and looked hard at it, for he had naturally
supposed this path was used only by the woodland gentry.

"Some deer-hunter, I reckon," he said. And so he went on.

With his characteristic curiosity, he peered all around the "lick"
when he was at last there. He even applied his tongue, calf-like,
to the briny earth; it did not taste so salty as he had expected.
As he rolled over luxuriously on his back among the fragrant summer
weeds, he caught sight of something in the branches of an oak tree.
He sat up and stared. It looked like a rude platform. After a
moment, he divined that it was the remnant of a scaffold from which
some early settler of Tennessee had been wont to fire upon the deer
or the buffalo at the "lick," below. Such relics, some of them a
century old, are to be seen to this day in sequestered nooks of the
Cumberland Mountains. Rufe had heard of these old scaffolds, but he
had never known of the existence of this one down by the "lick." He
sprang up, a flush of excitement contending with the dirt on his
countenance; he set his squirrel teeth resolutely together; he