strength flagged, he slipped more than once, giving himself a great
fright; and when he reached the ledge where the dead fox lay, he
thought, "The varmint don't wuth it."

Nevertheless he whooped out his triumph to Nate and Tim in a
stentorian halloo, for they had already started homeward, and
presently their voices died in the distance. Birt faced about and
sat down on the ledge to rest, his feet dangling over the depths
beneath.

It was a lonely spot, walled in by the mountains, and frequented
only by the deer that were wont to come to lick salt from the briny
margin of a great salt spring far down the ravine. Their hoofs had
worn a deep excavation around it in the countless years and
generations that they had herded here. The "lick," as such places
are called in Tennessee, was nearly two acres in extent, and in the
centre of the depression the brackish water stood to the depth of
six feet or more. Birt looked down at it, thinking of the old times
when, according to tradition, it was the stamping ground of buffalo
as well as deer. The dusk deepened. The shadows were skulking in
and out of the wild ravine as the wind rose and fell. They took to
his fancy the form of herds of the banished bison, revisiting in
this impalpable guise the sylvan shades where they are but a memory
now.

Presently he began the rugged descent, considerably hampered by the
fox, which he carried by the tail. He stopped to rest whenever he
found a ledge that would serve as a seat. Looking up, high above
the jagged summit of the cliff that sharply serrated the zenith, he
saw the earliest star, glorious in the crimson and amber sky.