The young man smiled. "I'll say this much for you farmers,--you're
a good-natured bunch. I ought to be ashamed of myself for grousing.
I suppose it's because I've been sick. You're all so kind and
thoughtful,--and so darned GENUINE,--even when you're asleep,--that
I feel like a dog for finding fault. By the way, you said something
awhile ago about that big black cliff over yonder having a history.
I've been looking at that cliff or hill or rock, or whatever it is,
and it doesn't look real. It doesn't look as though God had made
it. It's more like the work of man. So far as I can see, there isn't
another hill on either bank of the river, and yet that thing over
there must be three or four hundred feet high, sticking up like a
gigantic wart on the face of the earth. What is it? Solid rock?"

"Sort like slate rock, I guess. There's a stretch of about a mile
on both sides of the river along here that's solid rock. This bank
we're standin' on is rock, covered with six or eight foot of earth.
You're right about that big rock over there being a queer thing.
There's been college professors and all sorts of scientific men
here, off and on, to examine it and to try to account for its being
there. But, thunderation, if it's been there for a million years
as they say, what's the sense of explaining it?"

"There's something positively forbidding about it. Gives you the
willies. How did it come by the name you called it a while ago?"

"Quill's Window? Goes back to the days of the Indians. Long before
the time of Tecumseh or The Prophet. They used to range up and down
this river more than a hundred years ago. The old trail is over
there on the other bank as plain as day, covered with grass but