"Oh, I'll stay with you a while," Kerry put in, hastily. "I ain't a-goin'
on, a-leavin' a man in sech a fix, when I ain't got nothin' in particular
to do an' nowheres in particular to go," he concluded, rather lamely.

His host's eyes dwelt on him. "Well, now, that'd be mighty kind in you,
stranger," he began, gently; and added, with the mountaineer's deathless
hospitality, "You're shorely welcome."

In Kerry's pocket a pair of steel handcuffs clicked against each other. Any
moment of the time that he was dressing the outlaw's hand, identifying at
short range a dozen marks enumerated in the description furnished him, he
could have snapped them upon those great wrists and made his host his
prisoner. Yet, an hour later, when the big man had told him of a string of
fish tied down in the branch, of a little cellarlike contrivance by the
spring which contained honeycomb and some cold corn-pone, the two men sat
at supper like brothers.

"Ye don't smoke?" inquired Kerry, commiseratingly, as his host twisted off
a great portion of home-cured tobacco. "Lord! ye'll never know what the
weed is till ye burn it. A chaw'll do when you're in the trenches an'
afraid to show the other fellers where to shoot, so that ye dare not smoke.
Ah-h-h! I've had it taste like nectar to me then; but tobacco's never
tobacco till it's burnt," and the Irishman smiled fondly upon his stumpy
black pipe.

They sat and talked over the fire (for a fire is good company in the
mountains, even of a midsummer evening) with that freedom and abandon which
the isolation, the hour, and the circumstances begot. Kerry had told his
name, his birthplace, the habits and temperament of his parents, his