concentrated on the work of climbing through the tangle of dead trunks
and branches, and, when he had accomplished the hard passage, was turned
wholly from the things which he had been considering by a slight
crackling, as of some one stepping on a brittle twig, at a distance in
advance of him.

Instantly he was on his guard, showing signs quite unmistakable of
deadly fear. He shrank back into the thicket with the speed and silence
of a frightened animal.

The panic which had seized him soon had passed, however, for, within a
few short seconds it was clear to him that the noise which he had heard
had not been made by any one suspicious of his presence or a-search for
him.

Peering cautiously between the slender boles of crooked mountain-laurel
bushes, he soon found a vantage point from which he could see on beyond
the densely woven foliage, and, to his astonishment, found, before he
had thought, possible that he had progressed so far, that he had already
reached the place he sought. Memory had made the way to it a longer one
than it was really, and, in spite of the delays caused by his advancing
age and awkward muscles, long unaccustomed to the work of threading
mountain paths, he had traveled faster than he thought.

Not fifty feet away from him, separated from the thicket he was hiding
in but by a narrow stretch of mountain sward, he saw, among the mountain
side's disordered rocks, the carefully masked entrance to a cave.

An untrained eye would never have made note of the few signs which made
it clear to him, at once, that this cave was, as it had been long years