It seemed to Azalea that it was hours since they began “finding their way.” They had slipped out of the back door of the cabin when the people were at their supper, had crouched and crept along the path past the spring house and taken a trail that ran up to the pine grove. From there on they had been winding this way and that, always climbing and climbing till the pain in the girl’s side was almost more than she could stand. Ma McBirney seemed about ready to drop too. Azalea could hear her breath coming almost in sobs. Yet she pushed on, and when Azalea begged her to rest she would only say: “In a little while, my dear. In just a little while.” It began to thunder far off, and sheets of lightning threw a strange pinkish glow over their path now and then. “Don’t you worry none about that there lightning,” Ma McBirney said to the girl whose hand she held so tight in her own that it hurt. “It will swing off around the mountain, like as not. Anyway we’ll be there before it comes.” “Where, please ma’am?” asked Azalea again. And again Ma McBirney did not answer, but pressed on along the path. She seemed now to be walking on the very rim of a great bench, and Azalea couldn’t help feeling that if the people were looking for them, they could see them standing out against the sky when the lightning flashed over the mountain. Perhaps Ma McBirney feared the same thing. At any rate, she stooped over almost double as she walked. She could not hold Azalea’s hand as they crept along this narrow path, but she told the little girl to hold tight to her skirt. So they went on in the rising of the wind, their way lightened by the increasing flashes of lightning. Fortunately, though, they were walking on ground that was almost level, and it gave their pounding hearts a chance to quiet a little. Then, suddenly, Azalea saw looming up before her a great mass of rock. “Here we are!” cried Mrs. McBirney. She began feeling around in the dark, and then, a great flash of lightning showed something on the rock that was blacker than either the night or the stone. “Here it is!” she cried. “Here’s the way in!” And the girl, still holding onto that motherly skirt, crept after Mary McBirney through an opening in the rock, down three rude stairs, along a dark, damp place and through another narrower opening. Ma McBirney struck a match and lit a little lantern. “Well,” she said. “Here we are!” Azalea looked about her. Their feet rested on bare earth, and on every side of them arose stone walls. From them hung queer, mouse-like creatures and horrid spiders and long beetles. Two benches of stone ran along the side, and a sort of fireplace had been made of broken pieces of rock, above which a little crack in the roof served as chimney.