He went out of the back door, bidding Jim keep close beside him, and looked around for quite a while before starting on the up trail; and then he kept away from the wood trail and took the one that led up the face of the rocks—one which no one but a mountaineer could find or follow. His footsteps appeared on the freshly-washed earth only as far as the spring. From there on, there was no trace of him and his boy, and anyone who came looking for them would indeed have hard work to follow. “There was talk of them show folks setting up the merry-go-round and all the rest of the contraptions down there at Lee to-day,” said pa. “I only hope they’ll do it and not go turning their attention to things that don’t concern them.” Once or twice as Jim and his father came out upon some rocky ledge of the mountain the boy peered down into the valley to see if he could catch sight of tents or wagons, but all below them was wrapped in a wonderful lilac mist. And anyway, he had not much time to give to these matters. He was thinking of where his mother would be found, and wondering how it was that his father kept such a sure course. Not an idea of where his mother could be entered the boy’s head, but he knew there were secret hiding places on the mountains, of which children were not told, and he was right in thinking that his mother had gone to one of these. After a long time he said: “Where you heading for, pa?” “Well,” said pa, “your ma thought best not to tell me where she was going. She wanted me to speak up truthful and say I didn’t know her whereabouts. But it wouldn’t take many guesses for me to locate her in Conscript Den.” “What’s that?” asked Jim, staring at his father with open eyes and mouth. “Well, that’s a place that all the old folks about here knows of very well. It’s been used by a good many one time and another, but the first time I know of its being used was when old Colonel Atherton tried to conscript a lot of young men down there in Lee, to force ’em to join the Southern army in 1862. Some of these here men was for the Union and they didn’t take to the idea of fighting with the South. Anyway, I don’t think they was much interested either way. They just wanted to be left alone to work their little farms and be let mind their own business. But they didn’t believe in slavery. It wasn’t in ’em to do that. They was liberty loving people, and if anything, a little too independent in their ways for their own good, maybe.” “Think so?” said Jim. He had his own ideas about independence. “So twenty young men that was conscripted run up here and hid, and slipped down the mountain nights and got food; and they picked berries and stoned rabbits and I don’t know what all. But even so they didn’t have much and they was almost skin and bone when the searchin’ party found them.” “And when they found ’em, what did they do?”