"Neither har nor hide." At this moment a stranger to Uncle Dan came sauntering up the lawn, and, stepping on the porch, addressed them with: "Can you tell me where my brothers feed their flocks?" "He's crazy," whispered Abner to the hunter. "He's crazy, and mamma says pretend as if he was talking sense." "Oh, they are out thar somewhar on the hills, I reckin'," Uncle Dan answered. Joe looked at the mountaineer for a moment, carefully examining the hunting jacket of tanned skins, the hair of which formed an ornamental fringe, and then said: "I know you now. You are my Uncle Esau; but why should you be here in Egypt? It was you who grew angry with my father because he got your birthright for a mess of potage. You sought to slay him and he fled. Have you come to mock his son?" "Oh, no, youngster; yer pap and me hev made up that little fuss long ago. I forgive him that little steal, an' now we ar' all squar' agin." "But why are you in Egypt? You must be very old. My father, who is younger than you, is old--bowed down--" "Poor boy," said Mr. Tompkins, with a sigh, "he has been a close student, and perhaps that was what turned his head." "Does he ever git rantankerous?" asked Uncle Dan. "No; he is always mild and harmless." "Have you seen my father?" Joe now asked. "He has long white hair and snowy beard." "No, youngster; I ain't got a sight o' the old man fur some time," said Uncle Dan. "Potiphar resembles my father, but my father must be dead," and he sank into a chair, with a sad look of despair, and, burying his face in his hands, groaned as if in pain. "He does that way a dozen times a day," Abner whispered to Uncle Dan. "It's maughty strange," said Uncle Dan, shaking his head in a puzzled manner. The next day, when the mountaineer was about to return to his lonely cabin, Crazy Joe asked permission to accompany his Uncle Esau. Consent was given, and he went and stayed several weeks. For years afterward he stayed alternate on Mr. Tompkins' plantation and at the home of the mountaineer. CHAPTER V. THE MUD MAN. Sixteen years, with all their joys and sorrows, all their pleasures and pains, have been numbered with the dead past. Boys have grown to be men, men in the full vigor of their prime have grown old, and creep about with bent forms and heads whitening, while men who were old before now slumber with the dead. Girls are women, and women have grown gray, yet father Time has touched gently some of his children. Abner and Oleah Tompkins are no longer boys. Only the memory is left them of their childhood joys, when they played in the dark, cool woods, or by the brook in the wide, smooth lawn. Happy childhood days, when neither care nor anxiety weighed on their young hearts, or shadowed their bright faces. Abner is twenty-five--a tall, powerful man, with dark-blue, fearless eyes, light-haired, broad-chested and muscular.