"Keep your eyes open; step lightly on Eagle's Tracks; fly through the Devil's Wash Bowl!" The paper contained no signature, and puzzled over its meaning, Little Snap read it several times before he crumpled it in the hollow of his hand. "Some foolish whim of his," he said to himself. "Come, Jack, we must move faster than we have, or we shan't get to Six Roads until midnight." As young as he was, Little Snap, whose name, by the way, was Dix Lewis, though he was seldom addressed thus, had been carrying the mail between Upper Loop on the Kanawha and Union Six Roads, at the very base of the backbone of the Alleghany Mountains, for about two years. The distance between the two isolated towns was nearer forty than thirty miles, but he had never lost a trip yet, and he had never felt in better spirits than on this particular afternoon. The valley of the Great Kanawha, as the lower section of this "River of the Woods" is called, is one of the most fertile regions to be found in West Virginia; but beginning near the Greenbrier Uplands, the stream finds its course often through rocky gateways. Particularly is this the case where a narrow gorge in the Great Flat Top Mountains allow the water to escape from the rock-bound basin lying between that rugged ridge of earth and Greenbrier Mountain. The gnarled live oak, with its blasted top, where Little Snap had met Old Solitaire so many times, stood on the west side of the ascent leading to the Narrows, where the road wound over a spur of the mountain, to descend into one of the wildest valleys even the hackneyed landscape of the Old Dominion can show. For nearly a mile, a natural shelf of rock formed the roadbed, which actually hung out over the chasm of the Kanawha, that found its way along the rocky bottom a hundred feet below. Just beyond the Narrows in the first stage of the descent was a place called "Eagle's Tracks," where a bolt of lightning or some other work of nature had torn the rocks asunder so as to make the passage more difficult than at any other spot. As he reached this locality the postboy instinctively looked about him, as if expecting some unseen foe would spring upon him from behind the bowlders piled one on the other. Almost at his feet lay the rock-rimmed valley known by the grewsome name of "Devil's Wash Bowl." The ascent on the opposite side was less abrupt, while in the far distance, rising high above all the lesser ranges, loomed the Alleghany Mountains, looking like a mighty wave on the sea of space. But Little Snap had passed through this rugged scenery too often for his gaze to rest upon it now. "Pah!" he exclaimed, "I am foolish. Of course, they were but idle words, though it does——" "Hold up, younker!" suddenly broke in a harsh voice, giving an abrupt ending to his low speech. "We have a word to say to ye."