"Where are we going?" Woodward asked. "Well," said Parmalee, "the boys laid off for to have some fun, an' it's done got so these times that when a feller wants fun he's got to git furder up the mounting." If the words were evasive, the tone was far more so, but Woodward paid little attention to either. He had the air of a man accustomed to being called up in the early hours of the morning to go forth on mysterious expeditions. A bright fire was blazing in Poteet's kitchen, and the light, streaming through the wide doorway, illuminated the tops of the trees on the edge of the clearing. Upon this background the shadows of the women, black and vast--Titanic indeed,--were projected as they passed to and fro. From within there came a sound as of the escape of steam from some huge engine; but the men waiting on the outside knew that the frying-pan was doing its perfect work. The meat sizzled and fried; the shadows in the tops of the trees kept up what seemed to be a perpetual promenade, and the men outside waited patiently and silently. This silence oppressed Woodward. He knew that but for his presence the mountaineers would be consulting together and cracking their dry jokes. In spite of the fact that he recognised in the curious impassiveness of these people the fundamental qualities of courage and endurance, he resented it as a barrier which he had never been able to break down. He would have preferred violence of some sort. He could meet rage with rage, and give blow for blow, but how was he to deal with the reserve by which he was surrounded? He was not physically helpless, by any means, but the fact that he had no remedy against the attitude of the men of Hog Mountain chafed him almost beyond endurance. He was emphatically a man of action--full of the enterprises usually set in motion by a bright mind, a quick temper, and ready courage; but, measured by the impassiveness which these men had apparently borrowed from the vast aggressive silences that give strength and grandeur to their mountains, how trivial, how contemptible all his activities seemed to be!