As he sought to assume his place on this basis of mutual indifference, he noted a rock lying before a niche in the cliffs. It had been cleft by some freeze of the past winter perhaps; the fragment had fallen down the chasm at some distance, and he could dimly see the black interior of the fissure. Once again, the idea of death recurred to his persistent mind. This was like the burial caves of the Bible, with a stone rolled to the door of the crypt. He sat down near at hand; he was trembling with the intensity of his interest. He gazed at the place with an excited fascination. He wondered if any one could have been buried here. But no,—he would have heard of it. Besides, he was surprised now that he could have thought it,—the place was too contracted; a full-grown man could not have been entombed in this niche. His interest flagged upon the prosaic summons of fact. He rose to turn homeward. Then he stopped suddenly and looked back. In shifting his position he saw the moon full on the place now, on the broken stone that had been rolled to the niche; shining through the rift, blanching the sandstone, and showing distinctly, too, some dark object within. He did not understand his motive afterward. He fell upon the rock in a sudden fury; it yielded to his strength, and rolled crashing down the gorge, rousing a wild clamor in the silent mountains. He did not hear. He did not heed. The niche was smaller even than he had thought. There were no ghastly relics, no bones, no hair; only a man’s hat and coat, quite fresh and well preserved,—the usual jeans coat, the white wool hat common in the mountains; but as he unrolled them, there was some vague air about them that was familiar, and he knew them for the missing man’s. When were they hidden here? His quick imagination could answer, could paint the scene in every minute detail. He saw the skulking, guilty creature coming down the gorge laden with these garments, warm then from the form chilling fast, perhaps, in some icy subterranean current. The niche was a ready hiding-place, the great rock close at hand. And here they had lain concealed till the essential moment when the freeze cleft the rock and rendered up the evidence,—the new evidence, so long buried where the criminal had hidden it. And as Jepson held the garments aloft a recollection of his experience in the courts came to him. “A man shall not be placed twice in jeopardy of his life for the same offense,” said the lawyer. II. The undying grandeur of the mountains, their solemn fixity, the mystery that hangs about them, and their sombre silences impose upon the mind a sense of immutability, and in their midst human life seems a fluctuating, trivial thing, and men come and go with the transitory ineffectiveness of a shifting vapor.