She looked at him with uneasy surprise. What could be in his mind? The solemn gorge through which they were passing gave no entrancing views of clouds or sky or towering peaks. Its wooded cliffs hung ominously overhead in threatening shadows. The scene had depressed her after the vast sunlit spaces of sky, of shining valleys and cloud-capped, sapphire peaks on which they had turned their backs. “You like this, Jim?” she asked. “It's great--great!” “I thought that waterfall we just passed was very beautiful.” “I didn't see it. But this is something like it. You're clean out of the world here--and there ain't a railroad in twenty miles!” The deeper the shadows of tree and threatening crag, the higher Jim's strange spirit seemed to rise. She watched him with increasing fear. How little she knew the real man! Could it be possible that this lonely, unlettered boy of the streets of lower New York, starved and stunted in childhood, had within him the soul of a great poet? How else could she explain the sudden rapture over the threatening silences and shadows of these mountain gorges which had depressed her? And yet his utter indifference to the glories of beautiful waters, his blindness at noon before the most wonderful panorama of mountains and skies on which she had ever gazed, contradicted the theory of the poetic soul. A poet must see beauty where she had seen it--and a thousand wonders her eyes had not found. His elation was uncanny. What could it mean? He was driving now with a skill that was remarkable, a curious smile playing about his drooping, Oriental eyelids. A wave of fierce resentment swept her heart. She was a mere plaything in this man's life. The real man she had never seen. What was he thinking about? What grim secret lay behind the mysterious smile that flickered about the corners of those eyes? He was not thinking of her. The mood was new and cold and cynical, for all the laughter he might put in it. She asked herself the question of his past, his people, his real life-history. The only answer was his baffling, mysterious smile. A frown suddenly clouded his face. “Hello! Ye're running right into a man's yard!” Mary lifted her head with quick surprise. “Why yes, it's the stopping place for the parties that climb Mount Mitchell. I remember it. We stayed all night here, left our rig, and started next morning at sunrise on horseback to climb the trail.” “Pretty near the jumping-off place, then,” he remarked. “We'll ask the way to Cat-tail Peak.” He stopped the car in front of the low-pitched, weather-stained frame house and blew the horn. A mountain woman with three open-eyed, silent children came slowly to meet them. She smiled pleasantly, and without embarrassment spoke in a pleasant drawl: “Won't you 'light and look at your saddle?”