Produced by David Edwards and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN AND OTHER STORIES BY CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1895 Copyright, 1895, BY MARY N. MURFREE. _All rights reserved._ _The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._ Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. CONTENTS. PAGE THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN 1 TAKING THE BLUE RIBBON AT THE COUNTY FAIR 165 THE CASTING VOTE 200 THE MYSTERY OF WITCH-FACE MOUNTAIN. I. The beetling crags that hang here and there above the gorge hold in their rugged rock sculpture no facial similitudes, no suggestions. The jagged outlines of shelving bluffs delineate no gigantic profile against the sky beyond. One might seek far and near, and scan the vast slope with alert and expectant gaze, and view naught of the semblance that from time immemorial has given the mountain its name. Yet the imagination needs but scant aid when suddenly the elusive simulacrum is revealed to the eye. In a certain slant of the diurnal light, even on bright nights at the full of the moon, sometimes in the uncanny electric flicker smitten from a storm-cloud, a gigantic peaked sinister face is limned on the bare, sandy slope, so definite, with such fixity of lineament, that one is amazed that the perception of it came no earlier, and is startled when it disappears.