_BOOKS BY_ “Charles Egbert Craddock.” (MARY N. MURFREE) IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS. Short Stories. 16mo, $1.25. DOWN THE RAVINE. Illustrated. 16mo, $1.00. THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS. A Novel 16mo, $1.25. IN THE CLOUDS. A Novel 16mo, $1.25. THE STORY OF KEEDON BLUFFS. 16mo, $1.00. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. BOSTON AND NEW YORK. THE STORY OF KEEDON BLUFFS BY CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK AUTHOR OF “IN THE CLOUDS,” “DOWN THE RAVINE,” “IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS,” “THE PROPHET OF THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS,” ETC. [Illustration] BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1888 Copyright, 1887, BY MARY N. MURFREE. _All rights reserved._ _The Riverside Press, Cambridge_: Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. THE STORY OF KEEDON BLUFFS. I. Towering into the air, reflected deep in the river, the great height of Keedon Bluffs is doubled to the casual glance and augmented in popular rumor. Nevertheless a vast mass of rock it is, splintered and creviced, and with rugged, beetling ledges, all atilt, and here and there a niche which holds a hardy shrub, subsisting surely on the bounty of the air or the smile of the sun, for scant sustenance can be coaxed from the solid sandstone. Here bats and lizards colonize, and amongst the trailing vines winged songsters find a home, and sometimes stealthy, four-footed, marauding shadows, famous climbers, creep in and out of the hollows of the rocks, for it is in the very heart of the wilderness on a slope of the Great Smoky Range. Naught was likely to behold them—save their own bright-eyed images in the swift current below, or perhaps a wayfaring cloud above, journeying adown the sky from the zenith—until one day a boy chanced to come this way in driving home the cow; he paused on one side of the horseshoe bend, which the river describes just here, and gazed fixedly across the bight at the bluffs. If at this moment one of the shy dwellers of the cliff had thrust forth an unwary head there was no need to hastily withdraw it. The boy’s attention was concentrated on a motionless object lying on a ledge; he looked at it in doubting surprise. It was a cannon-ball, precariously lodged where it had fallen, spent and harmless, years ago.