“Jes’ a leetle furder, sonny,” said Jerry Binwell paternally, turning upon him a quiet face, immovable save for the industriously ruminant jaws, subduing a great quid of tobacco; he was apparently so unaware of any cause for suspicions that they were erased from Skimpy’s mind. He took up his end of the ladder again, thinking it probably belonged to Binwell, and thankful that he had put into words no intimation of his vague but uneasy doubts. He even hummed a song as he stumped along, willing enough to be cheerful if the adventure only signified a little work for no pay. “But I’d hev ruther not l’arn them chunes folks fiddle down in Persimmon Cove ef I hed knowed I hed ter skitter up the mounting this-a-way.” For they were in truth near the summit, not ascending the great bald, but in a gap between two peaks. The laurel had given way to open woods, and Skimpy’s end of the ladder almost dragged. The trees, instead of the great forest kings on the mountain slopes below, were the stunted growths peculiar to the summit. They heard no call of herder, no tinkle of bell, for the cattle that found summer pasturage here had been rounded up and driven home to the farms in the “flat-woods.” The silence was intense; they saw no living creature save a buzzard circling high in the red skies of the sunset. Skimpy thought for a moment they were going down on the North Carolina side; he was about to protest; the way was indescribably rocky and tortuous; the night was coming on. Suddenly Binwell paused. “Kem along, sonny; take the ladder in the middle an’ feed it out ter me.” Skimpy, wondering, took the ladder in the middle, giving it a series of shoves toward Binwell, who suddenly lifted the end, and with one effort flung it from him—and out of the world, as it seemed to Skimpy. He listened for a moment, hearing it crash among the tree-tops as it went falling down the precipice whence Binwell had thrown it. A moment after there was silence as intense as before. Then Binwell knelt on the verge and looked down the abyss. He raised a triumphant grinning face, and silently beckoned to Skimpy. The boy went forward and knelt too, to look over. At first he could see nothing but the shelving side of the mountain; the deep abyss gloomed with shadows, the richness of the autumnal colors sombre and tempered beneath the purple dusk. And then he discovered one end of the ladder, barely perceptible in the top of a pine-tree. “It lodged ’mongst them pines,” said the jubilant Binwell. “It’s safe, summer or winter; nobody’ll find it but the birds or the squir’ls.” Skimpy could no longer resist. “Air—air—it yourn?” he faltered, struggling with his instinct of politeness. Binwell had risen to his feet; he was rubbing the earth off his hands—recklessly bedaubed when he had knelt down—and also from his trousers, nimbly raising first one knee, then the other, for the purpose. He was chuckling unpleasantly as he looked at the boy.