“Skimpy!” his voice sounded strong again—reassured; he could not, would not believe this thing. “Quit foolin’, sonny; whar hev ye hid?” Skimpy’s mother had waited for neither the candle nor the lantern; she mounted the ladder by the light of the fire, and she understood what had happened almost as soon as Ike did, as pale and dismayed he looked over her shoulder into the dusky garret. The golden moonlight fell through the little window upon the slowly-pacing clothes, and drew the image of the bare tree upon the floor, and slanted upon the empty bed by which Peter Sawyer stood crying aloud—“He hev gone, wife; he hev gone!” XV. The great gray sandstone heights of Keedon Bluffs began to glimmer in the midst of the black night when the yellow moon, slow and pensive, showed its waning disk, half veiled with a fibrous mist, in the gap of the eastern mountain. The woods were still densely dark on the other side of the road. A slender beech, white and spectral, was dimly suggested at their verge, shuddering and shivering in the last vagrant gust of the wind. Skimpy glanced fearfully at it for a moment as he came softly down the road and then he stood shivering too, with his hands in his pockets. A swift, dark figure, as noiseless as if unhampered with substance, appeared at his side, and a husky, wheezing voice murmured suddenly—“Hyar we air, Skimp!” Even so bated a tone did not elude the alert echo. “S-Skimp-imp-mp,” the Bluffs were sibilantly multiplying the tones. It seemed to Skimpy that some vague spy of the earth or of the air was repeating the sound to charge its memory with the word. He could ill trust even Keedon Bluffs with the secret of his name now, and he looked with futile deprecation over his shoulder at every whisper of the familiar word. “Don’t talk!” he said nervously. “Shucks!” exclaimed Binwell; “I’d sing ef I war minded ter—an’ ef I hed a pipe like yourn. What ails ye ter be so trembly? ’Tain’t no s’prisin’ job—it’s fun, boy! An’ ter-morrer ye and me will go an’ cut down them pines an’ git old Fat-sides’ ladder out’n ’em.” Skimpy plucked up a little. The prospect of retrieving his folly reassured him. It was the hour, the secrecy of his escape from the roof-room window at home, the atmosphere of mystery that surrounded the adventure, he endeavored to think, rather than any distrust of Jerry Binwell, which shook his nerves. He lent himself with docile acquiescence to a sort of harness of rope which the man slipped over his head and secured beneath his armpits, one end fastened to Binwell’s arm. Its ostensible use was to aid the boy while climbing, in case he should slip among the ledges. A mind prone to suspicion might have deemed its utility most pronounced in preventing Skimpy from hiding anew or making off with anything of value which he might find hidden in the hollows.