He had long since ceased to attach (if indeed he had ever attached) any significance to the look on Whalen’s face in the woods. That striking resemblance to his little old friend, Caleb Dyker, had been a thing seen in a moment of half-consciousness and amid surroundings altogether dramatic and unusual. Yet he had wondered if there were any particular reason why Whalen avoided him. He had decided that there was not, that it was just his friend’s moroseness and lonely habit. Probably Whalen looked upon him as a kid, thought Tom. At all events here was a chance to chat with him in the good old way he used to do.... Tom soon found that he was on the trail along the brow of the mountain. By the time he reached the point which marked the limit of Audry’s daring, Whalen had disappeared around a bend in the winding trail. Tom leaped the crevice and soon found himself in the thick of the jungle. On his left the heavy undergrowth encroached upon the almost indistinct path as if to crowd the passerby to the very brink of the overgrown cliff. Below, the abnormal, upturned wilderness with its tilted trees and half-exposed roots, and its great insecurely lodged boulders, looked dark and forbidding in the cold twilight. In this witching hour the path seemed very lonesome. Shadows played like living things among the trees. The great reservoir afar off looked the color of steel in the gathering dusk. And the initialed rocks along the trail, wrapped in the gray coverlet of twilight, might easily have been imagined to be ghosts out of the past. On one of these bordering rests a shadow flitted back and forth making the initials of some unknown pilgrim to shimmer in the changing light and hover on the verge of invisibility like some departed shade. How interesting and romantic, thought Tom, for some former visitor who had left his memorial in this silent haunt, to return and search it out. He had passed around another bend of this sequestered, lofty trail, when he saw Whalen sitting on a rock some hundred feet or so distant. His back was toward Tom, for he had turned about and had somewhat altered his sitting posture to gaze at the darkening panorama in the extensive country below. As he thus sprawled unaware of Tom’s approach, the latter’s eye was caught by something shiny on the rock. As he approached nearer, he saw it was an open jack-knife. As soon as Whalen became aware of Tom he turned about, which was natural, but it seemed to Tom that there was something unnatural in the new attitude. He fancied a trace of agitation about Whalen, which was quite unlike him. As he approached it seemed as if Whalen were on the point of coming to meet him but decided suddenly to remain where he was. “H’lo, Ned,” said Tom cheerily. “Taking a walk? Or a rest, I mean?”