"Aha!" he exclaimed. "The little rascal! He stuck it up there, or my name's not Witham. That's why he wouldn't take the money for getting it down. Reckon I ought to have given him a taste of that stick, instead of offering him a quarter." But even Colonel Witham, when he came to think upon it, knew deep down in his heart that he had a sort of admiration for Little Tim. In the meantime, Henry Burns, turning over in his mind the secret that had been partly revealed to him, through the words of Grannie Thornton, could not make up his mind just what to do about it. He had almost decided to entrust what he knew to Lawyer Estes, for him to unravel, when the lawyer was called out of town for several weeks, on an important case. Again, another event intervened to cause delay. Miss Matilda Burns made a visit to her home in Massachusetts, and took Henry Burns with her; and it was well into November, close upon Thanksgiving, in fact, when they returned to Benton. By this time early winter had set in, and some heavy snow falls had buried all the country around and about Benton deep under drifts. "You're just in time," said Harvey, as he and Tom Harris greeted Henry Burns on the latter's return. "We've got a week's holiday, and look what I've made for us." Harvey proudly displayed a big toboggan, some seven feet in length, in the making of which he had expended the surplus time and energy of the last two weeks. "No easy job steaming those ends and making 'em curl up together even," he added; "but she'll go some. Say, you ought to see the slide we've got, down the mountain above Ellison's. Well go up this afternoon, if you like." They were up there, all of them, early in the afternoon, George and Young Joe Warren driving one of the Warren horses hitched to a sleigh, and drawing a string of toboggans after. Blanketing the horse some distance above the Ellison dam, they proceeded up the surface of the frozen stream to the slide. It was, as Henry Burns said, enough to make the hair on one's fur cap stand on end, to look at it. From the summit of what might almost be termed a small mountain--certainly, a tremendous hill--to the base, down a precipitous incline, the boys had constructed a chute, by banking the snow on either side. This chute led down on to the frozen stream, where a similar chute had been formed for a half-mile or more down stream. Moreover, a temporary thaw, with a fall of sleet, had coated the bed of the chute with a glassy surface, like polished steel, or glare ice. Henry Burns, standing beside the slide, half-way up the mountain, saw a toboggan with four youths dash down the steep incline, presently. Little Tim sat in front, yelling like an Indian at a war-dance. They fairly took Henry Burns's breath away as they shot past him. He looked at Harvey and shrugged his shoulders.