The Young Mountaineers

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"No; you tore it on a blackberry bush on the ledge of a bluff; it was
close to the Conscripts' Hollow, where some burglars have hidden stolen
plunder. I found the scrap and the button there myself."

Barney felt as if he were dreaming. How should his coat be torn on that
ledge, where he had not been since the cloth was woven!

The next words almost stunned him.

"Ye see, sonny," said the constable, "we believes ye're the boy what
holped to rob Blenkins's store by gittin' through a winder-pane an'
handin' out the stole truck ter the t'other burglars. Ye hev holped
about that thar plunder somehows,--else this hyar thing air a liar!" and
he shook the bit of cloth significantly.

"We'd better set out, Jim," said Stebbins, turning toward the wagon.
"We'll pass Blenkins's on the way, and we'll stop and see if this chap
can slip through the window-pane. If he can't, it's a point in his
favor, and if he can, it's a point against him. As we go, we can try to
get him to tell who the other burglars are."

"Kem on, bubby; we can't stand hyar no longer, a-wastin' the time an'
a-burnin' of daylight," said the constable.

Barney seemed to have lost control of his rigid limbs, and he was
half-dragged, half-lifted into the wagon by the two officers. The crowd
began to fall back and disperse, and he could see the group of
"home-folks" at the door. But he gave only one glance at the little log
cabin, and then turned his head away. It was a poor home, but if it had
been a palace, the pang he felt as he was torn from it could not have
been sharper.

In that instant he saw granny as she stood in the doorway, her head
shaking nervously and her stick whirling in her uncertain grasp. He knew
that she was struggling to say something for his comfort, and he had a
terrible moment of fear lest the wagon should begin to move and her
feeble voice be lost in the clatter of the wheels. But presently her
shrill tones rang out, "No harm kin kem, sonny, ter them ez hev done no
harm. All that happens works tergether fur good, an' the will o' God."

Little breath as she had left, it had done good service to-day,--it had
brought a drop of balm to the poor boy's heart. He did not look at her
again, but he knew that she was still standing in the doorway among the
clustering red leaves, whirling her stick, and shaking with the palsy,
but determined to see the last of him.

And now the wagon was rolling off, and a piteous wail went up from the
children, who understood nothing except that Barney was being carried
away against his will. Little four-year-old Melissa--she always seemed a
beauty to Barney, with her yellow hair, and her blue-checked cotton
dress, and her dimpled white bare feet--ran after the wagon until the
tears blinded her, and she fell in the road, and lay there in the dust,
sobbing.

Then Barney found his voice. His father and mother would not return
until to-morrow, and the thought of what might happen at home, with
nobody there but the helpless old grandmother and the little children,
made him forget his own troubles for the time.

"Take good keer o' the t'other chillen, Andy!" he shouted out to the
next oldest boy, thus making him a deputy-guardian of the family, "an'
pick Melissy up out'n the dust, an' be sure ye keeps granny's cheer
close enough ter the fire!"

Then he turned back again. He could still hear Melissa sobbing. He
wondered why the two men in the wagon looked persistently in the
opposite direction, and why they were both so silent.

The children stood in the road, watching the wagon as long as they could
see it, but Nick had slunk away into the woods. He could not bear the
sight of their grief. He walked on, hardly knowing where he went. He
felt as if he were trying to get rid of himself. He appreciated fully
now the consequences of what he had done. Barney, innocent Barney, would
be thrust into jail.

He began to see that the most terrible phase of moral cowardice is its
capacity to injure others, and he could not endure the thought of what
he had brought upon his friend. Soon he was saying to himself that
something was sure to happen to prevent them from putting Barney in
prison,--he shouldn't be surprised if it were to happen before the wagon
could reach the foot of the mountain.

In his despair, he had flung himself at length upon the rugged, stony
ground at the base of a great crag. When this comforting thought of
Barney's release came upon him, he took his hands from his face, and
looked about him. From certain ledges of the cliff above, the road which
led down the valley was visible at intervals for some distance. There he
could watch the progress of the wagon, and see for a time longer what
was happening to Barney.

There was a broad gulf between the wall of the mountain and the crag,
which, from its detached position and its shape, was known far and wide
as the "Old Man's Chimney."

It loomed up like a great stone column, a hundred feet above the wooded
slope where Nick stood, and its height could only be ascended by
dexterous climbing.

He went at it like a cat. Sometimes he helped himself up by sharp
projections of the rock, sometimes by slipping his feet and hands into
crevices, and sometimes he caught hold of a strong bush here and there,
and gave himself a lift. When he was about forty feet from the base, he
sat down on one of the ledges, and turning, looked anxiously along the
red clay road which he could see winding among the trees down the
mountain's side.

No wagon was there.

His eyes followed the road further and further toward the foot of the
range, and then along the valley beyond. There, at least two miles
distant, was a small moving black object, plainly defined upon the red
clay of the road.

Barney was gone! There was no mistake about it. They had taken him away
from Goliath Mountain! He was innocent, and Nick knew it, and Nick had
made him seem guilty. There was no one near him now to speak a good word
for him, not even his palsied old grandmother.

It all came back upon Nick with a rush. His eyes were blurred with
rising tears. Unconsciously, in his grief, he made a movement forward,
and suddenly clutched convulsively at the ledge.

He had lost his balance. There was a swift, fantastic whirl of vague
objects before him, then a great light seemed flashing through his very
brain, and he knew that he was falling.

He knew nothing else for some time. He wondered where he was when he
first opened his eyes and saw the great stone shaft towering high above,
and the tops of the sun-gilded maples waving about him.

Then he remembered and understood. He had fallen from that narrow ledge,
hardly ten feet above his head, and had been caught in his descent by
the far broader one upon which he lay.

"It knocked the senses out'n me fur a while, I reckon," he said to
himself. "But I hev toler'ble luck now, sure ez shootin', kase I mought
hev drapped over this ledge, an' then I'd hev been gone fur sartain
sure!"

His exultation was short-lived. What was this limp thing hanging to his
shoulder? and what was this thrill of pain darting through it?

He looked at it in amazement. It was his strong right
arm--broken--helpless.

And here he was, perched thirty feet above the earth, weakened by his
long faint, sore and bruised and unnerved by his fall, and with only his
left arm to aid him in making that perilous descent.

It was impossible. He glanced down at the sheer walls of the column
below, shook his head, and lay back on the ledge. Reckless as he was, he
realized that the attempt would be fatal.

Then came a thought that filled him with dismay,--how long was this to
last?--who would rescue him?

He knew that a prolonged absence from home would create no surprise. His
mother would only fancy that he had slipped off, as he had often done,
to go on a camp-hunt with some other boys. She would not grow uneasy for
a week, at least.

He was deep in the heart of the forest, distant from any dwelling. No
one, as far as he knew, came to this spot, except himself and Barney,
and their errand here was for the sake of the exhilaration and the
hazard of climbing the crag. It was so lonely that on the Old Man's
Chimney the eagles built instead of the swallows. His hope--his only
hope--was that some hunter might chance to pass before he should die of
hunger.

The shadow of the great obelisk shifted as the day wore on, and left him
in the broad, hot glare of the sun. His broken arm was fevered and gave
him great pain. Now and then he raised himself on the other, and looked
down wistfully at the cool, dusky depths of the woods. He heard
continually the impetuous rushing of a mountain torrent near at hand;
sometimes, when the wind stirred the foliage, he caught a glimpse of the
water, rioting from rock to rock, and he was oppressed by an intolerable
thirst.

Thus the hours lagged wearily on.

CHAPTER IV

When the wagon was rolling along the road in the valley, Barney at first
kept his eyes persistently fastened upon the craggy heights and the red
and gold autumnal woods of Goliath Mountain, as the mighty range
stretched across the plain.

But presently the two men began to talk to him, and he turned around in
order to face them. They were urging him to confess his own guilt and
tell who were the other burglars, and where they were. But Barney had
nothing to tell. He could only protest again and again his innocence.
The men, however, shook their heads incredulously, and after a while
they left him to himself and smoked their pipes in silence.

When Barney looked back at the mountains once more, a startling change
seemed to have been wrought in the landscape. Instead of the frowning
sandstone cliffs he loved so well, and the gloomy recesses of the woods,
there was only a succession of lines of a delicate blue color drawn
along the horizon. This was the way the distant ranges looked from the
crags of his own home; he knew that they were the mountains, but which
was Goliath?

Suddenly he struck his hands together, and broke out with a bitter cry.

"I hev los' G'liath!" he exclaimed. "I dunno whar I live! An' whar _is_
Melissy?"

A difficult undertaking, certainly, to determine where among all those
great spurs and outliers, stretching so far on either hand, was that
little atom of dimpled pink-and-white humanity known as "Melissy."

The constable, being a native of these hills himself, knew something by
experience of the homesickness of an exiled mountaineer,--far more
terrible than the homesickness of low-landers; he took his pipe
promptly from between his lips, and told the boy that the second blue
ridge, counting down from the sky, was "G'liath Mounting," and that
"Melissy war right thar somewhar."

Barney looked back at it with unrecognizing eyes,--this gentle, misty,
blue vagueness was not the solemn, sombre mountain that he knew. He
gazed at it only for a moment longer; then his heart swelled and he
burst into tears.

On and on they went through the flat country. The boy felt that he could
scarcely breathe. Even tourists, coming down from these mountains to the
valley below, struggle with a sense of suffocation and oppression; how
must it have been then with this half-wild creature, born and bred on
those breezy heights!

The stout mules did their duty well, and it was not long before they
were in sight of the cross-roads store that had been robbed. It was a
part of a small frame dwelling-house, set in the midst of the yellow
sunlight that brooded over the plain. All the world around it seemed to
the young backwoodsman to be a big cornfield; but there was a garden
close at hand, and tall sunflowers looked over the fence and seemed to
nod knowingly at Barney, as much as to say they had always suspected
him of being one of the burglars, and were gratified that he had been
caught at last.

Poor fellow! he saw so much suspicion expressed in the faces of a crowd
of men congregating about the store, that it was no wonder he fancied he
detected it too in inanimate objects.

Of all the group only one seemed to doubt his guilt. He overheard
Blenkins, the merchant, say to Jim Dow,--

"It's mighty hard to b'lieve this story on this 'ere boy; he's a manly
looking, straight-for'ard little chap, an' he's got honest eyes in his
head, too."

"He'd a deal better hev an honest heart in his body," drawled Jim Dow,
who was convinced that Barney had aided in the burglary.

When they had gone around to the window with the broken pane, Barney
looked up at it in great anxiety. If only it should prove too small for
him to slip through! Certainly it seemed very small.

He had pulled off his coat and stood ready to jump.

"Up with you!" said Stebbins.

The boy laid both hands on the sill, gave a light spring, and went
through the pane like an eel.

"That settles it!" he heard Stebbins saying outside. And all the idlers
were laughing because it was done so nimbly.

"That boy's right smart of a fool," said one of the lookers-on. "Now, if
that had been me, I'd hev made out to git stuck somehows in that winder;
I'd have scotched my wheel somewhere."

"Ef ye hed, I'd have dragged ye through ennyhow," declared Jim Dow, who
had no toleration of a joke on a serious subject. "This hyar boy air a
deal too peart ter try enny sech fool tricks on _Me_!"

Barney hardly knew how he got back into the wagon; he only knew that
they were presently jolting along once more in the midst of the yellow
glare of sunlight. It had begun to seem that there was no chance for
him. Like Nick, he too had madly believed, in spite of everything, that
something would happen to help him. He could not think that, innocent as
he was, he would be imprisoned. Now, however, this fate evidently was
very close upon him.

Suddenly Jim Dow spoke. "I s'pose ye war powerful disapp'inted kase ye
couldn't git yerself hitched in that thar winder; ye air too well used
to it,--ye hev been through it afore."

"I hev never been through it afore!" cried Barney indignantly.

"Well, well," said Stebbins pacifically, "it wouldn't have done you any
good if you hadn't gone through the pane just now. I'd have only thought
you were one of those who stood on the outside. You see, the _main_
point against you is that scrap of your coat and your button found right
there by the Conscripts' Hollow,--though, of course, your going through
the window-pane so easy makes it more complete."

Barney's tired brain began to fumble at this problem,--how did it
happen?

He had not been on the ledge nor at the Conscripts' Hollow for six
months at least. Yet there was that bit of his coat and his button found
on the bush close at hand only to-day.

Was it possible that he could have exchanged coats by mistake with Nick
the last afternoon that they were on the crag together?

"Did Nick wear _my_ coat down on the ledge, I wonder, an' git it tored?
Did Nick see the plunder in the Conscripts' Hollow, an' git skeered, an'
then sot out ter lyin' ter git shet o' the blame?"

As he asked himself these questions, he began to remember, vaguely,
having seen, just as he was falling asleep, his friend's head slowly
disappearing beneath the verge of the crag.

"Nick started down ter the ledge, anyhow," he argued.

Did he dream it, or was it true, that when Nick came back he seemed at
first strangely agitated?

All at once Barney exclaimed aloud,--

"This hyar air a powerful cur'ous thing 'bout'n that thar piece what war
tored out'n my coat!"

"What's curious about it?" asked Stebbins quickly.

Jim Dow took his pipe from his mouth, and looked sharply at the boy.

Barney struggled for a moment with a strong temptation. Then a nobler
impulse asserted itself. He would not even attempt to shield himself
behind the friend who had done him so grievous an injury.

He _knew_ nothing positively; he must not put his suspicions and his
vague, half-sleeping impressions into words, and thus possibly criminate
Nick.

He himself felt certain now how the matter really stood,--that Nick had
no connection whatever with the robbery, but having accidentally
stumbled upon the stolen goods, he had become panic-stricken, had lied
about it, and finally had saved himself at the expense of an innocent
friend.

Still, Barney had no _proof_ of this, and he felt he would rather suffer
unjustly himself than unjustly throw blame on another.

"Nothin', nothin'," he said absently. "I war jes' a-studyin' 'bout'n it
all."

"Well, I wouldn't think about it any more just now," said good-natured
Stebbins. "You look like you had been dragged through a keyhole instead
of a window-pane. This town we're coming to is the biggest town you ever
saw."

Barney could not respond to this attempt to divert his attention. He
could only brood upon the fact that he was innocent, and would be
punished as if he were guilty, and that it was Nick Gregory, his chosen
friend, who had brought him to this pass.

He would not be unmanly, and injure Nick with a possibly unfounded
suspicion, but his heart burned with indignation and contempt when he
thought of him. He felt that he would go through fire and water to be
justly revenged upon him.

He determined that, if ever he should see Nick again, even though years
might intervene, he would tax him with the injury he had wrought, and
make him answer for it.

Barney clenched his fists as he looked back at the ethereal blue shadows
that they said were the solid old hills.

Perhaps, however, if he had known where, in the misty uncertainty that
enveloped Goliath Mountain, Nick Gregory was at this moment,--far away
in the lonely woods, helpless with his broken arm, perched high up on
the "Old Man's Chimney,"--Barney might have thought himself the more
fortunately placed of the two.

Before he was well aware of it, the wagon was jolting into the town. He
took no notice of how much larger the little village was than any he had
ever seen before. His attention was riveted by the faces of the people
who ran to the doors and windows, upon recognizing the officers, to
stare at him as one of the burglars.

When the wagon reached the public square, a number of men came up and
stopped it.

Barney was surprised that they took so little notice of him. They were
talking loudly and excitedly to the officers, who grew at once loud and
excited, too.

The boy roused himself, and began to listen to the conversation. The
burglars had been captured!--yes, that was what they were saying. The
deputy-sheriff had nabbed the whole gang in a western district of the
county this morning early, and they were lodged at this moment in jail.
Barney's heart sank. Would he be put among the guilty creatures? He
flinched from the very idea.

Suddenly, here was the deputy-sheriff himself, a young man, dusty and
tired with his long, hard ride, but with an air of great satisfaction in
his success. He talked with many quick gestures that were very
expressive. Sometimes he would leave a sentence unfinished except by a
brisk nod, but all the crowd caught its meaning instantly. This
peculiarity gave him a very animated manner, and he seemed to Barney to
enjoy being in a position of authority.

He pressed his foaming horse close to the wagon, and leaning over,
looked searchingly into Barney's face.

The poor boy looked up deprecatingly from under his limp and drooping
hat-brim.

All the crowd stood in silence, watching them. After a moment of this
keen scrutiny, the deputy turned to the constable with an interrogative
wave of the hand.

"This hyar's the boy what war put through the winder-pane ter thieve
from Blenkins," said Jim Dow. "Thar's consider'ble fac's agin him."

"You mean well, Jim," said the deputy, with a short, scornful laugh.
"But your performance ain't always equal to your intentions."

He lifted his eyebrows and nodded in a significant way that the crowd
understood, for there was a stir of excitement in its midst; but poor
Barney failed to catch his meaning. He hung upon every tone and gesture
with the intensest interest. All the talk was about him, and he could
comprehend no more than if the man spoke in a foreign language.

Still, he gathered something of the drift of the speech from the
constable's reply.

"That thar boy's looks hev bamboozled more'n one man ter-day, jes' at
fust," Jim Dow drawled. "_Looks_ ain't nothin'."

"I'd believe 'most anything a boy with a face on him like that would
tell me," said the deputy. "And besides, you see, one of those scamps,"
with a quick nod toward the jail, "has turned State's evidence."

Barney's heart was in a great tumult. It seemed bursting. There was a
hot rush of blood to his head. He was dizzy--and he could not
understand!

State's evidence,--what was that? and what would that do to him?

CHAPTER V

Barney observed that these words produced a marked sensation. The crowd
began to press more closely around the deputy-sheriff's foaming horse.

"Who hev done turned State's evidence?" asked Jim Dow.

"Little Jeff Carew,--you've seen that puny little man a-many a
time--haven't you, Jim? He'd go into your pocket."

"He would, I know, powerful quick, ef he thunk I hed ennything in it,"
said Jim, with a gruff laugh.

"I didn't mean that, though it's true enough. I only went ter say that
he's small enough to go into any ordinary-sized fellow's pocket. Some of
the rest of them wanted to turn State's evidence, but they weren't
allowed. They were harder customers even than Jeff Carew,--regular old
jail-birds."

Barney began to vaguely understand that when a prisoner confesses the
crime he has committed, and gives testimony which will convict his
partners in it, this is called turning "State's evidence."

But how was it to concern Barney?

An old white-haired man had pushed up to the wagon; he polished his
spectacles on his coat-tail, then put them on his nose, and focused them
on Barney. Those green spectacles seemed to the boy to have a solemnly
accusing expression on their broad and sombre lenses. He shrank as the
old man spoke,--

"And is this the boy who was slipped through the window to steal from
Blenkins?"

"No," said the deputy, "this ain't the boy."

Barney could hardly believe his senses.

"Fact is," continued the deputy, with a brisk wave of his hand, "there
wasn't any boy with 'em,--so little Jeff Carew says. _He_ jumped through
the window-pane _himself_. We wouldn't believe that until we measured
one there at the jail of the same size as Blenkins's window-glass, and
he went through it without a wriggle."

Barney sprang to his feet.

"Oh, tell it ter me, folkses!" he cried wildly; "tell it ter me,
somebody! Will they keep me hyar all the same? An' when will I see
G'liath Mounting agin, an' be whar Melissy air?"

He had burst into tears, and there was a murmur of sympathy in the
crowd.

"Oh, that lets you out, I reckon, youngster," said Stebbins. "I'm glad
enough of it for one."

The old man turned his solemnly accusing green spectacles on Stebbins,
and it seemed to Barney that he spoke with no less solemnly accusing a
voice.

"He ought never to have been let in."

Stebbins replied, rather eagerly, Barney thought, "Why, there was enough
against that boy to have clapped him in jail, and maybe convicted him,
if this man hadn't turned State's evidence."

"We hed the fac's agin him,--dead agin him," chimed in Jim Dow.

"That just shows how much danger an innocent boy was in; it seems to me
that somebody ought to have been more careful," the old man protested.

"That's so!" came in half a dozen voices from the crowd.

Barney was surprised to see how many friends he had now, when a moment
before he had had none. But he ought to have realized that there is a
great difference between _being_ a young martyr, and _seeming_ a young
thief.

"I want to see the little fellow out of this," said the old man with the
terrible spectacles.

He saw him out of it in a short while.

There was an examination before a magistrate, in which Barney was
discharged on the testimony of Jeff Carew, who was produced and swore
that he had never before seen the boy, that he was not among the gang of
burglars who had robbed Blenkins's store and dwelling-house, and that he
had had no part in helping to conceal the plunder. In opposition to
this, the mere finding of a scrap of Barney's coat close to the
Conscripts' Hollow seemed now of slight consequence, although it could
not be accounted for.

When the trial was over, the old man with the green spectacles took
Barney to his house, gave him something to eat, and saw him start out
homeward.

As Barney plodded along toward the blue mountains his heart was very
bitter against Nick Gregory, who had lied and thrown suspicion upon him
and brought him into danger. Whenever he thought of it he raised his
clenched fist and shook it. He was a little fellow, but he felt that
with the strength of this grievance he was more than a match for big
Nick Gregory. He would force him to confess the lies that he had told
and his cowardice, and all Goliath Mountain should know it and despise
him for it.

"I'll fetch an' kerry that word to an' fro fur a thousand mile!" Barney
declared between his set teeth.

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