The Young Mountaineers | Page 5

a fight--and all because he had loitered.
How he tore out of the brambly woods! How he pounded along the
sandy road! But when he reached the settlement close upon nightfall,
the storekeeper's wife told him that the men had gone long ago.
"They war powerful special ter git off early," she added, "'kase they
wanted ter be thar 'fore Old Daddy drapped off ter sleep. Some o' them
foolish, slack-jawed boys ter the store ter-day riled the old man's
feelin's, an' they 'lowed ter patch up the peace with him, an' let him an'
Jonas know ez they never meant no harm."

This suggestion buoyed up the boy's heart to some degree as he toiled
along the "short cut" homeward through the heavy shades of the
gloomy woods and the mystic effects of the red rising moon. But he
was not altogether without anxiety until, as he drew within sight of the
log cabin on the slope of the ravine, he heard Old Daddy piping
pacifically to the guests about "my son," and Jonas Creyshaw's jolly
laughter.
The moon was golden now; Si could see its brilliant shafts of light
strike aslant upon the smooth surface of the cliff that formed the
opposite side of Old Daddy's Window. He stopped short in the deep
shadow of the more rugged crag. The vines and bushes that draped its
many jagged ledges dripped with dew. The boughs of an old oak,
which grew close by, swayed gently in the breeze. Hidden by its huge
hole, Si cast an apprehensive glance toward the house where his elders
sat.
Certainly no one was thinking of him now.
"This air my chance fur that young owel--ef ever," he said to himself.
The owl's nest was in the hollow of the tree. The trunk was far too
bulky to admit of climbing, and the lowest branches were well out of
the boy's reach. Some thirty feet from the ground, however, one of the
boughs touched the crag. By clambering up its rugged, irregular ledges,
making a zigzag across its whole breadth to the right and then a similar
zigzag to the left, Si might gain a position which would enable him to
clutch this bough of the tree. Thence he could scramble along to the
owl's stronghold.
He hesitated. He knew his elders would disapprove of so reckless an
undertaking as climbing about Old Daddy's Window, for in venturing
toward its outer verge, a false step, a crumbling ledge, the snapping of a
vine, would fling him down the sheer precipice into the depths below.
His hankering for a pet owl had nevertheless brought him here more
than once. It was only yesterday evening--before he had heard of the
ghost's appearance, however--that he had made his last futile attempt.

He looked up doubtfully. "I ain't ez strong ez--ez some folks," he
admitted.
"But then, come ter think of it," he argued astutely, "I don't weigh
nuthin' sca'cely, an' thar ain't much of me ter hev ter haul up thar."
He flung off his hat, he laid his wiry hands upon the wild grape-vines,
he felt with his bare feet for the familiar niches and jagged edges, and
up he went, working steadily to the right, across the broad face of the
cliff.
Its heavy shadow concealed him from view. Only one ledge, at the
extreme verge of the crag, jutted out into the full moonbeams. But this,
by reason of the intervening bushes and vines, could not be seen by
those who sat in the cabin porch on the slope of the ravine, and he was
glad to have light just here, for it was the most perilous point of his
enterprise. By deft scrambling, however, he succeeded in getting on the
moonlit ledge.
"I clumb like a painter!" he declared triumphantly.
He rested there for a moment before attempting to reach the vines high
up on the left hand, which he must grasp in order to draw himself up
into the shadowy niche in the rock, and begin his zigzag course back
again across the face of the cliff to the projecting bough of the tree.
But suddenly, as he still stood motionless on the ledge in the full
radiance of the moon, the clamor of frightened voices sounded at the
house. Until now he had forgotten all about the ghost. He turned,
horror-stricken.
There was the frightful thing, plainly defined against the smooth
surface of the opposite cliff--some thirty feet distant--that formed the
other side of Old Daddy's Window.
And certainly there are mighty few dancers such as that ghost! It
lunged actively toward the precipice. It suddenly dashed wildly
back--gyrating continually with singularly nimble feet, flinging wiry

arms aloft and maintaining a sinister silence, while the frightened
clamor at the house grew ever louder and