roll and Katrina cried out in surprise and indignation. Bob's
eyes were fixed upon Sydney, and she, ghastly white, was crumbling her
bread into bits.

"The next day? Why, that is why he didn't come here for so long,
Sydney!"

"He's under bond to appear at the next sitting of the United States
Court, and, as that comes in on Monday, you understand the appearance
of my friend the enemy on the train."

"Poor fellow!" murmured Katrina.

"Why in the world should the Baron sell any whisky, I should like to
have some one tell me," demanded Mrs. Carroll. "And why didn't we see
it in the paper?"

"Probably the name was put in incorrectly," Bob suggested. "The
Asheville reporters aren't accustomed to German."

Sydney was silent. But upon Bob, for his father's sake, she laid
accusing eyes, for she thought she had a clue to the words that had
come to her ears through the clear air as she stood upon the top of
Buck Mountain.

X

Through the Mist

One day in the autumn, a few weeks after he had bought Ben Frady's
farm, von Rittenheim had taken his gun, and had whistled to heel one of
the hounds that had preferred to stay in his old home with an unknown
master rather than endure the precarious temper of the known quantity,
and had climbed Buzzard, the mountain behind his cabin, in search of
squirrel or quail.

As the day advanced, fleecy clouds gathered over the sky and obscured
the sun, and then thickened and turned leaden. Suddenly, as the
huntsman tramped across a clearing, a one-time cornfield high on the
side of the mountain, he saw a mass of fog rolling towards him, and
before he could descend below its level he found himself enveloped in
the mist of a passing cloud. Heavy as a palpable thing it closed around
him, impenetrable to the eye, chilling to the whole physical being,
fraught with discouragement and depression to the mind.

Friedrich tried to regain a path that he remembered to have crossed a
few minutes before, but under the trees the gloom was too dense for
profitable search. Moisture began to collect upon the leaf tips and to
drip upon him. The dog did not answer to his whistle. There were no
points of the compass; there was no view of the valley below. He was
like a ship rudderless. He only knew of a surety that the earth was
beneath his feet, and as night drew on, and he could no longer see the
soil his boot-soles pressed, he only knew that he was descending.

And then of a sudden came the b