r the mountains. And
Bruce came down to see them off.

"Remember, son," said Roger, as the two walked on the platform. "Come up
this year for a month, my boy. You need it." The train was about to start.

"Oh, I'll be all right," was the answer. "My friend the Judge, who has hay
fever, tells me he has found a cure."

"Damn his cure! You come to us!"

"Hold on a minute, live and learn. The Judge is quite excited about it.
You drink little bugs, he says, a billion after every meal. They come in
tall blue bottles. We're going to dine together next week and drink 'em
till we're all lit up. Oh, we're going to have a hell of a time. _His_ wife
left town on Tuesday."

"Bruce," said Roger sternly, as the train began to move, "leave bugs alone
and come up and breathe! And quit smoking so many cigarettes!" He stepped
on the car.

"Remember, son, a solid month!" Bruce nodded as the train moved out.

"Good luck--good-bye--fine summer--my love to the wife and the kiddies--"
and Bruce's dark, tense, smiling face was left behind. Roger went back into
the smoker.

"Now for the mountains," he thought. "Thank God!"

CHAPTER XIV

A few hours later Roger awakened. His lower berth was still pitch dark. The
train had stopped, and he had been roused by a voice outside his window.
Rough and slow and nasal, the leisurely drawl of a mountaineer, it came
like balm to Roger's ears. He raised the curtain and looked out. A train
hand with a lantern was listening to a dairy man, a tall young giant in top
boots. High overhead loomed a shadowy mountain and over its rim came the
glow of the dawn. With a violent lurch the train moved on. And Roger, lying
back on his pillow, looked up at the misty mountain sides all mottled in
the strange blue light with patches of firs and birches and pines. In the
narrow valley up which the train was thundering, were small herds of
grazing cattle, a lonely farmhouse here and there. From one a light was
twinkling. And the city with its heat and noise, its nervous throb, its
bedlam nights, all dropped like a fever from his soul.

Now, close by the railroad track, through a shallow rocky gorge a small
river roared and foamed. Its cool breath came up to his nostrils and
gratefully he breathed it in. For this was the Gale River, named after one
of his forefathers, and in his mind's eye he followed the stream back up
its course to the little station where he and Deborah were to get off.
There the narrowing