d girl who had come into his
life from the desolation and unhappiness of Jed Hawkins' cabin.

Forgetting the law, forgetting all but her, he went at last into the
dungeon-like gloom between the rocks, and after Peter had wallowed
himself a bed in the carpet of sand they fell asleep.

They awoke with the dawn. But for three days thereafter they went forth
only at night, and for three days did not show themselves above the
barricade of rocks. The Stew-Kettle was what Jolly Roger had called it,
and when the sun was straight above, or descending with the last half of
the day, the name fitted.

It was a hot place, so hot that at a distance its piled-up masses of
white rock seemed to simmer and broil in the blazing heat of the July
sun. Neither man nor beast would look into the heart of it, Jolly Roger
had assured Peter, unless the one was half-witted and the other a fool.
Looking at it from the meadowy green plain that lay between the Ridge
and the forest their temporary retreat was anything but a temptation to
the eye. Something had happened there a few thousand centuries before,
and in a moment of evident spleen and vexation the earth had vomited up
that pile of rock debris, and Jolly Roger good humoredly told himself
and Peter that it was an act of Providence especially intended for them,
though planned and erupted some years before they were born.

The third afternoon of their hiding, Jolly Roger decided upon action.

This afternoon all of the caloric guns of an unclouded sun had seemed
to concentrate themselves on the gigantic rock-pile. Though it was now
almost sunset, a swirling and dizzying incandescence still hovered about
it. The huge masses of stone were like baked things to the touch of hand
and foot, and one breathed a smoldering air in between their gray and
white walls.

Thus forbidding looked the Stew-Kettle, when viewed from the plain. But
from the top-most crag of the mass, which rose a hundred feet high at
the end of the Ridge, one might find his reward for a blistering climb.
On all sides, a paradise of green and yellow and gold, stretched the
vast wilderness, studded with shimmering lakes that gleamed here and
there from out of their rich dark frames of spruce and cedar and balsam.
And half way between the edge of the plain and this highest pinnacle of
rock, utterly hidden from the eyes of both man and beast, nestled the
hiding place which Jolly Roger and Peter had found.

It was a cool and cavern