e realized as he had never done
before the depths to which strong drink will reduce men. But that the
very rocks would cry out upon them, they would have murdered him.

In the preparations for departure all the lights had been extinguished,
except a single lantern, and a multitude of shadows had come thronging
from the deeper recesses of the cave. In the faint glimmer the figures
of the men loomed up, indistinct, gigantic, distorted. They hardly
seemed men at all to Rick; rather some evil underground creatures,
neither beast nor human.

And he was to be made equally besotted, and even more helpless than
they, in order that his senses might be sapped away, and he should
remember no story to tell. Perhaps if he had not had before him so vivid
an illustration of the malign power that swayed them, he might not have
experienced so strong an aversion to it. Now, to be made like them
seemed a high price to pay for his life. And there was his promise to
his mother! As the long, lank, lazy-looking mountaineer pressed the
whiskey upon him, Rick dashed it aside with a gesture so unexpected and
vehement that the cracked jug fell to the floor, and was shivered to
fragments.

Rick lifted an appealing face to the man, who seized him with a strong
grip. "I can't--I won't," the boy cried wildly. "I--I--promised my
mother!"

He looked around the circle deprecatingly. He expected first a guffaw
and then a blow, and he dreaded the ridicule more than the pain.

But there were neither blows nor ridicule. They all gazed at him,
astounded. Then a change, which Rick hardly comprehended, flitted across
the face of the man who had grasped him. The moonshiner turned away
abruptly, with a bitter laugh that startled all the echoes.

"_I--I_ promised _my_ mother, too!" he cried. "It air good that in her
grave whar she is she can't know how I hev kep' my word."

And then there was a sudden silence. It seemed to Rick, strangely
enough, like the sudden silence that comes after prayer. He was
reminded, as one of the men rose at length and the keg on which he had
been sitting creaked with the motion, of the creaking benches in the
little mountain church when the congregation started from their knees.
And had some feeble, groping sinner's prayer filled the silence and the
moral darkness!

The "executive committee" promptly recovered himself. But he made no
further attempt to force the whiskey upon the boy. Under some whispered
instructions which