ficient importance
to waste his breath on.

Unable at last to endure the strain, she burst out impatiently:

"What on earth's the matter with you, Jim?"

"Why?" he asked softly.

"You haven't spoken to me in half an hour, and I've asked you two
questions."

"Just studying about something, Kiddo, something big. I'll tell you
sometime, maybe--not now."

Slowly a great fear began to shape itself in her heart. The real man
behind those slumbering eyes she had never known. Who was he?

CHAPTER XIV. UNWELCOME GUESTS

While she was yet puzzling over the strange mood of absorbed brooding
into which Jim had fallen, his face suddenly lighted, and he changed
with such rapidity that her uneasiness was doubled.

They had reached the stretches of deep forest at the foot of the Black
Mountain ranges. The Swannanoa had become a silver thread of laughing,
foaming spray and deep, still pools beneath the rocks. The fields were
few and small. The little clearings made scarcely an impression in the
towering virgin forests.

"Great guns, Kiddo!" he exclaimed, "this is some country! By George, I
had no idea there was such a place so close to New York!"

She looked at him with uneasy surprise. What could be in his mind? The
solemn gorge through which they were passing gave no entrancing views
of clouds or sky or towering peaks. Its wooded cliffs hung ominously
overhead in threatening shadows. The scene had depressed her after the
vast sunlit spaces of sky, of shining valleys and cloud-capped, sapphire
peaks on which they had turned their backs.

"You like this, Jim?" she asked.

"It's great--great!"

"I thought that waterfall we just passed was very beautiful."

"I didn't see it. But this is something like it. You're clean out of the
world here--and there ain't a railroad in twenty miles!"

The deeper the shadows of tree and threatening crag, the higher Jim's
strange spirit seemed to rise.

She watched him with increasing fear. How little she knew the real man!
Could it be possible that this lonely, unlettered boy of the streets
of lower New York, starved and stunted in childhood, had within him the
soul of a great poet? How else could she explain the sudden rapture over
the threatening silences and shadows of these mountain gorges which
had depressed her? And yet his utter indifference to the glories of
beautiful waters, his blindness at noon before the most wonderful
panorama of mountains and skies on which she ha