igh found himself again late for school. It was always
happening. It seemed to be inevitable with the process of going to
school at all. And it was no fault "o' his." Something was always
occurring,--some eccentricity of Nature or circumstance was invariably
starting up in his daily path to the schoolroom. He may not have been
"thinkin' of squirrels," and yet the rarest and most evasive of that
species were always crossing his trail; he may not have been "huntin'
honey," and yet a wild bees' nest in the hollow of an oak absolutely
obtruded itself before him; he wasn't "bird-catchin'," and yet there was
a yellow-hammer always within stone's throw. He had heard how grown men
hunters always saw the most wonderful animals when they "hadn't got
a gun with 'em," and it seemed to be his lot to meet them in his
restricted possibilities on the way to school. If Nature was thus
capricious with his elders, why should folk think it strange if she was
as mischievous with a small boy?

On this particular morning Johnny had been beguiled by the unmistakable
footprints--so like his own!--of a bear's cub. What chances he had of
ever coming up with them, or what he would have done if he had, he did
not know. He only knew that at the end of an hour and a half he found
himself two miles from the schoolhouse, and, from the position of the
sun, at least an hour too late for school. He knew that nobody would
believe him. The punishment for complete truancy was little worse than
for being late. He resolved to accept it, and by way of irrevocability
at once burnt his ships behind him--in devouring part of his dinner.

Thus fortified in his outlawry, he began to look about him. He was on a
thickly wooded terrace with a blank wall of "outcrop" on one side nearly
as high as the pines which pressed close against it. He had never seen
it before; it was two or three miles from the highroad and seemed to be
a virgin wilderness. But on close examination he could see, with the
eye of a boy bred in a mining district, that the wall of outcrop had not
escaped the attention of the mining prospector. There were marks of his
pick in some attractive quartz seams of the wall, and farther on, a more
ambitious attempt, evidently by a party of miners, to begin a tunnel,
shown in an abandoned excavation and the heap of debris before it. It
had evidently been abandoned for some time, as ferns already forced
their green fronds through the stones and gravel, and the y