ad the mistress of Champ-au-Haut stood on the terrace a few minutes
longer, she might have seen with those far-sighted eyes of hers a dark
form passing quickly along the strip of highroad that showed white
between the last houses at The Bow. It was Father Honore. He walked
rapidly along the highway that, skirting the base of the mountain,
follows the large curve of the lake shore. Rapid as was the pace, the
quickened eyes were seeing all about, around, above. In passing beneath
a stretch of towering pines, he caught between their still indefinite
foliage the gleam of the lake waters. He stopped short for a full minute
to pommel his resonant chest; to breathe deep, deep breaths of the night
balm. Then he proceeded on his way.

That way led northwards along the lake shore; it skirted the talus that
had fallen from the cliff which rose three hundred feet above him. He
heard the sound of a rolling stone gathering in velocity among the
rubble. He halted in order to listen; to trace, if possible, its course.
The dull monotone of its rumbling rattle started a train of thought:
perhaps his foot, treading the highway lightly, had caused the sensitive
earth to tremble just sufficiently to jar the delicately poised stone
and send it from its resting place! He went on. Thoughts not to be
uttered crowded to the forefront of consciousness as he neared the cleft
in the Flamsted Hills, whence the Rothel makes known to every wayfarer
that it has come direct from the heart of The Gore, and brought with it
the secrets of its granite veins.

The road grew steeper; the man's pace did not slacken, but the straight
back was bent at an angle which showed the priest had been accustomed to
mountain climbing. In the leafy half-light, which is neither dawn nor
twilight, but that reverential effulgence which is made by moonlight
sifting finely through midsummer foliage, the Rothel murmured over its
rocky bed; once, when in a deep pool its babble wholly ceased, an owl
broke the silence with his "witti-hoo-hoo-hoo".

Still upwards he kept his way and his pace until he emerged into the
full moonlight of the heights. There he halted and looked about him. He
was near the apex of The Gore. To the north, above the foreground of the
sea of hilltops, loomed Katahdin. At his right, a pond, some five acres
in extent, lay at the base of cliff-like rocks topped with a few
primeval pines. Everywhere there were barren sheep pastures alternating
with acres of st