The old mine's secret

Front matter

*

THE

OLD MINE’S SECRET

Chapter I

O -O-OH! oh me-e!” Dick made the sigh very sad and pitiful.

His father did not seem to hear it. He tilted his chair farther back, perched his feet on the porch railing, and unfolded his newspaper.

It was a mild April morning, and the Osborne family had drifted out on the porch,—Mr. Os¬ borne with his papers and Mrs. Osborne with her sewing; Sweet William was playing jackstraws with himself, Patsy sat on the steps with her back to the others, especially Dick, who, however, was pitying himself too much to notice her.

“I always get blamed for everything I do,”

he said mournfully, “but David-”

“'House for War: Vote 373 to 50/” Mr. Osborne read the headline. “That is the answer to the President’s message four days ago. Now the Senate-”

“Father! If you’ll just let me off to-day, I’ll work from school-out till dark every day next

week. I certainly will. Father, please-”

“Richard Randolph Osborne! You are to work your assigned part of the garden to-day,, to¬ day, without further pleas for postponement.’’ Mr. Osborne’s mild voice and red flabby face stiffened with determination. This was not the first week that Dick had neglected his garden task.

“Yes, sir,” Dick answered meekly, wriggling a little. That was all he could do—wriggle a little—because he was made into a sort of mer¬ man by having an old Persian shawl wrapped about him, from the waist down. “I think you might let me off,” he persisted in an undertone; “just this one more time. If mother had patched my trousers last night—if she’d let me put on my Sundays now—I could get that hateful old gar¬ den worked this morning. I’ve got something else to do to-day, something awfully important.”

“I’m sorry I forgot, son,” said his mother. “I certainly meant to mend them last night. I was reading, and forgot. I wish you had reminded me.” She took quicker stitches and her thread snarled so that she had to break it and begin again. “I am so sorry,” she repeated in the deli¬ cious voice that made her words seem as fresh and sweet as the red roses that fell from the mouth of the fairy-tale maiden.

Mrs. Osborne was a dear, sunny-hearted little woman with dark hair, irregular features, and a vivid, eager face. She loved to read; indeed, she could no more resist a book than a toper could refuse a drink, but she was always so sorry and so ashamed when she neglected home duties that every one except the person who suffered from it forgave her freely.

Patsy, Dick’s twin sister, came now to her mother’s defense. “It’s your fault, Dick,” she said. “It’s all your own fault. If you had locked the bookcase door, it would have reminded her there was something to do. And then she would have thought of the trousers.”

“I forgot,” Dick confessed. That put him clearly in the wrong, and made him the crosser. He turned on his sister, growling: “What busi¬ ness is it of yours, miss? You please let my affairs alone and attend to your own. What are you doing, Patsy?”

He tried to wriggle near enough to see, but Patsy made a face at him and ran into the yard. Dick was such a tease! She was not going to tell him that she had decided to be a poet and was composing a wonderful ballad. How surprised he would be when it came out in the Atlantic or St. Nicholas, with her name in big black letters— Pocahontas Virginia Osborne, as it was in the family Bible. Or would she have a pen-name, like ‘Marion Harland’? If she could think of a lovely original name- But perhaps she had

better finish the poem first.

She perched herself in the swing and chewed her pencil and read over the four lines she had written:

“Johnny was a sailor,

He was brave and bold;

He thought he would make an adventure To find the North Pole. ,,

She could not think of anything else to say, so she read that over again; and then again. While inspiration tarried, an interruption came. It took the shape of her small brother William with two of his followers—Hop-o-hop, a lame duck that he had adopted when its hen mother pecked it and cast it off, and Scalawag, a sand-colored, bob-tailed stray dog that had adopted him.

“Hey, Patsy! I think I’ll give you a kiss.,” announced Sweet William, raising his fair, se¬ rious face to hers. “I think I might give you two kisses. You are so sweet. Patsy,” he went on coaxingly, “wouldn’t you want to lend me a pen¬ cil? Just one little minute, to make you a picture of a horse.”

“Oh, Sweet William, you’re such a nuisance!” said Patsy. “I’m awfully busy. How can I ever finish this, if you bother me?”

But she gave him pencil and paper, and sat swinging back and forth, looking idly about the spacious yard where the budding oaks made lacelike shadows, on that April morning.

In the center of the yard was a great heap of bricks. That was the remains of Osborne’s Rest, the family mansion that had been burned in a raid during The War, as those southern Virginians called the War of Secession from which they dated everything. Since then, two generations of Osbornes had dwelt in The Roost,, a cottage in one corner of the yard. It was now the home of Patsy, her father and mother, her two brothers, Dick and Sweet William, and a mother¬ less cousin, David Spotswood.

The big front gate opened on The Street, the one thoroughfare of The Village. There were a church, a tavern, two shops, a dozen frame and brick dwellings set far back in spacious grounds, and the county Court-house in a square by itself. Behind the Court-house rambled The Back Way which had once expected to become a street, but remained always The Back Way with only a blacksmith’s shop, a basket-maker’s shed, and a few cabins on it.

A century and a half before, three royal-grant estates, Broad Acres and Larkland and Mattoax, cornered at a stone now on Court-house Green. These plantations had long ago been divided into small farms; but in The Village still lived Wil¬ sons and Mayos and Osbornes who counted as outsiders all whose grandfathers were not born in the neighborhood and the kinship.

While we have been looking about, Sweet Wil¬ liam lay flat on the ground, holding his tongue between his teeth, to assist his artistic efforts.

“Look at my horse, Patsy!” he crowed, holding up the paper.

“Hm-m! I don’t call that much like a horse,” observed Patsy.

Sweet William’s face clouded, and then bright¬ ened. “Tell you what!” he said. “It’ll be a cow. I’ll kick out one hind leg and put a bucket here. Now! She’s spilt all the milk.”

Patsy laughed; and then one knew that she was pretty, seeing the merry crinkles around her twinkling hazel eyes, and the upward curve of her lips that brought out dimples on her freckled pink cheeks.

“I love you when you laugh, Patsy!” ex¬ claimed Sweet William, hugging her knees. “You may have my picture. And I’ll sit in the swing with you.”

“You and Scalawag and Hop-o-hop may have the swing,” said Patsy. “I’m going in. I’ll finish my poem to-morrow. I want to find out—I think Dick has a secret.”

She jumped out of the swing, gave Sweet Wil¬ liam’s ear a “love pinch,” and strolled back to the porch.

“Dick,” she asked in an offhand way, “what are you going to do with that candle you got this morning?”

Dick’s gloom relaxed and he winked tantalizingly.

“You wish you knew,” he said. “But—you’ll —never—find—out. Ah, ha-a-a!”

“Don’t you tell, Mister Dick!” said Patsy. “I don’t want you to tell. I’d rather find out for myself. And I certainly will find out, sir. You just see if I don’t.”

Mr. Osborne still had his nose in his day-old paper; news younger than that seldom, came to The Village. “ 'Army plans call for a million men the first year.’ That is a gigantic under¬ taking, Miranda, and—”

“It certainly is,” she agreed placidly. “Mayo, Black Mayo has bought some more pigeons; and Polly says he’ll not tell what he paid for them, so she knows it’s some absurd sum that he can’t afford.”

“Yes.” Her husband agreed absently. “And a million men means not only men, but arms, equipment, food. Bless my life! Is that clock striking—it can’t be!—is it ten? And I here instead of at the Court-house.” He got up and stuffed the newspaper and a Congressional Rec¬ ord in his pocket.

“What are you going to do, dear?” asked his wife.

“We want to find out if the Board of Super¬ visors can appropriate money to send our Con¬ federate veterans to the Reunion in June. There have been so many unusual expenses, bridges washed away and that smallpox quarantine, that funds are low. I hope they can raise the requisite amount.”

“Of course they will. They must,” Mrs. Osborne said quickly and positively. “Why, the yearly reunion—seeing old comrades, be¬ ing heroized, recalling the glorious past— is the one bright spot in their gray old lives.”

“Mr. Tavis and Cap’n Anderson were talking about the Reunion at the post office yesterday,” said Dick. “They are just crazy about having it in Washington. Cap’n has never been there. But he was telling how near he and old Jube Early came to it, in ’64.”

“What an experience it will be, taking peace¬ ful possession in old age of the Capital they cam¬ paigned against when they were soldier boys, over fifty years ago!” said Mrs. Osborne. “Certainly they must go. How many are there,, Mayo?”

“Nine in our district,” answered her husband. “Last year there were sixteen. Three have died, and four are bedridden.”

“Ah! so few are left; so many have passed on.” Mrs. Osborne glanced through the open door at a portrait, her father in a colonel's gray uni¬ form. “Of course they must go, our nine old soldiers.”

“Sure!” said Dick. “If there isn't money enough, we boys can help raise it. Mr. Tavis says he’ll pay me to plant corn, afternoons and Saturdays. I wasn’t thinking about doing it. But our old Confeds mustn’t miss their Reunion.”

“Good boy! that’s the right spirit,” exclaimed Mrs. Osborne.

She adored the memory of her gallant father and of the Confederate cause to which he had de¬ voted himself. The quiet, uneventful years had brought no new deep, inspiring interests to the little Southern community. Its love and loyalty clung to the past. To the children the Lost Cause was a tradition as heroic and romantic as the legends of Roland and Arthur; but it was a tradi¬ tion linked to reality by the old gray-clad men who had fought with Lee and Jackson. As Jones and Tavis and Walthall, they were ordinary old io men, rather tiresome and absurd; but call them "Confederate veterans’' and they were trans¬ formed to heroes whom it was an honor to serve. Dick, shirking the work that meant food for his family,, would toil gladly to send them to their Reunion.

"They must have this, perhaps their last—”

Mrs. Osborne paused, and her husband said: "We’ll manage it; we’ll manage it somehow. If there is a deficit, we may be able to make it up by private subscription. Perhaps I’ll get a case next term of court, and can make a liberal con¬ tribution.” He laughed.

Mr. Osborne—called Red Mayo to distinguish him from a dark-haired cousin of the same name, called Black Mayo—was a lawyer more by pro¬ fession than by practice; there were not enough law crumbs in The Village, he said, to support a sparrow.

He strolled toward the Court-house while Mrs. Osborne took her last hurried stitches. Then she handed the patched trousers to her son, who rolled indoors and put them on. He went into the garden and gloomily eyed the neglected square where peas and potatoes and onions were merely green lines among crowding weeds.

"I certainly can’t finish it this morning,” he growled. "There’s too much to do.”

“If you work hard, you can finish by sun¬ down,” said his cousin, David Spotswood, who was planting- a row of beets on the other side of the garden.

“I can’t work after dinner,” said Dick. “I’ve got something else to do. I just can’t finish it to-day.”

“You’d better,” said Patsy, who had followed him into the garden. “When father says 'Rich¬ ard’ and shuts his mouth—so! he means busi¬ ness. Say., Dick! What were you getting that candle for? What are you going to do? Let us go with you, Anne Lewis and me, and I’ll help you here.”

“You help!” Dick spoke in his most superior masculine manner. “Girls haven’t any business in gardens. They ought to stay in the house and make bed-quilts. They’re too afraid of dirty hands and freckled faces.”

Patsy flared up and answered so quickly that her words stepped on one another’s heels. “That’s mean and unfair! You know I hate gloves and bonnets, and I just wear them because mother makes me. But anyway, sir, I think they’re nicer than great-grandmother’s shawl for trousers.”

She went back up the boxwood-bordered walk.

‘Til keep my eyes on you, Mr. Richard Ran¬ dolph Osborne/’ she said to herself. “Where you go to-day, I’ll follow.”

Halfway up the long walk, she came upon Sweet William, sitting on the ground, holding a maple bough over his head.

“Won’t you come to our picnic, Patsy?” he said. “Me and Scalawag are having a loverly picnic in the woods down by Tinkling Water.”

“No, thank you,,” said Patsy. “I want to see Anne Lewis about going somewhere after din¬ ner.”

“Where?” asked Sweet William.

“I don’t know—till I find out,” laughed Patsy. “But Anne and I will do that; we certainly will.”

“I wish Anne was staying here,” Sweet Wil¬ liam said wistfully.

“So do I,” agreed Patsy. “Easter holiday is too short to divide with Ruth. Oh! I’ll be so glad when it’s summer and Anne comes to stay a long time.”

“It isn’t ever a long time where Anne is,” said Sweet William. “I’m going with you to see her, Patsy, and I’ll have my picnic another day.”

They went ofif and left Dick raking and weed¬ ing and hoeing very diligently; but, working his best, he had not half finished his task when the dinner bell rang. He surveyed the garden with a scowl.

“It’ll take hours and hours to get it done,” he said. “And then it would be too late to go where I’m going. Maybe I can work the potato patch after supper.”

“You can’t,” said David, who had a straight¬ forward way of facing facts.

“Oh! maybe I can,” said Dick, who had a pic¬ turesque way of evading them. “You might help me. You might work on it awhile after dinner.”

“Thank you! I’ve something else to do. I’m going to harrow my corn acre. I want to plant it next week,” said David, who was a blue-ribbon member of the Boys’ Corn Club.

At the dinner table the boys were joined by Sweet William, Patsy, and Anne Lewis,, a cousin who was spending her Easter holiday in The Vil¬ lage. The two girls watched Dick like hawks, and jumped up from the table as soon as he went out of the dining room. He hurried to the little upstairs room he shared with David that was called the “tumble-up room” because the steps were so steep. Presently he came down and showed off the things he was putting in his pockets—a candle, a box of matches, and a ball of

H

stout twine. He sharpened his hatchet and fas¬ tened it to his belt.

“Yah! You wish you knew what that’s for,” he said, with a derisive face at Patsy and then at Anne.

He strutted across the yard toward the front gate, but he was not to march off in undisturbed triumph.

“Dick! uh Dick!” called his mother. “Remem¬ ber you’ve your garden work to finish.”

“Yes’m.” He scowled, then he said doggedly: “There’s something else I’ve promised myself to do first.”

Anne and Patsy waited only to see that he turned up, not down, The Street; then they ran around The Back Way and came out just behind him at the church; there The Street turned to a road which led past the mill and on to Redville. Dick walked quickly, and the girls hurried after him; then he walked slow¬ ly, and they loitered so as to keep just be¬ hind him.

“Where are you going?” he turned and chal¬ lenged them.

“Oh! we might go to the mill to see Cousin Giles, or to Larkland to look at Cousin Mayo’s new pigeons, or to Happy Acres,” answered Patsy.

Dick strode on, and the girls trotted be¬ hind him, making amicable efforts at con¬ versation.

“Steve Tavis has gone fishing with John and Baldie Eppes,” Anne remarked. “He said we girls might go, too. But Patsy and I thought there might be something—something more fun to do.”

No answer.

Patsy made an effort. “Dick,” she said, “I hope you’ll finish your garden work to-day. Father’s tired of excuses and he’s made up his mind for punishing. But even if we do get home late, I can help you.”

Silence.

“It’s a mighty nice day,” Patsy went on plead¬ ingly, “to—to do outdoor things. You say your¬ self I’m as good as a boy to have around. I wouldn’t be in the way at all; and I could hold the candle for you.”

By this time they were at the mill where the Larkland road and the Happy Acres path turned from the highway. Dick kept to the main road and the girls followed. He stopped and faced them.

“You said you were going to the mill, or Larkland, or Happy Acres. Trot along!”

“I said we might go there,” Patsy amended.

i6 THE OLD MINE’S SECRET

“Or we might go—’most anywhere. Do let us go with you; please, Dick.”

“Where?”

“Oh! wherever you are going. We’ll not tell.”

“You certainly will not,” he declared; “for a mighty good reason: you are not going to know anything to tell.”

Patsy’s eyes flashed. “We’ll show you,” she said. “We are going to follow you, like your shadow. You know good and well I can run as fast as you. Now take your choice, sir; let us go with you, or give up and toddle home and finish your task so as not to get punished.”

“Hm!” he jeered. “If I’ve got something on hand good enough to take punishment for, it’s too good to spoil with girls tagging along.”

He walked briskly up the road. Anne and Patsy followed him for a silent mile—up and down hills scarred with red gulleys, through woods, by brown plowed fields and green grain land. They passed several log cabins; the Spen¬ cer place, an old mansion amid tumbled-down out¬ buildings; Gordan Jones’s trim new house gay with gables and fresh paint. Then they came to an old farmhouse surrounded by neglected fields.

“Why, that door’s open!” Anne remarked with surprise. “Is somebody living at the old Tolli¬ ver place?”

“A new man; Mr. Smith. He came here last winter,” explained Patsy.

“Somebody new in the neighborhood!” laughed Anne. “Doesn’t that seem queer? What sort of folks are they?”

“Um-mm; unfolksy,” said Patsy. “There’s just Mr. Smith, and his nephew Albert that goes to our school. We’ve never got acquainted with Albert. He’s sort of stand-offish; not as if he wanted to be, but as if he were afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” asked Anne.

“Oh! I don’t know. Nothing. I reckon he’s just shy.”

“What sort of man is Mr. Smith?” inquired Anne.

“Ugly; and grins. He’s away from home most of the time. He’s a salesman or agent of some kind. Dick,” Patsy returned to a more interest¬ ing subject, “do please tell us what you are going to do.”

“We-ell,” Dick began as if he were about to yield reluctantly; then he interrupted himself eagerly: “Oh! look at that squirrel!”

Their eyes followed his pointing finger, and crying, “Easy marks!” he darted into a dense thicket of pines on the other side of the road. The girls followed quickly, but he made good use of his moment’s start and they caught only glimpses of him here and there behind the trees.

“Run, Anne!” Patsy called presently. “To the left. Here! Let’s head him off!”

They ran around a thick clump of pines to meet him—and he was not there. He did not seem to be anywhere. He had vanished as com¬ pletely as if the earth had opened and swallowed him.

“We may as well give up,” Anne sighed at last.

“Yes,” Patsy agreed reluctantly. “I reckon he’s miles away by this time.”

Crestfallen and disappointed, they went back to the road and started slowly down the hill.

Then a red-brown head rose out of a heap of pine brush, so cautiously that it did not disturb the woodpecker drumming on a nearby stump. A pair of merry brown eyes watched the girls till they were at a safe distance; then Dick, to the terror and hasty flight of the woodpecker, scrambled out of the brush heap.

Anne and Patsy started and looked back.

“There he is!” groaned Patsy.

Yes, there he was, standing in the middle of the road, waving his hand tauntingly.

“Shall we chase him again?” asked Anne.

“Yes,” said Patsy; and then: “No, it's no use. He’s too far away; before we could get halfway up the hill, he’d be out of sight again.”

“Oh, well!” laughed Anne. “We don’t care,, Patsy-pet. Let’s go to Happy Acres and see what flowers are in bloom.”

They went back to Larkland mill that had been a mill ever since The Village had been a village; crossed a foot bridge over Tinkling Water; and followed the path to the woodland nook they called Happy Acres. Long ago a house had been there, and persistent garden bulbs and shrubs gave beauty and fragrance to the place. One spring, Anne had adopted it and christened it Happy Acres, and she and her friends had made it a little woodland park that was a joy to all the neighborhood. It was fragrant now with a blossoming plum-tree and gay with the pink and scarlet of flowering almond and japonica.

Anne and Patsy plucked a few sprays to carry home the beauty of it, and started down the path for a little visit to their cousin, Giles Spotswood, the miller.

Patsy, who was in front, stopped suddenly. “What’s that?” she whispered.

“It sounds like men quarreling,” Anne whis¬ pered back. “Who on earth—”

“Look there!”

Anne crept to Patsy’s side and peeped through the bushes. There were two men on the road¬ side. One was their cousin, Black Mayo Os¬ borne.

“Who’s that man?” asked Anne.

“Mr. Smith; the new man at the Tolliver place.”

“Ugh! he’s horrid! snarling like a spiteful cur dog!” exclaimed Anne.

The stranger was indeed odd and unpleasantlooking. He had long loose-jointed limbs and such a short body that it seemed as if its only function was to hold his head and limbs together. The two sides of his blond face were quite unlike. The left side was handsome with its straight brow and wide blue eye; but the right eye, half hidden by its drooping lid., slanted outward and down, the tip of the nose turned toward the bulg¬ ing right nostril, and the mouth drooped at the right corner and ended in a heavy downward line.

“Easy! go easy, my German friend!” Black Mayo’s voice rang out clear and mocking.

“I am not a German; that am I not!” screamed Smith. “I am an American citizen. I can my papers show. I am more American than you. What are your peoples here ? Ach! what do they ? This morning they did the last cent out of their treasury take, the expenses of old traitors and rebels to pay—”

The sentence was not finished. A quick blow from the shoulder stretched him on the ground.

“Hey! lie there a minute!” cried Black Mayo, with an impish light twinkling in his dark eyes. “Listen! Here’s a tune you’ve got to respect in this part of the world.” He whistled “Dixie” with vim and vigor, over and over again. Then he stepped aside and held out his hand, saying: “Ah, well! You didn’t know any better. Forget it!”

The man glared up at him, without a word.

“Oh! if that’s the way you feel about it—” Mr. Osborne laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and, still whistling “Dixie,” took the road that led to his home at Larkland.

Mr. Smith scrambled to his feet and looked after Black Mayo, from under down-drawn brows, with his thin wide lips writhing like ser¬ pents; then he went limping up the road.

The girls turned white amazed faces to each other.

“Ugh!” said Patsy. “Let’s go home. Do—do you reckon he’ll hurt Cousin Mayo?”

“Of course not. He can’t. How can he?” said Anne. After a pause she added: “He cer¬ tainly will if he can.”

Chapter II

E XULTING at the way he had diddled the girls, Dick pranced along the Redville road. He did not meet any one, for it was a fair spring day and the country people were busy; but he saw men and boys he knew, plowing and grubbing, hallooing to their teams and to one another.

About two miles from The Village, Dick turned off on the Old Plank Road. Twenty years before, this had been a highway going through The Village, on its long way to Richmond. Then the railroad was built. It wanted to come through The Village, between court-house and church, but the people rose up in arms. They did not want shrieking, grinding trains, to scare horses and bring in outsiders, nor an iron track parting their homes from their graves in the churchyard. So the railroad went by Redville that was six miles from The Village in summer and three or four times as far in the winter season of ruts and red mud.

After the railway was built, however, the road by Redville station became the thoroughfare;

the Old Plank Road was seldom traveled except by negroes who lived in clearings in the Big Woods that covered miles of the rocky, infertile ridge land.

Dick was near one of these clearings, a patch of stumpy land around a log cabin, when he heard a voice calling loudly, “Whoa! Gee! Whoa, I say!”

An old negro was coming up the hill, in a cart drawn by bony, long-horned oxen.

“Hey, Unc’ Isham!” said Dick. “What are you making such a racket for?”

Isham Baskerfield jumped nervously; but when he recognized the speaker, he grinned and said: “Howdy, little marster! howdy! I was jest talkin’ to my oxes. I tuk ’em down to de creek to gin ’em some water.”

“You sounded scared,” commented Dick. “And you looked scared, too.”

“Skeered? Course I aint skeered. Huccome I be skeered?” Isham replied loudly. Then he mumbled: “I aint nuver liked to go down dis road since dat old man—Whar you gwine, Marse Dick?” he interrupted himself. “Don’t you fool ’round dat lowermos’ cabin. Dat’s”—he breathed the name in a whisper—“Solomon Gabe’s house, dat is. An’ he can shore cunjer folks.”

Dick laughed. “So that's what you are afraid of. You—"

“Sh—sh, little marster!" The old negro looked around, as if afraid of being overheard. He stopped his ox cart in front of his cabin. “I got to git my meal bag," he said. “Lily Belle emptied it to make a hoecake for dinner, so I got to go to mill an’ git some corn ground ’fore supper time. I don’t worry ’bout nothin’ long as my meal bag can stan’ up for itself, but when it lays down I got to stir about. What you doin’, Marse Dick, strayin’ so fur from home?’’

“Oh! I’m just strolling ’round,’’ Dick an¬ swered vaguely.

“Umph! When I fust see you, I thought you mought be gwine fishin’; but you aint got no fishin’ pole."

“No use to carry a pole in the woods, when you’ve got a knife," said Dick. “Where is a good place to go?"

“Uh! any o’ dem holes in Mine Creek below de ford," said the old man; “taint good fishin’ ’bove thar."

“O. K.!’’ said Dick. “If I catch more fish than I can carry, I’ll leave you what I can’t tote home."

“Yas, suh; yas, suh! I reckon you will," chuckled the old negro.

Dick went on down the road. But his merry whistle died on his lips as he passed Solomon Gabe’s cabin.

It stood, like a dark, poisonous fungus, under low-branching evergreens in a dank, somber hol¬ low a little away from the road. The squat old log hovel had not even a window; the door stood open, not hospitably,, but like the yawning mouth of a pit.

Dick ran on down the road and came pres¬ ently to Mine Creek, a little stream straggling along a rocky, weed-fringed bed. Near the ford, there was a pile of rotting logs and fallen stones that had once been a cabin. He left the road here, but he did not take Isham’s advice and go down Mine Creek. Instead, he went up stream, following a vague old path that presently crossed the creek and climbed a little hill. There was a small enclosure fenced in with rotting rails. In and around the enclosure were piles of earth and broken stones of such ancient date that sap¬ lings and even trees were growing on them.