Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/67

Rh merged with that which broods always over the forest. At a well remembered ford he pushed his horse across the stream, knowing that further up there could be no crossing because of steep, water gouged rocky banks. In a little meadow where a tributary stream and thick rich grass promised the best of pasturage he unsaddled, tethering his horse with a twenty-foot rope. The saddle with its pack thrown over his shoulder, he hastened on upstream on foot.

Now he clambered over piled and strewn boulders, always climbing steeply. The din of the water swelled into a thunderous roar as it flashed out and down in a series of white waterfalls. But impatiently he pushed on, breathing deeply, spurred by the knowledge that in ten minutes he could throw down his saddle and call the day's work done.

In that ten minutes he penetrated the very citadel of solitude. Between great boulders ten, fifteen feet high, over fallen slabs of granite, under occasional monster pines, at last along a little-used deer trail leading back from the river and to a small, grassy, timbered table-land. Upon a sun-dried mat of fallen pine needles he dropped his saddle, and with a deep sigh of utter content turned toward the west. Yonder, still an hour high above the wooded ridge, was the sun. There, catching only infrequently the sun's slant rays, lay the source of Thunder River. And here, to be seen at its best from where he stood, only a hundred yards from him, was Hell's Goblet.

Those who come first into such spots are not men who carry subtle fancies in their brains or golden similes