That the place was quite familiar to him none who watched him would have doubted, but no smiles of pleasant memories curved his thin, unpleasant lips as he surveyed it.  He did not pause there, happily, communing with his memory in smiling reminiscence as he had at other points along the way.  Instead, as the great view burst upon his gaze, he started back as if the outlook almost terrified him.  He had been traveling astoop, partly because the burden of his years weighed heavy on his shoulders, partly as if his muscles had unconsciously reverted to the easy, slouching, climbing-stoop of the Kentucky mountaineer.  But at sight of this especial spot his attitude changed utterly, the whole expression, not of his face, alone, but of his body, altered.  His stoop became a crouch.  His hands flew out before him as if, with them, he strove to ward away the charming scene.  His feet paused in their tracks, as if struck helpless and immovable by what his eyes revealed to him.

For a full moment, almost without moving, he stood there, fascinated by some old association, plainly, for there was nothing in the prospect which, to an actual stranger, would have seemed more notable than details of a dozen other views which he had peered at through his half-closed, weather-beaten eyes within the hour.  Here, clearly, was the arena of some great event in his past life—­an arena which he gladly would have never seen again.  His face went pale beneath its coat of tan, his shoulders trembled slightly as he tried to shrug them with indifference to brace his courage up.  Twice he started from the spot, determined, evidently, to shut away the crowding and unpleasant recollections it recalled to him, twice he returned to it, to carefully, if with evident repugnance, make closer study of some detail of its rugged picturesqueness.  More than once, as he lingered there against his will, his hands raised upward to his eyes as if to shut away from them some vivid memory-picture, but each time they fell, with strangely hopeless gesture.  The picture which they strove to hide plainly was not before his eyes in the actual scene, but painted in the brain behind them and not to be shut out with screening, claw-curved fingers.

The effect of this especial spot on the old man, indeed, was most remarkable.  His lips, as he stood gazing there, moved constantly as if with words unspoken, and, once or twice, the crowding sentences found actual but not articulate voice.  Whenever this occurred he started, to look about behind him as if he feared that some one, who might overhear, had crept up upon him slyly.  Finally, making absolutely certain that he had not been observed by any human being, and evidently yielding to an impulse almost irresistible, he went over the ground carefully, examining each foot of the little rocky platform with not a loving, but a fascinated observation.

When he finally left the spot a striking change had come upon his features.  He had reached the place sly, cunning, and, withal, triumphant, as if he had accomplished, that day, through securing the small stones, some secret thing of a great import.  His countenance, as, at length, he went away, was not triumphant but half terrified.  It was as if some long-forgotten scene of horror had been brought before his gaze again, to terrify and astonish him.