The two brothers, their hands in the pockets of their brown jeans trousers, stood watching his ascent.  Nate had sandy hair, small gray eyes, set much too close together, and a sharp, pale, freckled face.  Tim seemed only a mild repetition of him, as if Nature had tried to illustrate what Nate would be with a better temper and less sly intelligence.

Birt was climbing slowly.  It was a difficult matter.  Here was a crevice that would hardly admit his eager fingers, and again a projection so narrow that it seemed to grudge him foothold.  Some of the ledges, however, were wider, and occasionally a dwarfed huckleberry bush, nourished in a fissure, lifted him up like a helping hand.  He quaked as he heard the roots strain and creak, for he was a pretty heavy fellow for sixteen years of age.  They did not give way, however, and up and up he went, every moment increasing the depth below him and the danger.  His breath was short; his strength flagged, he slipped more than once, giving himself a great fright; and when he reached the ledge where the dead fox lay, he thought, “The varmint don’t wuth it.”

Nevertheless he whooped out his triumph to Nate and Tim in a stentorian halloo, for they had already started homeward, and presently their voices died in the distance.  Birt faced about and sat down on the ledge to rest, his feet dangling over the depths beneath.

It was a lonely spot, walled in by the mountains, and frequented only by the deer that were wont to come to lick salt from the briny margin of a great salt spring far down the ravine.  Their hoofs had worn a deep excavation around it in the countless years and generations that they had herded here.  The “lick,” as such places are called in Tennessee, was nearly two acres in extent, and in the centre of the depression the brackish water stood to the depth of six feet or more.  Birt looked down at it, thinking of the old times when, according to tradition, it was the stamping ground of buffalo as well as deer.  The dusk deepened.  The shadows were skulking in and out of the wild ravine as the wind rose and fell.  They took to his fancy the form of herds of the banished bison, revisiting in this impalpable guise the sylvan shades where they are but a memory now.

Presently he began the rugged descent, considerably hampered by the fox, which he carried by the tail.  He stopped to rest whenever he found a ledge that would serve as a seat.  Looking up, high above the jagged summit of the cliff that sharply serrated the zenith, he saw the earliest star, glorious in the crimson and amber sky.  Below, a point of silver light quivered, reflected in the crimson and amber waters of the “lick.”  The fire-flies were flickering among the ferns; he saw about him their errant gleam.  The shadowy herds trooped down the mountain side.

Now and then his weight uprooted a bush in his hands, and the clods fell.  He missed his footing as he neared the base, and came down with a thump.  It was a gravelly spot where he had fallen, and he saw in a moment that it was the summer-dried channel of a mountain rill.  As he pulled himself up on one elbow, he suddenly paused with dilated eyes.  The evening light fell upon a burnished glimmer;—­a bit of stone—­was it stone?—­shining with a metallic lustre.