William Bellwood, so long a hermit in the wilds of Florida, seemed glad to leave that region.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
IN THE MOUNTAINS AGAIN.
Leaving their friends in Florida, Frank, Barney and the professor next moved northward toward Tennessee, Frank wishing to see some of the battlegrounds of the Civil War.
The boys planned a brief tour afoot and were soon on their way among the Great Smoky Mountains.
Professor Scotch had no heart for a "tour afoot" through the mountains, and so he had stopped at Knoxville, where the boys were to join him again in two or three weeks, by the end of which period he was quite sure they would have enough of tramping.
Frank and Barney were making the journey from Gibson's Gap to Cranston's Cove, which was said to be a distance of twelve miles, but they were willing to admit that those mountain miles were most disgustingly long.
They had paused to rest, midway in the afternoon, where the road curved around a spur of the mountain. Below them opened a vista of valleys and "coves," hemmed in by wild, turbulent-appearing masses of mountains, some of which were barren and bleak, seamed with black chasms, above which threateningly hung grimly beetling crags, and some of which were robed in dense wildernesses of pine, veiling their faces, keeping them thus forever a changeless mystery.
From their eyrie position it seemed that they could toss a pebble into Lost Creek, which wound through the valley below, meandered for miles amid the ranges, tunneling an unknown channel beneath the rock-ribbed mountains, and came out again—where?