But presently the two men began to talk to him, and he turned around in order to face them. They were urging him to confess his own guilt and tell who were the other burglars, and where they were. But Barney had nothing to tell. He could only protest again and again his innocence. The men, however, shook their heads incredulously, and after a while they left him to himself and smoked their pipes in silence.
When Barney looked back at the mountains once more, a startling change seemed to have been wrought in the landscape. Instead of the frowning sandstone cliffs he loved so well, and the gloomy recesses of the woods, there was only a succession of lines of a delicate blue color drawn along the horizon. This was the way the distant ranges looked from the crags of his own home; he knew that they were the mountains, but which was Goliath?
Suddenly he struck his hands together, and broke out with a bitter cry.
"I hev los' G'liath!" he exclaimed. "I dunno whar I live! An' whar is Melissy?"
A difficult undertaking, certainly, to determine where among all those great spurs and outliers, stretching so far on either hand, was that little atom of dimpled pink-and-white humanity known as "Melissy."
The constable, being a native of these hills himself, knew something by experience of the homesickness of an exiled mountaineer,—far more terrible than the homesickness of low-landers; he took his pipe promptly from between his lips, and told the boy that the second blue ridge, counting down from the sky, was "G'liath Mounting," and that "Melissy war right thar somewhar."
Barney looked back at it with unrecognizing eyes,—this gentle, misty, blue vagueness was not the solemn, sombre mountain that he knew. He gazed at it only for a moment longer; then his heart swelled and he burst into tears.
On and on they went through the flat country. The boy felt that he could scarcely breathe. Even tourists, coming down from these mountains to the valley below, struggle with a sense of suffocation and oppression; how must it have been then with this half-wild creature, born and bred on those breezy heights!
The stout mules did their duty well, and it was not long before they were in sight of the cross-roads store that had been robbed. It was a part of a small frame dwelling-house, set in the midst of the yellow sunlight that brooded over the plain. All the world around it seemed to the young backwoodsman to be a big cornfield; but there was a garden close at hand, and tall sunflowers looked over the fence and seemed to nod knowingly at Barney, as much as to say they had always suspected him of being one of the burglars, and were gratified that he had been caught at last.
Poor fellow! he saw so much suspicion expressed in the faces of a crowd of men congregating about the store, that it was no wonder he fancied he detected it too in inanimate objects.