When the trial was over, the old man with the green spectacles took Barney to his house, gave him something to eat, and saw him start out homeward.
As Barney plodded along toward the blue mountains his heart was very bitter against Nick Gregory, who had lied and thrown suspicion upon him and brought him into danger. Whenever he thought of it he raised his clenched fist and shook it. He was a little fellow, but he felt that with the strength of this grievance he was more than a match for big Nick Gregory. He would force him to confess the lies that he had told and his cowardice, and all Goliath Mountain should know it and despise him for it.
"I'll fetch an' kerry that word to an' fro fur a thousand mile!" Barney declared between his set teeth.
Now and then a wagoner overtook him and gave him a ride, thus greatly helping him on his way. As he went, there was a gradual change in the blue and misty range that seemed to encircle the west, and which he knew, by one deep indentation in the horizontal line of its summit, was Goliath Mountain. It became first an intenser blue. As he drew nearer still, it turned a bronzed green. It had purpled with the sunset before he could distinguish the crimson and gold of its foliage and its beetling crags. Night had fallen when he reached the base of the mountain.
There was no moon; heavy clouds were rolling up from the horizon, and they hid the stars. Nick Gregory, lying on the ledge of the "Old Man's Chimney," thirty feet above the black earth, could not see his hand before his face. The darkness was dreadful to him. It had closed upon a dreadful day. The seconds were measured by the throbs and dartings of pain in his arm. He was almost exhausted by hunger and thirst. He thought, however, that he could have borne it all cheerfully, but for the sharp remorse that tortured him for the wrong he had done to his friend, and his wild anxiety about Barney's fate. Nick felt that he, himself, was on trial here, imprisoned on this tower of stone, cut off from the world, from everything but his sternly accusing conscience and his guilty heart.
For hours he had heard nothing but the monotonous rushing of the water close at hand, or now and then the shrill, quavering cry of a distant screech-owl, or the almost noiseless flapping of a bat's wings as they swept by him.
He had hardly a hope of deliverance, when suddenly there came a new sound, vague and indistinguishable. He lifted himself upon his left elbow and listened again. He could hear nothing for a moment except his own panting breath and the loud beating of his heart. But there—the sound came once more. What was it? a dropping leaf? the falling of a fragment of stone from the "Chimney"? a distant step?
It grew more distinct as it drew nearer; presently he recognized it,—the regular footfall of some man or boy plodding along the path. That path!—a recollection flashed through his mind. No one knew that short cut up the mountain but him and Barney; they had worn the path with their trampings back and forth from the "Old Man's Chimney."
He thought he must be dreaming, or that he had lost his reason; still he shouted out, "Hold on, thar! air it ye, Barney?"
The step paused. Then a reply came in a voice that he hardly recognized as Barney's; it was so fierce, and so full of half-repressed anger.